College of Behavioral & Social Sciences
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Item On Terrorist Attacks and Estimation Methods(2023) Macario, Pablo; Prucha, Ingmar R; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In my thesis I propose a theoretical model of terrorist attacks and anestimation strategy which I compare to existing methods in the literature. The modeling approach was designed with terrorism in mind, but can be applied to other discrete dynamic decision processes with a latent component and a random payoff variable that is measured when the agent exits a state of waiting. Chapter 1 briefly describes the structure of the thesis. Chapter 2 provides a literature review of empirical studies of terrorist attacks. The primary focus is the series hazard model that estimates the effect of policy interventions on the risk of terrorist attacks. Recent contributions include LaFree et al. (2009), Dugan (2011), Carson (2014) Argomaniz and Vidal-Diez (2015), and Carson (2017). A major limitation of the series hazard approach is that it is unable to evaluate the impact of a policy intervention on the outcomes of attacks (e.g., the number of fatalities) even if these are measured during each event. Chapter 3 introduces the sequence hazard model of a terrorist groupdeciding when to attack. The model links the outcome of terrorist attacks to the choice of when to attack by taking the amount of time elapsed since the last attack as an input into the planning of the next attack. The agent trades off the desire to improve their attack against the risk that their plans are sabotaged before they are able to carry them out. The sequence hazard model is dynamic because agents take into account the potential size of future attacks when deciding whether or not to attack today. As a consequence, the hazard implied by the sequence approach is non-proportional in time. This distinguishes the sequence hazard model from the proportional hazard assumed by the series (Cox) approach. The sequence model implies a data generating process for attack outcomes that takes into accountthe probability the agent attacks. Chapter 3 derives the implied mathematical expectation and variance of attack outcomes which allows researchers to extend the notion of deterrence to allow for the possibility that counterterrorist policies that reduce the frequency of attacks, but increase the expected severity of attacks that do take place. Two types of attack outcomes are considered, a mixed Poisson-beta model for the number of casualties and a mixed Bernoulli-beta model for attack success or failure. Chapter 4 presents a Monte Carlo study demonstrating the validity ofestimating the sequence hazard model by maximum likelihood. In contrast, when the underlying data are generated according to the simple behavioral model presented in Chapter 3, the series hazard fails to estimate the true effect of a policy intervention on the risk of attacks. Moreover, the standard tests fail to reject the null hypothesis that the data are generated according to a proportional model. The simulation implies that if planning time and uncertainty over attack outcomes are important elements in terrorist decision making, then methods of policy evaluation based on the assumption of proportionality may not be appropriate. In contrast, by modeling both the timing of attacks as well as their size, the sequence hazard offers a straightforward way of incorporating terrorist attack outcomes into the analysis of counterterrorism policy.Item Membership Diversity and Tactical Adaptation within Violent Non-State Organizations(2018) Dunford, Eric Thomas; Birnir, Johanna K; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines why some violent non-state organizations experiment with and develop a broader repertoire of tactics and targets to achieve their political goals while other groups consistently utilize the same methods across their lifespan. Social movement theory argues that challengers to the state's authority should continually innovate their repertoires of contention to mobilize support and sustain an effective challenge against the state; however, rebel groups vary markedly in the size of the tactical repertoires that they employ in their campaign to alter the status quo. Some non-state organizations are more capable of experimenting with and implementing new variations on existing methods than others. I explore the factors that shape a militant organization's ``adaptive capacity.'' Specifically, these are the conditions that make an organization more or less capable of the incremental innovations necessary for expanding its set of violent repertoires and generating a larger tactical menu from which it can draw when selecting a strategy to challenge the state. The project first delves into how measure tactical adaptation, employing a text as data pipeline to classify and numerically compare descriptions of violent events. It then argues develops a theory of membership diversity as an internal driver of tactical adaptation. The theory emphasizes the stochastic elements that underpin membership interactions, arguing that individuals bring with them prior knowledge and experience when joining an organization and that knowledge diversity in an organization positively impacts an organization's adaptive capacity. The argument establishes two distinct mechanisms that focus on the endogeneity inherent to how solution concepts emerge and members learn in an organization. The project directs the analytical focus on \textit{who} is in a violent organization and argues that the answer to this question can shape (a) the ultimate outcome of a civil conflict, (b) how analysts assess the military capabilities of an armed group, (c) other arenas for innovation, such as rebel governance or institution building, and (d) the underlying severity of the conflict. the theoretical framework advanced here atomizes the individual and thinks carefully about the information he or she possesses and how such information can operate contagiously in a closed system. Moreover, the theory generates a framework whereby individual-level interactions and outcomes contribute to larger organization-level outcomes that we observe. The theory reduces the concept of diversity down to its most basic element: information. This allows one to think about the impact of membership diversity more formally and to treat it as another resource that a violent organization has available to it.Item Control, Learning, and Vulnerability: An Interactional Approach to Engagement in Violent Extremism(2017) Becker, Michael Henry; Dugan, Laura; Criminology and Criminal Justice; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In criminological research, scholars present learning and social control theories as competing explanations for criminal behavior. While this has extended to specific offenses and analogous behaviors, it has less frequently been related to ideologically-motivated extremist behavior. This study considers the explanatory power of these two schools of criminological thought as they predict individual participation in violent ideologically motivated extremist behaviors using a recently collected individual-level dataset. A combination of Multivariate Imputation through Chained Equations (MICE), Exploratory Factor Analysis, and logistic regression is used to examine the relationship between theoretical measures and the probability of violent extremist behavior. Ultimately, this thesis finds: (1) having stronger social bonds is associated with a lower probability of violent ideologically motivated behavior, (2) the social learning of violence is associated with a higher probability of violent ideologically motivated behavior, and (3) these relationships depend somewhat upon the ideological milieu of the individual.Item Public Communication as Counter-Terrorism: An Examination of Zero-Sum Counter-Terrorism Assumptions(2017) Fisher, Daren Geoffrey; Dugan, Laura; Criminology and Criminal Justice; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Terrorist groups from around the globe rely on a range of communication tactics to rally support to their political movement, including publicly directed discourse ranging from public talks to online publications. Thus far, the criminological literature has focused primarily on efforts embodied in law and policy to make terrorism harder to commit. Based on the zero-sum assumption that any losses for a terrorist group result in gains for a government, this perspective suggests that terrorism may only be reduced through deterrence or by diminishing the relative capacity of terrorist organizations. In contrast, this dissertation argues that public communications are a relatively inexpensive, readily available, and less oppressive means to potentially reduce terrorism. Seeking to identify the role that government public communications have played in existing counter-terrorism strategies, this dissertation examines US public communications regarding terrorism delivered by US Presidents and their Press Secretaries between 1970 and 2014. Drawing upon the 6,001 transcripts of presidential communications concerning terrorism during this period, a series of structural equation models are employed to estimate the impact of the quantity and sentiment of presidential communications concerning terrorism on subsequent terrorism aimed at US targets. Findings from these models suggest that the frequency of presidential communications regarding terrorism is consistently related to reductions in terrorism targeting the US in the following month. The frequency of terrorism communications is related to decreases in both domestic and international terrorism, but is also related to increases terrorist casualties between 1970 and 2014. After accounting for the sentiment in these models, support primarily emerged that communicating negative sentiment reduces terrorism in line with restrictive deterrence theory. Key differences in the impact of both the frequency and sentiment of terrorism communications between presidential administrations are also identified, suggesting that influences were more prominent for Presidents such as Carter and George W. Bush. Finally evidence that public approval moderates the impact of presidential communications on domestic terrorism is provided, with presidents with approval ratings in the lowest 25% netting the largest decreases in terrorism but greatest increases in terrorist casualties through their communications.Item Strategic vs. Opportunistic Looting: The Relationship Between Antiquities Looting and Armed Conflict in Egypt(2016) Fabiani, Michelle Rose Dippolito; McGloin, Jean; Dugan, Laura; Criminology and Criminal Justice; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Antiquities are looted from archaeological sites across the world, seemingly more often in areas of armed conflict. Previously, the relationship between antiquities looting and armed conflict has been assessed with qualitative case studies and journalistic evidence due to a lack of data. This study considers the relationship between antiquities looting and armed conflict in Egypt from 1997 – 2014 with a newly collected time series dataset. A combination of Lag-augmented Vector Autoregression (LA-VAR) and Autoregressive Distributed Lag Models (ARDL) is used to look at both the overall relationship between these two phenomena and their temporal ordering. Ultimately, this thesis finds that: (1) antiquities looting and armed conflict have a positive statistically significant relationship, (2) there is stronger support for antiquities looting preceding armed conflict than for the reverse temporal ordering, and (3) this relationship varies by type of conflict.Item The Smoking Gun: Toward Understanding the Decision Calculus Behind Repressive Outcomes(2015) Munayyer, Yousef; Telhami, Shibley; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Why do states repress? Why are civil liberties curtailed? Explorations of these questions have departed from the assumption that security concerns motivate decisions that lead to repressive outcomes. If the state is challenged, it will repress. A state, it is assumed, must "strike a balance" between security and liberty. But what if those assumptions are flawed? If the decisions behind politically repressive outcomes are not always motivated by security challenges to the state, then we must ask a different set of questions about what can motivate state behavior and repression. This study examines the validity of these assumptions. A survey of cases of repressive episodes in the United States, using both primary and secondary sources, reveals that the decisions behind enacting repressive measures is not as straightforward as these assumptions would have it seem. A unique case, situated both contextually and historically by the preceding survey, is then explored in depth using data that is rarely available to shed a new degree of light on a decision making process. This data is overwhelming primary source information and includes declassified material from a variety of archives, material obtained from Freedom of Information Act Requests, as well as uniquely revelatory audio evidence that has only recently been made publicly available. After reviewing the case I argue that enough evidence exists to suggest the main assumptions of the repression and civil liberties literature fails to encompass all motivating factors behind repressive outcomes and a deeper understanding of how other factors can lead to repressive outcomes is needed.Item Pirates, Anarchists, and Terrorists: Violence and the Boundaries of Sovereign Authority(2014) Shirk, Mark Alexander; Haufler, Virginia; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study examines how states combat episodes of violence that pose an ontological threat to the state. Sovereignty is a bundle of practices that draw, maintain, and redraw boundaries around political authority, the state is the polity constructed by these boundaries. The boundaries can be physical such as a border between state or conceptual such as that between public and private. These boundaries create the `conceptual maps that state leaders use to make sense of the world. The threat posed by violent action is constructed by narratives. Revisionist narratives of violence, the focus of this study, are illegible to states using current conceptual maps and therefore cannot be defeated while they remain. States are forced to redraw the boundaries of sovereign authority in the course of combating these threats, resulting in a transformed state. In my three cases - golden age piracy in the 18th century, anarchist `propagandists of the deed' at the turn of the 20th, and al Qaeda - I demonstrate that the state develops creative solutions to concrete crises. For instance, golden age pirates exploited a surfeit of ungoverned land and open markets in the early 18th century Atlantic to attack trade forcing colonial states to bring their Atlantic colonies into the domestic sphere and shift the sea into an open space. Similarly, the rise of the labor movement and the development fingerprint databases and the universal passport system were, in part, responses to the threat of anarchists propounding "propaganda of the deed" at the turn of the 20th century. Finally, counterterror innovations devised to combat al Qaeda, such as targeted killing and bulk data collection, have transformed borders from sites of exclusion designed to keep out undesirables to sites of collection where they are tracked and controlled. Each case demonstrates how states re-inscribe themselves by redrawing conceptual boundaries, such as between in order to make sense of an episode of revisionist and respond effectively.Item The Impact Of Natural Disasters On Kurdish Terrorism In Turkey 1987-2011: The Importance Of Adequate Government Responses To Natural Disasters(2014) Fisher, Daren Geoffrey; Dugan, Laura J; Criminology and Criminal Justice; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Natural disasters and terrorism present major challenges in their aftermath to a state and its populace, and help to define the identity of nations (Flynn, 2008). Destructive in their own right, previous research has argued that natural disasters also provide the catalyst for acts of terrorism (Berrebi and Ostwald, 2011), complicating the role that state actions hold in response to a natural disaster. Responses to natural disasters by a state however vary (Perry and Lindell, 2003), and this thesis posits that the response to a natural disaster presents a unique situation for a state, through perceived adequacy of its response, to alter the rational incentives for a group to engage in subsequent terrorism. Using Turkey between 1987 and 2011 as a case study, these data suggest that the perceived adequacy of a response to a natural disaster is inversely associated with ethno-nationalist terrorism within Turkey in the following month.Item Robotics and the Future of International Asymmetric Warfare(2013) Grossman, Nicholas; Quester, George; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the post-Cold War world, the world's most powerful states have cooperated or avoided conflict with each other, easily defeated smaller state governments, engaged in protracted conflicts against insurgencies and resistance networks, and lost civilians to terrorist attacks. This dissertation explores various explanations for this pattern, proposing that some non-state networks adapt to major international transitions more quickly than bureaucratic states. Networks have taken advantage of the information technology revolution to enhance their capabilities, but states have begun to adjust, producing robotic systems with the potential to grant them an advantage in asymmetric warfare.Item THE UTILITY OF DETERRENCE-BASED SANCTIONS IN THE PREVENTION OF VIOLENCE AGAINST ABORTION PROVIDERS: TESTING A BLENDED MODEL OF DETERRENCE AND BACKLASH(2012) Bartholomew, Brad; LaFree, Gary; Criminology and Criminal Justice; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The American abortion debate has existed since the early 19th century; however, the previous four decades have born witness to fundamental changes within the abortion opposition movement. Beginning in the 1970s, activists started to focus more of their attention on abortion providers. Soon thereafter, the traditionally peaceful protest activities of the activist movement began to share space with acts of harassment, arson, bombings, assaults, and even assassination. Today, abortion provider-related crime has become an unwelcome staple within the broader pro-life movement. In an attempt to prevent future attacks, state and federal legislatures have enacted a series of protection laws designed to raise the penalties associated with crimes against abortion providers. Despite the recent proliferation of these laws, their impact on abortion provider-related crime has seldom been the subject of rigorous empirical research. In this dissertation, I aim to address this shortcoming by using zero-inflated negative binomial regression modeling to present the first longitudinal test of the relationship between protection laws and abortion provider-related crime using incident-level data from 1975 to 2008, collected during a year-long research project at The National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START). The results of this study offer considerable support for the backlash hypothesis and the notion that traditional deterrence-based policy is often demonstrably unsuccessful in the prevention of this particular type of crime. Additionally, the findings suggest that not all protection laws are created equal with respect to their impact on crime. While state laws prohibiting minor forms of anti-abortion crime are shown to produce a backlash effect for crimes of harassment and vandalism, other types of state protection laws were shown to have no effect on crime whatsoever. Furthermore, the presence of the highly visible FACE Act is shown to generate similar increases for both major and minor crime types.