The National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), a Department of Homeland Security Center of Excellence housed at the University of Maryland, offers a course looking at the who, what and how of Terrorism Studies, by introducing students to cutting-edge research from the social and behavioral sciences and the experts investigating these topics. The course will begin with a unit looking at widely held myths about terrorism and utilizing empirical data to discuss the realities of broad trends and patterns in terrorist attacks over time. The course will then review the psychological factors at play in individual radicalization and recruitment into terrorism, followed by an analysis of terrorist group dynamics. The course will next look at terrorist group operations, including their attacks and some of the supporting behaviors that allow them to carry out attacks, including use of media, financing, recruitment, and training. The course will conclude by looking at the factors that drive terrorist group persistence or endurance versus terrorist group desistance, and will bring the varied course concepts together through a detailed look at the case of Al-Qa’ida. Throughout the course, students will have the opportunity to study and work with the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database (GTD), the largest database of terrorist incidents in the world, learning its capabilities and developing basic skills in searching and displaying terrorism data.
3.F: Victor Asal (SUNY), "Big, Allied and Dangerous: A Look at Terrorist Group Lethality"
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From the course by University of Maryland, College Park
Understanding Terrorism and the Terrorist Threat
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From the lesson
Module 3: Terrorist Group Dynamics
Meet the Instructors
Dr. Gary LaFreeDirector
National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism
Bill BraniffExecutive Director
National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism
Kate IzsakEducation Director
National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Reponses to Terrorism
Joyce Rasing
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.
These organizations that have a lot of alliances are likely
to be much more lethal.
Now one of the reasons that we think this is so is that alliances give information.
The more information you have,
the more connections you have, the more capabilities you can get to.
Think about it for a moment, how many of you have a job or
know someone who has a job because they know someone?
So alliances are power.
Alliances can give you that ability to be more lethal.
In addition, though,
there's another thing about relations that can make you more lethal.
And that's competition.
If you have rivals, you're likely to try harder.
If you're sitting back and you're not being competed against,
maybe you can take it easy.
But if there are other groups that are trying to attract attention, they're
going to have to compete with you and you're going to have to compete with them.
And one way to compete is to kill lots of people.
So, we would expect that if you have rivalries you're going to be more lethal.
And indeed, what we find if we go to the next slide,
is that both network alliances and
network rivalries make organizations much, much more lethal.
Indeed alliances and rivalries, these network connections, are the thing that
makes organizations have the biggest impact on organizational lethality.
But it's not just alliances and rivalries that have an impact.
Again, remember we talked about ideology and goals.
Ideology and goals can have an impact too.
We believe the reason for this is that when you have
a certain kind of ideology, you are able to think about people differently.
So there are ideologies that allow you to, what we call other people.
If I see the world,
if my ideology enables me to see the world as being my side, your side.
My side is good, your side is evil.
Then indeed what's going to happen is,
if you're evil, it's a lot easier to kill you.
And so we would expect that ideologies that allow you to other.
So ideologies like religious ideologies,
ethnonationalist ideologies, should make you much more lethal.
On the other hand, there should be certain kinds of ideologies
that should say to you, don't kill.
Don't do these nasty things.
And those kind of ideologies should make it more likely that you won't kill.
And indeed, what we find from this data is that ideologies that other people,
particularly the combination of ethnonationalist ideologies and
religious ideologies, make you much more likely to be very lethal.
In addition, size, again capabilities,
again make you much more likely to kill people.
Although I should note again, is neither of these factors is having as large
an impact as the network factors we talked about earlier.
As someone who is getting older every year, I should also note that age, or
experience is also making you more lethal.
And that should be an obvious relationship.
The older you are, the older an organization is,
the more knowledge it has.
The more it's had time to develop experience and learn not to do things so
that it allows it, an organization to do things better.
And so older organizations indeed kill more people as well.
There are other factors that we found have this impact.
One of these factors is drug smuggling.
Drug smuggling, in addition to building connections, ties organizations into
criminal organizations and gives them huge resources in terms of the capabilities and
connections and money that should allow organizations to be more capable.
And thus we believe that is the reason why drug smuggling makes organization
more lethal.
In addition, and a bit of surprise, if you know the literature,
when you have state sponsorship, you're more likely to be able to kill people.
And indeed we should expect this because state sponsorship gives you resources.
But like resources you get from your parents, they're caveats.
So your parent might say, here's a car, but you need to be back by 11.
So what we're finding, interestingly enough, is that state sponsorship creates
a situation where organizations are more likely to cross that threshold of killing.
But they're actually less like to kill lots of people because the state sponsor
is acting like a parent that doesn't want their kid to get into too much trouble.
Because if that kid, i.e.,
a terrorist organization, gets into to much trouble, it may bring the attention
of other parents that that state sponsor really just doesn't want.
In addition, we find that organizations in wealthy countries,
which is an indicator of the capability of the country itself,
remember we were talking about the environment, do not kill many people.
And that is not surprising because these organizations face are much more capable
state.
And so the other thing that we're finding doesn't matter, and this contradicts
much of the way people thought about this, is the regime of the organization.
So even if it's democracy, these organizations, even with that freedom,
don't seem to be killing more people.
So overall, what we're finding here is that network connections,
both your enemies and your allies, are pushing you and
enabling terrorist organizations to kill many more people.
Capabilities like size and experience make them much more likely to be lethal.
And as well ideology,
this ability to other people, makes them much more likely to be lethal.
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