An Integrated Approach to Modeling Terrorism

Kylla Fu Weiqing

Abstract

The fight against terrorism today must shift the focus beyond its ideological appeal towards further examination of the global network of terror. Drawing on the premise that social bonds are the driving force behind the successful perpetuation of terrorism, unleashing efforts to tackle operational terrorism rather than ideological terrorism would surely constitute a more tangible and effective response to the terrorist scourge.

This report aims to address the problem of operational terrorism using social bonds as the basis for which the solution would be built upon. Proposed in this report is a methodology which puts together various disciplines to introduce a systems approach spanning two stages of study to model terrorism. At the outset, an examination of the network structure together with theoretical validation of its features using Social Network Analysis serve to direct the focus onto the component of the network where operational capability resides. These findings then set the platform for the modeling of terror operational dynamics after the S-curve using concepts of Diffusion Theory.

A key contribution of this report lies in its ability to take into account the fact that terror operational planning is dynamic and not static. Since past research on terrorism had hardly touched on fighting terrorism from a dynamic perspective, an exploration on how this tracking utility would serve its purpose of modeling terrorism is presented.