The Puzzle of Anonymous Political Violence

Anonymity is a form of political violence that has received very little attention and no systematic analysis among scholars of political violence until now. This paper focuses on clandestine political violence identified by the paradigm of “propaganda by the deeds” according to which by signalling their identity, perpetrators advocate a cause and signal commitment to a number of audiences. Yet Between 1970 and 2006 only 27.694 out of 73.961 terrorist attacks worldwide were attributed to a perpetrator, leaving 62.5 percent without an author. The questions why and when anonymity is preferred to alternative forms of identity signalling such as claiming and false claiming have been addressed only anecdotally until now. This paper contributes to the scholarly debate by presenting a systematic quantitative overview of anonymous political violence based on the data recorded in the Global Terrorism Database between 1970 and 2012, the largest source on terrorist events to date.