Understanding Terrorist Organizations with a Dynamic Model

Abstract

Terrorist organizations change over time because of processes such as recruitment and training as well as counter-terrorism (CT) measures, but the effects of these processes are typically studied qualitatively and in separation from each other. Seeking a more quantitative and integrated understanding, we constructed a simple dynamic model where equations describe how these processes change an organization's membership. Analysis of the model yields a number of intuitive as well as novel findings. Most importantly it becomes possible to predict whether counter-terrorism measures would be sufficient to defeat the organization. Furthermore, we can prove in general that an organization would collapse if its strength and its pool of foot soldiers decline simultaneously. In contrast, a simultaneous decline in its strength and its pool of leaders is often insufficient and short-termed.These results and other like them demonstrate the great potential of dynamic models for informing terrorism scholarship and counter-terrorism policy making.

Modeling the role of government efforts in controlling extremism in a society

“…Also, the results obtained from the analysis infer that increase in the in-fighting loss within extremists leads to decrease in the number of extremists and extremists activities in a region. This result is in line with the findings of Gutfraind [24]. The model has also shown similar results for the variation in the immigration rate as well as for the in-fighting loss in the extremists with the findings of Raman [10] and Rashid [11].…”

“…A lot of efforts have been made in the past to study the effectiveness of the counter measures by government efforts to control the extremism in a population [4,10,11,[21][22][23][24][25][26]. In particular, Gutfraind studied the evolution of a terrorist organization in the form of leaders and foot soldiers and investigated the effect of counter measures on the strength of the extremists organization [24]. Further, Hoffman has studied new techniques for interactions between government resources and terrorist activities for the optimization of its resources [21].…”

“…It is pointed out here that most of the aforementioned studies, the government efforts have been assumed to be constants. The effects of demographic factors such as immigration and emigration growth rates of population have also not been considered in the model [18,24]. In this paper, therefore, we propose a new nonlinear model by considering four dependent variables, namely, number of susceptibles, number of extremists, number of isolated extremists, and the cumulative density of government efforts to capture extremists.…”

Terrorist group survival: ideology, tactics, and base of operations

“…For (4), an increase in the group's resources increases the probability of all types of attacks, thereby adding to the group's expected payoff and ultimate success. An increase in resources may also imply a larger group size, which fosters survival (see, also, Gutfraind 2009). If, in (5), the payoff to attack type i increases, ceteris paribus, then the terrorist group will shift resources from other attack modes to type i.…”

Tweeting propaganda, radicalization and recruitment

“…Terrorist networks tend to change over time because of changes in operational processes such as recruitment and training as well as changes in counter-terrorism policies [26]. Future research can apply our theoretical framework to further investigate the exploitation of Twitter networks by other terrorist networks or the exploitation of other social media networks such as YouTube and Facebook by Islamic State terrorist networks examining how strategic interactions between information reporters and users can affect terrorism communication outcomes.…”