Understanding Terrorist Organizations with a Dynamic Model

TL;DR

This paper develops a dynamic quantitative model of terrorist organizations to predict their responses to counter-terrorism measures and identify conditions leading to their collapse.

Contribution

It introduces a novel, integrated dynamic model that quantitatively analyzes how recruitment, training, and counter-measures affect terrorist organization stability.

Findings

Counter-terrorism can be sufficient to defeat organizations under certain conditions.

Organizations collapse if both strength and foot soldiers decline simultaneously.

Decline in strength and leaders alone may be insufficient for collapse.

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.