Hi, my name is Victor Asal and I'm a professor at the University of Albany, and
I'm affiliate of the Start Center.
For the last several years, one of my major research areas has been why are some
terrorist organizations are so much more lethal than other terrorist organizations.
In order the research this subject, I have worked with one of my colleagues,
Karl Rethemeyer, who is a social network analyst, to collect lots and
lots of data on terrorist organizations.
Much of the research up until 9/11 and even after 9/11, was based on either
anecdotal or case study evidence, or was based purely on event based analysis.
What our date set, which is called the Big, Allied, and
Dangerous data set, or as I like to call the BAAD data set,
does is add organizational features that allow us to do analysis.
Which will allow us to see what kind of organizational features will have
an impact on whether organizations kill people, and
if they do kill people, how many people they kill.
Many people would assume I think,
that most terrorist organizations kill people, and indeed, kill a lot of people.
But using data from the Global Terrorism Database or
GTD, we've tied that data to the BAAD data, the organizational data.
And indeed what we find as you'll see in this slide Is that most terrorist
organizations actually don't kill a lot of people.
Indeed, most terrorist organizations don't kill anybody.
So if you look at the data we're talking about,
and this is yearly data from 1998 to 2007.
What you see is 52% of the organizations that we have,
that's 580 organizations overall,
52% of them kill no one and 77% of them kill ten or fewer.
Indeed, only 12 organizations have actually killed more than 500 people.
Which means that killing lots of people as a terrorist organization is a fairly
rare thing.
And so this has motivated us to look at what factors make this kind of behavior
more likely.
Now this slide shows our meta-theoretical model of how we approach this.
And we don't just analyze terrorists lethality,
we analyze a variety of different factors related to terrorist behavior.
But we believe there are key features that will impact whether or
not a terrorist organization is likely to behave in a certain way.
And one feature is the organizational environment, so if an organization
is in a particular environment, it will have certain advantages and disadvantages.
So for example, if an organization is in a state that has high capabilities,
that can really smack it down if it does something the state doesn't like,
that state is likely to follow a different course than if it's in a state,
an area, where there's a lot of leeway, okay?
Just think about how you behaved when the teacher was in the classroom,
and how you behaved when the teacher was out of the classroom.
Then there are the issues of capabilities, relations, network alliances or enemies.
Let’s go back to first grade again,
if you are the popular kid you have a lot of connections, that’s going to give
you a lot of power the other kids sitting there by themselves is not going to have.
If there are two kids who have lots of connections,
then competition can get fierce and that might impact the behavior as well.
The next is attributes.
Everybody and every organization has certain attributes.
So I learned very early as being a fairly short person that I was not going to be in
the NBA regardless of how good my basketball skills were.
This was never a problem because my basketball skills were never that good.
But even if they were phenomenal, it wasn't going to happen.
In addition, what's going to feed into organizational behavioral belief is goals.
Organizations want to achieve certain things and
that should have an impact on what they do.
Now I should note that some organizations are going to do stuff based on those goals
but as we all know, if we've been to college,
sometimes you do stuff just because the opportunity exists.
So it's a combination of goals and
opportunity that is going to have that impact on behavior.
When it combines with issues related to attributes, relations, and environment.
Let me start first with this issue of relations.
What you see here is a network map of terrorist organizations that have
at least three connections, that aggregates this data from 1998 to 2005.
And the size of the circle or the node is related to the lethalities.
Organizations that have bigger circles are likely to be more lethal.
And as you can see, some of these circles are much,
much larger than others of these circles.
And what we see here is that there seems to be a connection between
the number of alliances you have, so if you look at al-Qaeda Central.