Why Do Some Organizations Kill While Others Do Not: An Examination of Middle Eastern Operations

This study addresses the question of why organizations choose to use violence as a strategy using the Political Organizations Dataset (POD) data set, which includes both violent and nonviolent organizations from the Middle East. Our findings show that religious ideology and social service provisions have less influence on this decision than the existing literature suggests. They also reveal that organizations that advocate the exclusion of women from public life, those that advocate a change in state boundaries, and those that experience state repression are more likely to use violence.