The Physics of Terror
http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture/the-physics-of-terror-25955/#
We just celebrated the ten year anniversary of 9/11, an event that brought fear and uncertainty to the American nation. But what if we had known it was going to happen? What would be different if we could predict terrorist attacks? Is it even possible? Aaron Clauset, now a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, studies patterns in terrorism that may one day lead to predicting long-term threats. Clauset disregards aspects like historical grievances and violent ideologies and instead focuses entirely on outcomes – committed violence. So how does the nature of terrorist groups help Clauset to understand the patterns associated with terrorism?
Clauset makes these claims from his research. The size of terrorist groups is important. Bigger groups attack faster though most groups start small and gain membership as they attack more and gain notoriety. Severity of attacks is the same for large and small groups. Terrorists target high-density areas – bombs are attracted to people so they go where people go (e.g. trains, airplanes). Clauset also explains that “religious groups accelerate their attacks faster than secular groups …[because they] grow faster than secular groups, and this may be because of that pool of people that are sympathetic to the rationale.” There is also a fundamental constraint in which terrorist groups, like any other social group, will face and that is manpower. These groups are made of highly motivated people who want to inflict terror. Therefore, these groups must increase because if a member leaves a small group, it is detrimental to the organization.
So what does this have to do with networks? We can see that the ways in which terrorist groups behave are related to what we have been studying in class. Groups acquire more members as they attack more and gain notoriety forming many triadic closures. These groups also want more members to strengthen themselves. As a religious group, there are strong connections between members, thus drawing more members (satisfying the strong triadic closure property). The 9/11 attacks can also be viewed as a network. Since terrorists want to attack high-density targets, they targeted connected nodes of people (the twin towers of the World Trade Center and airplanes). All four airplanes departed from the east coast with two from Boston. With these observations and more, Clauset continues to research on these patterns of terrorist and perhaps one day can eliminate or prepare for another terrorist attack.