Origins of International Terrorism in the Middle East* HERBERT KITSCHELT T his paper argues that Islamist international terrorism is associated with polities and regions of the world where economic globalization has not taken place because public institutions do not support the develop­ment of viable capitalist markets. The design of the explanatory account follows a simple scheme derived from theories of rebellious mobilization, social movements, and revolutions(for example, Della Porta and Diani 1999; Parsa 2000). For such political mobilization to take place, intense, widely experienced human suffering and deprivation must exist. For such suffering to motivate mobilization, political ideologues must articulate interests and a broad cultural interpretation that explains to potential ac­tivists how deprivations have come about and how to overcome them. These interpretations can be disseminated to target constituencies only if political opportunities are conducive for political entrepreneurs to over­come collective action problems and build insurrectional organizations. What this involves is a strategic interaction between forces protecting the status quo and those challenging it. In the case of contemporary Islamist movements, this process has led to a splintering of different challenging groups and an isolation of radicals who have resorted to a sectarian ter­rorist strategy. The observable dynamic in the Middle East may not be * This article is a considerably abbreviated version of a paper prepared for presenta­tion at the conference on»Die globale Frage. Empirische Befunde und ethische He­rausforderungen«(Symposium der Arbeitsgemeinschaft»Sozialethik« der Öster­reichischen Forschungsgemeinschaft), 27–28 June 2003, University of Vienna. The full-length version provides a more detailed analysis and additional empirical data, particularly in the first section on state failure and economic deprivation in the Mid­dle East. The complete study(Kitschelt 2003) appeared in the»Frieden und Sicher­heit« series of the International Policy Analysis Unit of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (Bonn 2003), available at http://fesportal.fes.de/pls/portal30/docs/ folder / poli­tikanalyse / eingangsseite3 . htm . A German version will appear in Peter Koller (ed.), Die globale Frage – Empirische Befunde und ethische Herausforderungen (Wien: Passagen Verlag, 2004). ipg 1/2004 Kitschelt, Origins of Terrorism 159