Uncovering the internal structure of Boko Haram through its mobility patterns

Curiel, Rafael Prieto; Walther, Olivier; Neave, Guy

doi:10.1007/s41109-020-00264-4

Cited by 18 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 53 publications

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“…The impact of conflict by adding all cartels is θC i j =i C j S ij . Other models of violence between groups look at the impact of risk aversion of its members, the arrest probability, the internal structure of the group or its mobility patterns [29,56,57], or they look at the frequency or severity of their events [58,59]. Here, we are interested in the cartels' size and recruitment process.…”

Section: A Dynamic Model Of Cartel Sizementioning

confidence: 99%

The heartbeat of the city

et al. 2021

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Human activity is organised around daily and weekly cycles, which should, in turn, dominate all types of social interactions, such as transactions, communications, gatherings and so on. Yet, despite their strategic importance for policing and security, cyclical weekly patterns in crime and road incidents have been unexplored at the city and neighbourhood level. Here we construct a novel method to capture the weekly trace, or “heartbeat” of events and use geotagged data capturing the time and location of more than 200,000 violent crimes and nearly one million crashes in Mexico City. On aggregate, our findings show that the heartbeats of crime and crashes follow a similar pattern. We observe valleys during the night and peaks in the evening, where the intensity during a peak is 7.5 times the intensity of valleys in terms of crime and 12.3 times in terms of road accidents. Although distinct types of events, crimes and crashes reach their respective intensity peak on Friday night and valley on Tuesday morning, the result of a hyper-synchronised society. Next, heartbeats are computed for city neighbourhood ‘tiles’, a division of space within the city based on the distance to Metro and other public transport stations. We find that heartbeats are spatially heterogeneous with some diffusion, so that nearby tiles have similar heartbeats. Tiles are then clustered based on the shape of their heartbeat, e.g., tiles within groups suffer peaks and valleys of crime or crashes at similar times during the week. The clusters found are similar to those based on economic activities. This enables us to anticipate temporal traces of crime and crashes based on local amenities.

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Section: A Dynamic Model Of Cartel Sizementioning

confidence: 99%

The heartbeat of the city

et al. 2021

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“…Battle observations are extracted to construct a network of conflict interactions between groups. Due to difficulties associated with untangling attackers and defenders, Curiel, Walther, and O'Clery (2020) consider ACLED event data as observations of symmetric events resulting in an undirected network.…”

Section: Dependent Conflict Networkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Salient Cleavages, Tactical Cooperation and Violence between Armed Groups in Yemen

Younger-Khan¹

2023

Preprint

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<p>Existing scholarship ignores relational interdependencies when attempting to understand the behaviour of non-state armed groups during civil war. This paper investigates the in- terconnected web of alliances and rivalries in the Yemen Civil War to answer the following question: why do armed groups fight each other? We employ a network approach to investigate determinants of intergroup violence. This emphasises the role of identity, arguing that operating in salient cleavages necessitates that groups align or distinguish themselves from each other. We further argue that informal cooperation incentivises violence the longer the war continues. These arguments are tested using pooled Exponential Random Graph Models to account for endogenous structures over time. Results indicate that shared identity is a significant driver of hostilities, moderating cooperation and amplifying the effects of group attributes. Robustness checks and simulations demonstrate that network models more accurately capture the underlying mechanisms to predict fighting in this case.</p>

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“…Advances in network analysis have also contributed to mapping the social structure of terrorist organisations [21][22][23][24][25][26]. Novel techniques have been developed to help detect future attacks [27], including the use of mobility patterns [28] and early warnings systems [29]. These techniques complement geo-visualising tools that can track terrorist organisations and help identify regularities in their spatial patterns [30,31].…”

Section: Theoretical Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

Detecting trends and shocks in terrorist activities

Prieto-Curiel,

Walther,

Davies

2023

PLoS ONE

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Although there are some techniques for dealing with sparse and concentrated discrete data, standard time-series analyses appear ill-suited to understanding the temporal patterns of terrorist attacks due to the sparsity of the events. This article addresses these issues by proposing a novel technique for analysing low-frequency temporal events, such as terrorism, based on their cumulative curve and corresponding gradients. Using an iterative algorithm based on a piecewise linear function, our technique detects trends and shocks observed in the events associated with terrorist groups that would not necessarily be visible using other methods. The analysis leverages disaggregated data on political violence from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) to analyse the intensity of the two most violent terrorist organisations in Africa: Boko Haram (including its splinter group, the Islamic State West Africa Province), and Al-Shabaab. Our method detects moments when terrorist groups change their capabilities to conduct daily attacks and, by taking into account the directionality of attacks, highlights major changes in the government’s strategies. Results suggest that security policies have largely failed to reduce both groups’ forces and restore stability.

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Uncovering the internal structure of Boko Haram through its mobility patterns

Cited by 18 publications

References 53 publications

The heartbeat of the city

The heartbeat of the city

Salient Cleavages, Tactical Cooperation and Violence between Armed Groups in Yemen

Detecting trends and shocks in terrorist activities

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