Advancing the Understanding of Sociospatial Dependencies in Terrorist Networks

Abstract

Terrorist networks operate in hybrid space where activities in social and geographic spaces are necessary for logistics and security. The Islamist terrorist network is analyzed as a sociospatial system using social network analysis, Geographic Information Science (GISc), and novel techniques designed for hybrid space analyses. This research focuses on identifying distance and sociospatial dependencies within the terrorist network. A methodology for analyzing sociospatial systems is developed and results lead to a greater understanding of terrorist network structures and activities. Distance and sociospatial dependencies are shown to exist for the Islamist terrorist network structure. These findings are discordant with recent literature that focuses on terrorist network tendencies toward decentralization in the information age. In this research, the Islamist terrorist network is theorized to use multiple structures of hierarchical and decentralized organization for effectiveness, efficiency, and resilience. Implications for counterterrorism policy and strategies are given.

The Spatial Properties of Radical Environmental Organizations in the UK: Do or Die!

“…Hence, it would appear that violent environmental groups in the UK and environmental terrorists in the U.S. each exhibit comparably localized geographic patterns of activity and interaction. Similar spatial findings have been reported for the behaviors of international and Islamic terrorists as well [13, 29]. We take these similarities to suggest that, like U.S. environmental terrorists and related terrorist organizations, very localized patters of interaction exist among violent environmental radicals in the UK, and as such, their geographic reach is likely to be fairly limited.…”

“…This finding contradicts the emerging narrative surrounding violent extremist groups, which largely characterizes such groups in modern times as spatially unconstrained and geographically decentralized [8–12]. In this respect, our work follows more recent, sociospatial analyses of Islamic terrorist networks [13] in demonstrating that for networks of violent radicals, local geographic factors remain crucial.…”

“…Together, these expectations are highly consistent with extant studies of (non)violent extremist and terrorist groups, which together suggest that violence is positively associated with overall group size, broader organizational visibility, and more extensive network ties [7, 22, 23, 27]. We also note that these contentions closely parallel an emerging narrative on modern terrorism, which emphasizes the non-geographically constrained nature of terrorist groups and networks, as facilitated by “the accessibility of ideological information, training materials, finances, and radicalization assistance via modern transport and communications technologies” [13]. …”

“…However, there is a strong literature which suggests the opposite, in that peaceful groups will be highly prone to communicate and mobilize over large distances [5, 28] whereas violent groups will be centered locally with very little engagement on the (inter)national scale [13, 29]. The logic to this alternate expectation is twofold.…”

Mining for geographically disperse communities in social networks by leveraging distance modularity

“…In this section we use the open-source derived terrorist network of Medina and Hepner [15] as a proxy for the (often classified) networks that will be used by this software in practice. The networks consists of 358 geolocated individuals in a transnational terrorist organization (660 unweighted edges).…”