Islamist terrorist attacks evoke negative stereotypes and symbolic threat perceptions toward men perceived to be of Middle Eastern origin, yet evidence on the labor market consequences of these attacks remains inconsistent. We address this ambiguity by developing a framework that links external shocks to employment outcomes through salience shifts and managerial discretion within workplaces. Salience shifts arise when clusters of terrorist attacks—rather than isolated events—are amplified by media coverage, reinforcing or generating stereotypes and increasing the likelihood that ethnoracial categories become consequential in hiring decisions. Whether such shifts translate into exclusion depends on organizational contexts that mute or permit greater managerial discretion. We test this framework using monthly linked employer–employee data from Germany (1999 to 2019), data on terrorist attacks linked to Islamist motives, name-based measures of perceived origin, and topic-modeled newspaper coverage. Our analyses show that periods marked by multiple Islamist terrorist attacks and heightened media coverage significantly reduce the employment of men perceived to be of Middle Eastern origin. These effects are strongest in workplaces with a high share of non-complex jobs and in settings lacking formal hiring procedures or worker representation, but they are muted where Middle Eastern managers are present. Together, these findings indicate when and where politicized events translate into employment disparities, highlighting the need to account for temporal and organizational contexts.

This article lays out the work of Costs of War, a project of scholars creating public-facing knowledge toward the goal of challenging US militarism. Emerging from literature that critiques US imperial violence and deconstructs the commonplace understandings that support it, our efforts identify and confront pillars of belief about war that are shaped by the powerful military-industrial complex and rooted in an underlying devaluation of the lives of Muslims, people of color, women, and oppressed groups who bear the brunt of militarization both at home and abroad. We use our research and associated website (costsofwar.org) to reach out to journalists, editors, Congress, policymakers, civic groups, social movements, and the US public. In contesting the soundbites about the post-9/11 wars that allow these wars to be seen as inevitable and to continue uncontested, we hope to help avert the next war championed by those least likely to live with the horrific and decades-long consequences. We describe our approach, its successes, and its stumbling blocks in hope of offering insights for scholars in the social sciences who wish to use their research in service of activist goals and social justice movements, antiwar and beyond.