Perspectives on Terrorism and Responses to It

September 2013 No Comments

Looking Back, Looking Forward: Perspectives on Terrorism and Responses to It.

Author | Editor: Cabayan, H. (Joint Staff), Sitterle, V. & Yandura, M. (Georgia Tech).

This white paper is a follow-on report to a recent publication entitled “Over a Decade Later…What Now? What Next? A Multi-Layer Assessment of Terrorism in its Current and Future Manifestation.” 2 The previous paper was primarily an analytical product intended to provide insight into what current social science research and over a decade of practical experience suggest regarding the most effective counterterror strategies. It was based on comments made during multiple, semi-structured telephone interview sessions conducted between 06 May and 12 June 2013. The current white paper includes a series of articles by authors who participated in the previous white paper. These articles expand on the main themes raised in the previous report and cover topics ranging from strategic and adaptive considerations of terrorism to analytical considerations.

The various contributors to this volume advance insights that are summarized below:

There is a body of research relating the strategic application of systems thinking, complexity theory, and complex adaptive systems theory to strategic planning in business and a variety of organizational constructs. These have implications in the deliberate planning of regional and global strategies and, critically, to our current counterterrorism strategy.
We frequently seek clarity by way of attributing political or particular ideological reasons and affiliations behind terror acts when such attribution is really viewing the present and future through the lens of the past. Looking forward, real resilience requires having a narrative of our own that projects a purpose beyond responding to adversity. Furthermore, we will continue to be perplexed by the enemy in our counterterrorism strategy as long as we are unclear as to our own purpose and direction.
The convergence of rapidly advancing scientific sectors (biotech, nanotech, energy, materials, etc.) combined with the availability of CBCT (Cyber-Based Communication Technology) could produce an entirely new generation of threat capabilities. The evolving socio-technical ecosystem is transforming temporal and spatial characteristics from individual to trans-State behaviors, simultaneously creating new paradigms for emergence and support of terror activities on a global scale.
As terrorism adapts to the market place, we need to move from “terrorist” towards an understanding of market entry and risk mitigation. The “cost” of terror and of counterterror activities is an increasingly important perspective. Turning the lens on ourselves, we need to ask what it will take to compete, to grow, and to expand our own market share, and re-establish our national identity as a global consumer brand of choice.
There is a need for much better psychosocial intelligence on foreign public opinion regarding key issues. Open-source intelligence can be used to provide such intelligence for counterterrorism. Findings from on-going efforts highlight the importance of testing theories and hypotheses about the bases of terrorism and political violence with statistical data on people’s attitudes, beliefs, sentiments, and other characteristics.
Thematic Content Analysis (TCA) of activist, militant, and terrorist groups has demonstrated the usefulness of such analyses to assess groups’ acceptance of, and proneness to, violence. An approach based on this concept and using measures of integrative cognitive complexity has been operationalized and proven successful for primary prevention. Efforts are underway for deploying this capability on the Internet.
Lone-actor terrorists have been relatively rare thus far. They may, however, exhibit personality and social traits that would support a useful profile, unlike group-based terrorists who vary in a myriad of ways. Recent research suggests two possible profiles of lone-actor terrorists: the disconnected-disordered and caring-compelled profiles.
Similarly, there is presently no empirically based psychological or demographic profile of individuals that perpetrate terrorist acts indicating a predisposition toward joining violent extremist organizations. Based on what limited empirical evidence is available, however, a set of individual psychological risk factors for individual radicalization may be proposed. While more study is needed before these may be established as firm indicators, these individual-level attributes may provide a starting point toward profiling individual willingness to participate in or perpetrate political violence.
There are a myriad of theories and frameworks to explain why and how individuals may radicalize to violence, and many shortcomings remain that limit the validity and generalizability of the findings. Advances in qualitative methodologies offer a framework for improving the understanding of the complexity inherent in the phenomena of radicalization and non- radicalization. Improved understanding of the multiple potential pathways into radicalism and terrorism should lead to better-tailored CVE (countering violent extremism) policies that are more effective and efficient.
There is a need to build teams—Joint and Interagency (and community) partners—to understand the information that comes from complex environments in order to organize counterterror practices in ways that inform and influence the behavior of friends and adversaries.

Brief Topic Overviews

Rethinking Counterterrorism: The Need for Systemic Strategic Planning and a Strategic Campaign to Address Violent Islamist Extremism that Manifests Itself in Terrorist Acts–CAPT Wayne Porter (NPS): There is a body of research related to strategic planning in an uncertain and dynamic environment. This research includes, among other topics, analyses of the strategic planning and thinking process, organizations and strategic change, multi-national corporation strategic planning in times of turbulence and uncertainty, backcasting for strategic planning of sustainable development, cognitive biases on strategic planning, and sensemaking in the boundaries of stability and instability, order and chaos. Further research is needed, though, in analyzing the potential benefit of employing methods of system thinking and complexity in the deliberate planning of regional and global strategies. Critically, this applies to our current counterterrorism strategy and the phenomenon of ideologically based violent extremism. While this paper focuses primarily on radical Islamist extremism, the concepts discussed apply equally to any ideologically based extremist network seeking to employ terrorism.

War on Terror or a Search for Meaning?—Dr. Bill Durodié, Professor & Program Head, Conflict Analysis & Management Programs, School of Humanitarian Studies, Royal Roads University: The events of 9/11 necessitated a response. What shape that took was determined by the meaning attributed to those events, in its turn influenced by the mood of the times. Unfortunately, these latter elements reflected the sense of confusion that gripped the West in the aftermath of the Cold War. This paper argues that we will continue to be perplexed by the enemy in the war on terror so long as we are unclear as to our own purpose and direction. Indeed, the perpetrators of such acts today appear more influenced by Western dystopianism than Eastern mysticism. Real resilience requires having a narrative of our own that projects a purpose beyond responding to adversity.

Technology, Society, and the Adaptive Nature of Terrorism: Implications for Counterterror–Dr. Valerie Sitterle (Georgia Tech), Dr. Rodrigo Nieto-Gomez (NPS), Maj David Blair (Harvard University): As technology continues to advance and increasingly permeate society, generating violence that makes a societal group feel vulnerable is not difficult. Generating the desired interpretation of that violence is hard, however, and is critical to the coupling we need between future U.S. counterterrorism (CT) and information operations (IO) strategy. This latter space, with all of its socio-technical nuances, is where threats we classify as “terrorists” have excelled. This paper will begin by explaining the nature and importance of socio-technical complexity and its relevance to terroristic adaptation. A true socio- technical confluence perspective, distinct from the traditional view that treats the dimensions as distinct elements that happen to coexist, promotes awareness of active and passive influences that exist bi- directionally between the social and technological elements. The cyber realm then becomes both a means through which terroristic attacks are conducted or directly targeted and an ecosystem. In this latter view, individual and community (up to state and even trans-state) patterns of organization are transformed via completely new paradigms across temporal and spatial scales of communication and information sharing across societal sectors. This has significant ramifications for emergence of terror cells, their coordination, and passive support of their activities in a global scale. Behavior of terror cells in this complex environment may be more intuitively understood from an entrepreneurial business model analogy, which naturally expands into a consideration of the multiple dimensions associated with both conducting terror and striving to build protective measures against it. Since adaptation is a hallmark of living systems, the U.S. cannot stifle innovative advances by a terroristic adversary through reliance on a static U.S. counterterror strategy. Rather, the U.S. must lead disruptive innovation in order to drive strategic surprise and strain the capacity of these threat groups to adapt.

Market Economies and the Collision of Narratives…Approaching Terrorism Through Branding and Marketing Methodologies–Mr. Scott Kesterson, Asymmetric Warfare Group: Terrorism has become a global franchised business, and, in terms of brands, al-Qa’ida (AQ) is king. Their brand has come to guarantee global positioning, brand name recognition, easy recruiting, as well as abundant financial resourcing. With the loss of Osama bin Laden, however, al-Qa’ida’s brand supremacy is now vulnerable to new tiers of competition; their brand that could have been characterized by adaptability, innovation, and persistence has suffered a loss of consumer confidence. As terrorism adapts to the market place, our conversations need to move from “terrorist” towards an understanding of market entry, branding, and risk mitigation. What are the market factors that create brand durability for terrorism? What are the value propositions that these markets are responding to? What are the market elements that allow for growth and the ability to franchise? Turning the lens on ourselves, we then need to ask what it will take to compete, to grow, and to expand our own market share and re-establish our national identity as a global consumer brand of choice.

Counterterrorism and Muslim Public Opinion–Dr. David R. Mandel (DRDC Toronto): A widely shared view is that counterterrorism must address the psychosocial and cultural aspects of Islamic violent extremism if it is to succeed strategically. Another is that we need much better psychosocial intelligence (what might be called PSYINT) on Muslim public opinion regarding key issues. In this paper, the author draws on open source polling data collected from large numbers of Muslim citizens in multiple predominantly Muslim states, as well as in Israel and the Palestinian territories, over multiple post-9/11 years in order to assess the current counterterrorism climate and anticipate its future. Original analysis of polling data from the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project was conducted for the 2011 calendar year. The analytic exercise illustrates how open source intelligence (OSINT) can be used to provide PSYINT for counterterrorism. The findings, many of which were counterintuitive, highlight the importance of testing theories and hypotheses about the bases of terrorism and political violence with statistical data on people’s attitudes, beliefs, sentiments, and other characteristics. The exercise also underscores how much work could be done with the available data. The present report merely illustrates some types of analyses that could be conducted in the service of improving defense and security through behavioral science.

Can Thematic Content Analysis Separate the Pyramid of Ideas from the Pyramid of Action? A Comparison Among Different Degrees of Commitment to Violence–Dr. Peter Suedfeld, Mr. Ryan W. Cross, and Mr. Carson Logan (The University of British Columbia): The publicly accessible messages of 15 extremist groups were coded by Thematic Content Analysis (TCA). Orientations toward violence included activist, militant, and terrorist groups; their goals derived from animal rights, Islamist, territorial, or white supremacist ideologies. TCA is a set of scientifically rigorous methods for converting running text into quantitative data, analyzable by standard statistics. A measure of cognitive integrative complexity (IC) showed significant declines across groups as they increased in their acceptance of violence, higher power imagery for terrorist compared to the other groups, and high importance among terrorists on the values of self-direction (autonomy), character (virtue, sincerity, honor), and benevolence (caring for those close to oneself). The results demonstrate the usefulness of IC coding to assess groups’ acceptance of, and proneness to, violence.

Prevention of Violent Extremism Based on Promoting Value Complexity, Informed by Neuroscience and Deployed on the Internet–Drs. Sara Savage and Jose Liht (University of Cambridge, UK): Researchers in counterterrorism are in a knowledge arms race that seeks to utilize the internet as a site for engaging with extremism and to harness neuroscience to inform counterterrorism strategies that can be deployed on-line. An approach to broad-based primary prevention that operationalizes Dr. Peter Suedfeld’s construct of integrative complexity (IC), developed by Savage & Liht at the University of Cambridge, leverages value complexity as a means to increase the complexity of thinking about issues of potential cleavage between Muslim and British/western identities. The IC model shows significant empirical results (using integrative complexity and values coding) across three different cultural groups exposed to AQ-related extremism, intra-religious and inter-religious conflicts, respectively. The IC approach is suitable for deploying on the Internet. Integrative complexity has two aspects: differentiation and integration. Differentiation regarding issues exploited by extremists will be supported through a range of balanced, even-handed film clips of influential Muslim viewpoints linked with vetted websites covering viewpoints such as: a) Caliphate, b) Conservative/Salafi, c) Muslim Engaged with the West, and d) Hardline/extremist views. This approach relativizes extremist opinion without provoking reactance. Graphic and video game learning activities will help users to ‘ladder down’ to the values that underlie the different viewpoints so that participants learn to find trade-offs between values in conflict and larger integrative frameworks, thus leveraging the complexity with which they think about issues that radicalisers exploit. This develops pro-social conflict skills and neutralizes the mobilizing impact of extremist opinion. The paper concludes with a research design to neuro-image the impact of the IC approach when operationalised on-line. This neuroscience research will augment the significant cognitive and social psychological data already supporting the IC approach. A project to develop an on-line version of the IC model Being Muslim Being British is planned in the UK.

Lone-actor Terrorists: Two Possible Profiles–Drs. Clark McCauley and Sophia Moskalenko (Bryn Mawr College): Research has shown that group-based terrorists vary in many ways; there is no useful profile of group-based terrorists. Lone-actor terrorists are relatively rare but may have personality and social characteristics that would support a useful profile. This paper will review recent research to suggest two possible profiles of lone-actor terrorists: the disconnected-disordered profile and the caring-compelled profile.

Psychological Risk Factors of Terrorism–Maj. Jason Spitaletta (Johns Hopkins University): Counterterrorism is not necessarily about combating a phenomenon or its’ tactical manifestation, rather it is countering those who perpetrate the associated acts. There is no empirically based psychological or demographic profile of such a person that would indicate a predisposition toward joining violent extremist organizations. There are, however, environmental, social, and individual characteristics whose presence may increase the likelihood of participating in an act of terrorism. What follows are a proposed set of individual psychological risk factors for individual radicalization. The behaviors or attributes described merely point to a possible increase in the willingness to participate in or actual perpetration of political violence. While derived from the limited available empirical evidence, additional research is still required to validate these risk factors and ultimately establish them as indicators and warnings of terrorist behavior.

Leveraging Advances in Qualitative Methodology to Analyze Radicalization: Dr. Peter S. Henne, Mr. Jonathan Kennedy, Dr. John P. Sawyer, and Mr. Gary A. Ackerman (DHS/START Consortium/University of Maryland): The dearth of scholarly work on radicalization at the turn of the century has been replaced with a plethora of frameworks and theories to explain why and how individuals radicalize to extremist violence. This dizzying menu of explanations often makes it difficult for scholars and policymakers to assess how the many hypothesized causes across various levels of analysis interact with each other to produce a wide range of radicalization outcomes. Worse yet, the inferential power, and thus the policy applicability, of these studies are severely limited by the failure to identify and study the proper population of “negative cases.” Fortunately, there have been a number of qualitative methodological advances that can be used to bring greater structure to our understanding of radicalization. Specifically, this paper explores how the use of typological theories, two-level concepts, qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) and the possibility principle can serve as the starting point for integrating extant knowledge about radicalization and serve as a conceptual “first-step” to organize theories and evidence in preparation for a quantitative study.

Mechanics of the Toolbox: CVE Practice and Inform & Influence Activities–Mr. Mubin Shaikh (University of Liverpool, Tactical Decision-making Research Group): Public and practitioner discourse on countering violent extremism (CVE) speaks of “countering ideology” without providing the specific mechanics of how such a process would work. This article demonstrates how that is best achieved in a manner that respects the various mandates in which both the state and “other” cultural constructs interact with one another. As one definition of Inform and Influence Activities (IIA) has it, the Commander is to build teams—Joint and Interagency (and community) partners—to understand the information that comes from complex environments in order to influence the behavior of friends and adversaries.

Contributing Authors

Mr. Gary Ackerman (DHS/START Consortium, University of Maryland); Brig Gen David Béen (Deputy Director for Global Operations, J39); Maj David Blair (Harvard University); Mr. Ryan Cross (University of British Columbia); Dr. Bill Durodié (Royal Roads University); LTG Mike Flynn (Director, Defense Intelligence Agency); Dr. Peter Henne (DHS/START Consortium, University of Maryland); Mr. Jonathan Kennedy (DHS/START Consortium, University of Maryland); Mr. Scott Kesterson (Asymmetric Warfare Group); Dr. Jose Liht (University of Cambridge, UK); Mr. Carson Logan (University of British Columbia); Dr. David Mandel (DRDC Toronto); Dr. Clark McCauley (Bryn Mawr College); Dr. Sophia Moskalenko (Bryn Mawr College); Dr. Rodrigo Nieto-Gomez (Naval Postgraduate School); CAPT Wayne Porter (Naval Postgraduate School); Dr. Sara Savage (ICthinking® Research Group); Dr. John Sawyer (DHS/START Consortium, University of Maryland); Mr. Mubin Shaikh (University of Liverpool); Dr. Valerie Sitterle (Georgia Tech); Maj. Jason Spitaletta (Johns Hopkins University); Dr. Peter Suedfeld (University of British Columbia)