Seymour Spilerman and Guy Stecklov (2009). Societal Responses to Terrorist Attacks. Annual Review of Sociology. Vol. 35: 167-189
Terrorist attacks in the United States and in Western Europe have been rare, and public awareness of the terrorist menace has largely been molded by a few horrific events. In contrast, other countries have experienced chronic terrorism, with attacks on buses, restaurants, coffee shops, and retail establishments. In this review, we assess the impact of terrorism on civilian society in the United States, Northern Ireland, and Israel. We examine the psychological effects, the adaptations made by individuals to enhance their safety, and the consequent adjustments made by institutional actors and by commercial establishments to ensure continued economic viability. We review the various theories of societal adjustments to exogenous shocks and point out that a very different formulation is required for the case of chronic terrorism than for the societal experience of a one-time attack.
John Thomas Alderdice (2009). Sacred Values: Psychological and Anthropological Perspectives on Fairness, Fundamentalism, and Terrorism. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences Volume 1167 Pages 158 - 173
Enduring, violent, social, and political conflicts have often been interpreted as resulting directly from socioeconomic inequity. The advent of global terrorism is traditionally understood by the political left as representing a rational, albeit regrettable, third-world response to poverty. On the political right the alternative explanation tends to see the world in terms of the fight between good and evil—each side “Islamist” and “Western,” characterizing the enemy in similar opposing terms. This has recently been popularized as a clash of religions, cultures, or civilizations. Most poor societies do not, however, respond to their circumstances with violence (particularly terrorism), and indeed it is often at the point where the socioeconomic circumstances of a society or a region are improving that there is a breakdown into violence. Starting in Northern Ireland and then exploring other regions, including Peru, Nepal, and the Middle East, the author’s close observation of a number of societies where there has been persistent terrorism has revealed that the response is an emotional and self-destructive one rather than being marked by rational economic self-interest or an essentially religious/cultural conflict; it is often the sense of humiliation, disrespect, and injustice that is the most toxic stimulus; and, insofar as there is inequity or cultural division, it is the component of “unfairness” or “injustice” that is the potent element in the predisposing mixture. “Righting a terrible wrong” or responding to unfairness and injustice is, therefore, a key to understanding and addressing such violent social conflicts.
Ignacio Sanchez-Cuenca and Luis de la Calle (2009). Domestic Terrorism: The Hidden Side of Political Violence. Annual Review of Political Science; Volume 12, Page 31 - 49
This article reviews the literature on the onset and dynamics of domestic terrorism, with special emphasis on the interactions between terrorist organizations, the state, and society. Because this literature has often been based on case studies, we seek to impose some structure to its findings. We challenge the distinction between domestic and international terrorism, which truncates the sample of violence, and we show that the actor-sense of terrorism (violence carried out by underground organizations) is the most appropriate model for causal analysis. Terrorist organizations tend to emerge in developed countries in which the state is able to prevent the loss of control over any part of its territory. Terrorists take advantage of the state’s mistakes (when, for example, it is over-repressive or makes ineffective concessions) in order to boost their support. Terrorists cannot survive without some degree of support. Consequently, levels of violence and targets are determined by social constraints.
Christopher C. Yang & Marc Sageman (2009). Analysis of terrorist social networks with fractal views. Journal of Information Science 35(3):299-320
Social network visualization has drawn significant attention over recent years. It creates images of social networks that provide investigators with new insights about network structures and helps them to communicate those insights to others. Visualization facilitates the social network analysis. It supports the investigators to discover patterns of interactions among the social actors including detecting subgroups, identifying central actors and their roles, and discovering patterns of interactions among social actors. However, visualizing a large heterogeneous social network has several challenges. The large size of networks, complex relations among social actors and limited number of available pixels on a screen make it difficult to present important information clearly to investigators and hence reduce the capability of investigators to explore the networks. In this work, we propose the fractal views to construct a visual abstraction of a large and complex social network with users selected social actors as focuses. The fractal views are focus and context visualization techniques using an information reduction approach. It controls the amount of information displayed by focusing on the syntactic structure of information. It is useful in discovering knowledge from terrorist social networks for combating the war on terrorism. Such application has formed an important research topic, known as intelligence and security informatics, in recent years due to the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001 (9/11) and several other terror attacks that have occurred within the last decade. We present several case studies to demonstrate the capability of the proposed technique on analyzing the Global Salafi Jihad terrorist social network. It extracts the hidden relationships among terrorists through user interactions. In addition, we have conducted a user evaluation to assess the efficiency and effectiveness of fractal views. It shows that fractal views outperform fisheye views and zoom-in windows to support users in visualizing and analyzing terrorist social networks.
Key Words: information visualization • terrorist social networks • social network analysis • fractal views • visual analytics
Inderscience publishers press release, 4 May 2009:
A new approach to analyzing social networks, reported in the current issue of the International Journal of Services Sciences, could help homeland security find the covert connections between the people behind terrorist attacks. The approach involves revealing the nodes that act as hubs in a terrorist network and tracing back to individual planners and perpetrators.
Dr Yoshiharu Maeno, Founder Management Consultant of the Social Design Group and Dr Yukio Ohsawa, Associate Professor at the School of Engineering, University of Tokyo, Japan, explain that their analytical approach to understanding terrorist networks could ultimately help prevent future attacks.
Reference:
The Rand Corporation has released a study on the Mumbai terrorist attacks last year.
The Mumbai terrorist attacks in India suggest the possibility of an escalating terrorist campaign in South Asia and the rise of a strategic terrorist culture, according to a study issued today by the RAND Corporation.
The RAND study identifies the operational and tactical features of the attack, evaluates the response of Indian security forces, and analyzes the implications for India, Pakistan and the United States.
Download study here.
Hat tip Docuticker
Hat tip to APA Psychological Science Agenda:
On Monday, December 15, the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), a Department of Homeland Security Center of Excellence based at the University of Maryland, launched the Terrorism Studies Syllabi Repository: www.start.umd.edu/education/syllabi. The repository currently contains 154 undergraduate, 56 graduate, and 1 K-12 syllabi relevant to the study of terrorism and responses to terrorism. Of those, a search on “psychology” returned 15 undergraduate and 4 graduate syllabi. The Web interface for the repository allows visitors to search by instructor name, course level, discipline, or one of 36 discrete keywords. Each syllabus is available for download in PDF format.
Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict: Pathways toward terrorism and genocide Volume 1 Issue 2 is now online. Contents include:
- How democracies fight insurgents and terrorists - Anthony Oberschall
- The language of violence: distinguishing terrorist from nonterrorist groups by thematic content analysis - Allison G. Smith; Peter Suedfeld; Lucian G. Conway III; David G. Winter
- The opposing forces diffusion model: the initiation and repression of collective violence - Daniel J. Myers; Pamela E. Oliver
- A theory of the dynamics of violence - Bert Useem
- Stretching military analysis to include asymmetric conflict - Barak Mendelsohn
- Looking backward and forward at the global war on terrorism - Mohammed M. Hafez
- Rethinking Al Qaeda: Leaderless jihad: terror networks in the twenty-first century - Lindsay Clutterbuck
- When zero-sum games go negative - Ian S. Lustick
The latest issue of the journal Policing 2(4) is a special on Violent Extremism. Contents include:
- Stephen Vertigans - Introducing Militant Islam: Peoples, Places and Policing
- Richard Warnes and Greg Hannah - Meeting the Challenge of Extremist and Radicalized Prisoners: The Experiences of the United Kingdom and Spain
- Paul Gill - Suicide Bomber Pathways among Islamic Militants
- Minna Saarnivaara - Suicide Campaigns as a Strategic Choice: The Case of Hamas
- Thomas Baumert - Do Terrorists Play the Market? Or Can Their Attacks Serve as a Source of Financing for Terrorism?
- Donncha Marron - Money Talks, Money Walks: The War on Terrorist Financing in the West
- Annamarie Oliverio - US versus European Approaches to Terrorism: Size Really Does Matter
From the New York Times 7 Nov 2008:
The sunset prayer had just ended, and Sheik Ahmad al-Jilani was already calling his class to order. When the latecomers slipped into the front row, Jilani nodded at them briskly. “Young men,” he began, “who can tell me why we do jihad?” […]
Jilani’s students, who range in age from 18 to 36, are part of a generation brought up on heroic tales of Saudi fighters who left home to fight alongside the mujahedeen in Afghanistan during the 1980s and who helped to force the Soviets to withdraw from the country. The Saudi state was essentially built on the concept of jihad, which King Abdul Aziz al-Saud used to knit disparate tribal groups into a single nation. The word means “struggle” and in Islamic law usually refers to armed conflict with non-Muslims in defense of the global Islamic community. Saudi schools teach a version of world history that emphasizes repeated battles between Muslims and nonbelieving enemies. Whether to Afghanistan in the 1980s or present-day Iraq, Saudi Arabia has exported more jihadist volunteers than any other country; 15 of the 19 hijackers on Sept. 11 were Saudis.
From the latest edition of Scientific American Mind (Oct 2008), an article co-authored by four authoritative and experienced terrorism researchers:
The Psychology of “The War on Terror” and Other Terms for Counterterrorism
By Arie W. Kruglanski, Martha Crenshaw, Jerrold M. Post and Jeff Victoroff
How we characterize an issue affects how we think about it. Replacing the “war on terror” metaphor with other ways of framing counterterrorism might help us curtail the violence more effectively
Mathew P. White, J. Christopher Cohrs, Anja S. Göritz (2008). The police officer’s terrorist dilemma: trust resilience following fatal errors. European Journal of Social Psychology 38(6):947-964
Suicide attacks have raised the stakes for officers deciding whether or not to shoot a suspect (Police Officer’s Terrorist Dilemma). Despite high-profile errors we know little about how trust in the police is affected by their response to the terrorist threat. Building on a conceptualisation of lay observers as intuitive signal detection theorists, a general population sample (N = 1153) were presented with scenarios manipulated in terms of suspect status (Armed/Unarmed), officer decision (Shoot/Not Shoot) and outcome severity (e.g. suspect armed with Bomb/Knife; police shoot suspect/suspect plus child bystander). Supporting predictions, people showed higher trust in officers who made correct decisions, reflecting good discrimination ability and who decided to shoot, reflecting an appropriate response bias given the relative costs and benefits. This latter effect was moderated by (a) outcome severity, suggesting it did not simply reflect a preference for a particular type of action, and (b) preferences for a tough stance towards terrorism indexed by Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA). Despite loss of civilian life, failure to prevent minor terror attacks resulted in no loss of trust amongst people low in RWA, whereas among people high in RWA trust was positive when police erroneously shot an unarmed suspect. Relations to alternative definitions of trust and procedural justice research are discussed. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 31(9) is now online. Contents include:
- Al Qaeda in the Tribal Areas of Pakistan and Beyond - Rohan Gunaratna; Anders Nielsen
- The Contradictory Effects of Ideology on Jihadist War-Fighting: The Bosnia Precedent - Jeni Mitchell
- Islamic Radicalism in East Africa: Is There a Cause for Concern? - Isaac Kfir
- Ghost Martyrs in Iraq: An Assessment of the Applicability of Rationalist Models to Explain Suicide Attacks in Iraq - Nick Ayers
Pieter A. Maeseele, Gino Verleye, Isabelle Stevens, and Anne Speckhard (2008). Psychosocial resilience in the face of a mediated terrorist threat. Media, War & Conflict. 2008; 1(1): p. 50-69
http://mwc.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/1/1/50
After 9/11, studies concerning psychological and psychiatric effects of terrorism have greatly multiplied. Media exposure to terrorism has been shown to be a vital factor in these effects. However, there is a lack of pre-trauma research assessing the resilience of the civilian population in the face of a `mediated’ terrorist threat. This article discusses an eight-dimensional conceptual model of terrorism-related issues central to psychosocial resilience to terrorism. Survey results (N = 1040) are provided which present an index of these terrorism-related issues for Flanders (Belgium) in December 2004 and January 2005 and their correlations. They are also related to media use in the case of television, radio and the internet. The results clearly indicate the psychological repercussions of this terrorism threat in terms of media information-seeking behavior, risk perception and fear levels. Furthermore, the important role of government communication, the ambiguity of social support and the opposing outcomes of television and internet use are demonstrated.
Indridi H. Indridason (2008). Does Terrorism Influence Domestic Politics? Coalition Formation and Terrorist Incidents. Journal of Peace Research. 2008; 45(2): p. 241-259
Terrorism has been shown to influence domestic politics, for example, by altering the priorities of voters and politicians. This article argues that terrorism has broader political consequences than simply putting national security on the political agenda. In particular, it argues that terrorist activity influences government formation. A number of scholars have noted that the presence of an external threat provides an incentive to overcome internal disagreements, suggesting that larger and more inclusive coalitions should form. Terrorist activity may also influence government survival, as voters hold politicians accountable for failing to provide security. Politicians, in anticipation of terrorist activity, may, therefore, seek to form a more stable coalition. The literature on government survival suggests that the size of the coalition positively affects its durability but that its ideological breadth is expected to have an adverse effect on survival, which is the opposite of the prediction of the theory based on external threat. To test whether terrorism influences coalition formation, the author analyzes coalition formation in 17 (primarily Western European) parliamentary democracies over a 50-year period using data on domestic and transnational terrorism from, respectively, the TWEED dataset and the Terrorism Knowledge Base. The results show that government coalitions are more likely to be surplus coalitions and, consistent with the theory emphasizing government survival, more likely to have a low degree of ideological polarization in periods following terrorist activity.