The developmental dynamics of terrorist organizations

Abstract

We identify robust statistical patterns in the frequency and severity of violent attacks by terrorist organizations as they grow and age. Using group-level static and dynamic analyses of terrorist events worldwide from 1968-2008 and a simulation model of organizational dynamics, we show that the production of violent events tends to accelerate with increasing size and experience. This coupling of frequency, experience and size arises from a fundamental positive feedback loop in which attacks lead to growth which leads to increased production of new attacks. In contrast, event severity is independent of both size and experience. Thus larger, more experienced organizations are more deadly because they attack more frequently, not because their attacks are more deadly, and large events are equally likely to come from large and small organizations. These results hold across political ideologies and time, suggesting that the frequency and severity of terrorism may be constrained by fundamental processes.

28 pages, 8 figures, 4 tables, supplementary material

References in corpus (6)

• Power-law distributions in empirical data
• On the Frequency of Severe Terrorist Events
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• The developmental dynamics of terrorist organizations
• Universal patterns underlying ongoing wars and terrorism
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Cited by in corpus (11)

• Multirelational Organization of Large-scale Social Networks in an Online World
• Saving Human Lives: What Complexity Science and Information Systems can Contribute
• The developmental dynamics of terrorist organizations
• Quantifying dynamics of failure across science, startups, and security
• Estimating the historical and future probabilities of large terrorist events
• Hidden Markov models for the activity profile of terrorist groups
• Generalized Gelation Theory describes Human Online Aggregation in support of Extremism
• A review of mechanistic and data-driven models of terrorism and radicalization
• Multi-modal Networks Reveal Patterns of Operational Similarity of Terrorist Organizations
• Rejoinder of "Estimating the historical and future probabilities of large terrorist events" by Aaron Clauset and Ryan Woodard
• Analyses of a Virtual World