In recent times, religion has become a powerful force in giving legitimacy to terrorist actions. The present work considers this highly salient fact, as well as stresses the necessity to consider the historical and social contexts and group power resources in any meaningful analysis of violent protest movements. Quantitative rigor is combined with a sensitivity to context. Terrorism is operationalized by taking a time-based count of terrorist killings of innocent people. Regime acts of omission and commission are coded as time series interventions. The analysis also includes a continuous variable measuring the incidence of economic distress in Punjab. A case is also made for the superiority of Box- Jenkins time series techniques for the quantitative analysis of problems of this nature.

The main objective of this research is to test some of the hypotheses linking economic development, social mobilization, legitimacy, and the coerciveness of the regime with internal political conflict. Each proposed hypothesis is to be tested across sixteen predominantly Islamic Middle Eastern nations for data from two time periods, 1960-66 and 1967-73. To check for the consistency and strength of the hypothesized relationships the test results for each hypothesis for the first period data will be compared with those of the second period.