the physics arXiv blog

Mon Jun 22 05:21:37 PDT 2009

[1]the physics arXiv blog
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   [2]How terrorists groups resemble manufacturing firms

   Posted: 21 Jun 2009 09:10 PM PDT

   Terrorist organisations may be best understood as companies whose
   principle product is violence, suggests a new study of terror attacks

   Understanding how terrorist groups operate is hard, not least because
   of a severe lack of information about how they recruit, organise and
   plan their activities. So it's no surprise then that working out how
   best to stop these organisations is tricky.

   Now Aaron Clauset from the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico and his
   pal, Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, say they've found an important new
   insight into terrorist activity that could help to solve this problem.

   The analysis is based on the one set of reliable data that we do have:
   the number and severity of terrorist attacks and rough idea of the
   size and age of the groups that carried them out (they've looked at
   the data from 1998 to 2005). Clauset and Gledistch say that a simple
   analysis of this data shows that the frequency of attacks increases
   over time in a pattern that is common to all groups: the time between
   attacks plotted against the group's experience decreases according to
   a power law.

   That can be explained in two ways. First, terrorist groups are born
   clumsy and increase their attack rate primarily because their members
   learn to be more efficient. In manufacturing industry, this kind of
   organisational learning is called learning by doing and is widely
   studied.

   Second, the terrorist groups are born small and increase their attack
   rate by recruiting new, replaceable, members, a process called
   organisation growth and is again well studied by economists.

   Perhaps economics can help. "In this light, terrorist groups may best
   be understood as firms whose principal product is political violence,
   and whose production rates depend largely on organizational growth and
   the availability of low-skill labor," say Clauset and Gledistch.

   That may well be an important insight because it implies that certain
   kinds of easily accessible organisations such as non-profit companies
   and groups of political activists, might be good models of terrorist
   groups from which additional insights can be gained. For example, it
   may be possible to determine whether the activity a group is best
   reduced by limiting its growth or by disrupting its organisation.

   But there is a puzzle in this data, say Clauset and Gledistch. The
   severity of terrorist attacks is independent of the size and
   experience of the organisation. So contrary to what you might expect,
   young and old terrorist groups are equally likely to carry out
   extremely severe attacks. "Internal factors seem to play a marginal
   role in the severity of any particular attack," say Clauset and
   Gledistch.

   Here's one explanation. Similar kinds of power laws are common in the
   real world: in the size of stock market crashes, the number of deaths
   in wars and the severity of forest fires. In these cases, the size of
   the conflagration has nothing to do with the size event that triggered
   it but everything to do with the network in which the event took
   place.

   Perhaps the same is true with terrorist attacks: the severity of the
   attack has more to do with the properties of the system being attacked
   than the organisation doing the attacking.

   Ref: [3]arxiv.org/abs/0906.3287: The Developmental Dynamics of
   Terrorist Organizations

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