An Economics paper proposes Insurgent activity increases with anti-war reporting

I’ll just guess that this part of the forum is a good place for this.

These news stories have cited a paper that claims that anti-war or, as they call it in the paper, anti-resolve reporting causes a rise in Iraqi insurgent activity.

http://www.usnews.com/articles/news/iraq/2008/03/12/are-iraqi-insurgents-emboldened-by-antiwar-reporting.html

A copy of the paper can be found here:

http://people.rwj.harvard.edu/~riyengar/insurgency.pdf

(49 page pdf file)

Now I don’t know anything about economics papers, but it did strike me that the authors had a certain audience in mind when I noticed terms like “anti-resolve” and “fence-sitting” being used instead of less colloquial words like “skeptics” or “undecided”. It struck me the way that works in the Soviet Union would often use terms like “anti-progressive”.

But asside from the propaganda I would really enjoy it if some of you could take the time for a more academic critique of the work, since I am clueless as to how to do so.

Thanks.