Recently, Dr. Victor Asal and Dr. R. Karl Rethemeyer from the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs & Policy located at the University of Albany, State University of New York presented their ongoing research project, Big Allied and Dangerous: The Behavior of Terrorist Organizations (BAAD).  The project, funded by 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, focuses on creating and maintaining a comprehensive database of terrorist organizational characteristics.  Currently, there is a plethora of event data (attacks) but very little data on the organizations that use violence themselves.  Understanding attacks is important in order to identify trends but understanding the organizations that commit the attacks has the greatest potential for the intelligence community.

The database has the potential to empirically demonstrate which characteristics and relationships make terrorist organizations lethal and effective at achieving its desired goals. The information could help inform homeland security, defense, and the intelligence communities on resource management decisions.  The findings may also offer a second opinion based on statistics as an additional layer of analysis in addition to the contributions of Subject Matter Experts (SME’s), which are widely used to develop policy.

The BAAD research team created a visual network map (see below) using ‘nodes’ to  represent terrorist organizations and corresponding lines to represent the connections between organizations.  This visual representation helps to better to understand and clarify the relationships between different terrorist organizations.  The size of the node denotes the size of the organization, with red nodes representing Islamist organizations and blue nodes representing all others.  Red lines denote known, direct relationships (joint operation or training) and blue lines denote relationships with only rhetorical support.

See a larger version of the image

A few preliminary observations are immediately apparent.  First, the data suggests that the more connections an organization has, the more likely it is to be a violent actor. For instance, Al Qaeda has a large number of global relationships while most other groups only enjoy regionally based connections.

One question this project looked to answer was the contributing factors which account for the dramatic differences in organizational lethality among terrorist organizations. Out of the 395 terrorist organizations identified in BAAD, 68 have killed ten or more people from 1998 to 2008, and only 28 have killed more then 100 people, during the same period of time.  The BAAD team found both ideological and capability factors that determine if an organization will or will not resort to lethal violence.

According to the research, an organization is more likely to use lethal violence if they follow a religious ideology or a combination of ethno-nationalist and religious ideology. However, an organization that follows an environmental, anarchist, or leftist (not mixed with religion or ethno-nationalism) ideology is less likely to use lethal violence.  From a capability perspective, and not surprisingly an organization is more likely to use lethal violence if they are large and enjoy state sponsorship while an organization that is predominantly dilettante, small, or young, is subsequently less likely to use lethal violence.

Another question the project attempts to answer is what factors cause an organization to target or attack U.S. interests.  Current literature on the topic largely attributes ideology along with various grievances relating to U.S. foreign policy, military activity, global economic penetration, and U.S. cultural penetration; as primary reasons why a terrorist organization targets U.S. interests or citizens.

BAAD’s findings suggest that national security resources should be appropriately balanced toward environmental, anarchist and leftist organizations as they present little lethal threat.  The data confirms that well-connected organizations, like al-Qaeda, present the largest threat and should receive a corresponding level of resources.  As this and other research data sets are updated and improved, the implications for how the United States Government should confront the terrorist threat will become more accurate and actionable.

The academic community has the unique ability to provide an objective analysis and unbiased view on terrorism, which presents a clear opportunity for collaboration between the academic and intelligence communities in the area of national security research and policy.  The question that remains is how will this research be integrated into the American policy structure?  Currently, there is not a clearly identifiable agency responsible for coordinating academic research in key areas and ensuring the results are put into the hands of the right policy and operational decision makers.  Without the clear direction of Congress or the White House, academic research and all of its powerful implications for national security policy will continue to be ad-hoc.

The BAAD team is currently working on BAAD Version 2 (BAAD2), which will expand on BAAD1 by expanding the data to include events from 2005 to 2008 and additional variables.  All the BAAD data and any other data from START is freely available to anyone who requests it.

Victor Asal  PhD
Associate Professor of Political Science
Co-Director of the Project on Violent Conflict
Rockefeller College, University at Albany, SUNY
Email: vasal@email.albany.edu
Office # 518 591-8729
fax # 518 442-5298

Liam Fitzsimmons, James Fenlon and Brent Hall are all alumni of PSA’s Congressional Fellowship Program. To learn more about the program, please see PSA’s CFP page.

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