AOC: The Ecology of Terrorist Organizations

该项目的目标是促进对恐怖组织作为变革推动者的行为的了解。虽然人们对恐怖组织有着极大的兴趣，特别是自9/11事件以来，但以前从未收集和分析过关于恐怖组织以及沿着选择不使用恐怖主义的类似政治组织的系统性非机密经验数据。该项目通过收集一个重要的新数据集来解决这一知识差距，然后使用社会和行为科学的工具来开发和测试预测哪些政治组织最有可能使用恐怖暴力来追求目标的模型。该项目产生了对政治组织行为的跨学科见解，作为地方，国家和国际政治，社会和经济变量的函数，以及组织特征。它通过分析恐怖组织行为作为更大的社会生态的一部分来实现这一点。该项目涉及来自3所主要研究型大学的超过15名研究人员的合作伙伴关系，代表了一系列学科，所有这些人都对人类行为的动力学有着实质性的兴趣。政治学家，犯罪学家和社会学家合作构建组织行为的综合模型，考虑到组织运作的广泛定义的背景下，建立在现有的社会动员，政治暴力和犯罪团伙行为动力学的理论和概念。此外，我们研究团队的计算机科学家还提供了有关信息提取工具如何最有效地对数据进行分类以确定其是否符合关键条件的见解。计算机科学家和社会科学家合作开发最佳协议，以结合特定于政治活跃组织主题的自动化和非自动化数据收集工作。这些进程的结合使人们能够对恐怖主义的动态进行变革性研究，远远超越目前的理论和方法界限，该项目产生的数据、方法和分析的影响超出了学术界，延伸到政策领域。核心问题？在什么情况下，一个组织会求助于恐怖主义来实现其政治和社会议程？对世界各国政府具有根本的重要性，为这一努力而组建的研究小组完全有能力确保将从这一努力中获得的知识传授给感兴趣的公职人员。该项目的研究基地是美国国土安全部的一个卓越中心-全国恐怖主义和应对恐怖主义研究联合会（START），其任务和机制是确保通过这项研究取得的进展直接传达给政策界。

The goal of this project is to advance understanding of the behavior of terrorist organizations as agents of change. While there has been enormous interest in terrorist organizations, especially since the events of 9/11, systematic unclassified empirical data on terrorist organizations, along with similar political organizations that choose not to use terrorism, has never before been collected and analyzed. This project addresses this knowledge gap by assembling a major new dataset and then uses the tools of the social and behavioral sciences to develop and test models that predict which political organizations are most likely to use terrorist violence to pursue goals.This project generates interdisciplinary insights into the behavior of political organizations as a function of local, national, and international political, social, and economic variables, as well as organizational characteristics. It accomplishes this by analyzing terrorist organization behavior as part of a larger social ecology. The project involves a partnership of more than 15 researchers from 3 major research universities and represents a range of academic disciplines, all of whom share a substantive interest in the dynamics of human behavior. Political scientists, criminologists, and sociologists collaborate to construct integrated models of organizational behavior that take into account the broadly defined context in which an organization operates, building upon existing theories and concepts about social mobilization, political violence, and criminal gang behavioral dynamics. Moreover, computer scientists on our research team provide insights on how information extraction tools can most efficiently classify data to determine if it meets key conditions. Computer scientists and social scientists work together to develop optimal protocols for combining automated and non-automated data-collection efforts specific to the topic of politically active organizations. The combination of these processes allows for transformative research into the dynamics of terrorism, pushing well beyond current theoretical and methodological boundaries.The impact of the data, methods and analyses resulting from this project extends beyond the academic community to the policy realm. The core question?under what conditions does an organization turn to terrorism to pursue its political and social agenda??is of fundamental importance to governments around the world, and the research team assembled for this effort is well positioned to ensure that the knowledge gained from this effort is transferred to interested public officials. The research home for this project is the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), a Center of Excellence of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, with a mandate and the mechanisms to ensure that advances made through this research are communicated directly to the policy community.