Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador

Wood, Elisabeth Jean

doi:10.1017/cbo9780511808685

Cited by 985 publications

(513 citation statements)

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“…An average terrorist group has a life expectancy of less than a year, so groups wishing to extend their lifespan must replace members lost through arrests, deaths, and defections [3]. Several studies have tried to understand why some people join violent rebellions [8][9][10][11][12], while others only sympathize or cooperate in a non-violent capacity [13][14][15][16]. This article facilitates such understanding by providing methods that identify examples of active recruitment activity within a population of individuals who may passively sympathize with violent groups.…”

Section: Offline Recruitment and Manual Social Network Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Automatic detection of cyber-recruitment by violent extremists

Scanlon

Gerber

2014

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Growing use of the Internet as a major means of communication has led to the formation of cyber-communities, which have become increasingly appealing to terrorist groups due to the unregulated nature of Internet communication. Online communities enable violent extremists to increase recruitment by allowing them to build personal relationships with a worldwide audience capable of accessing uncensored content. This article presents methods for identifying the recruitment activities of violent groups within extremist social media websites. Specifically, these methods apply known techniques within supervised learning and natural language processing to the untested task of automatically identifying forum posts intended to recruit new violent extremist members. We used data from the western jihadist website Ansar AlJihad Network, which was compiled by the University of Arizona's Dark Web Project. Multiple judges manually annotated a sample of these data, marking 192 randomly sampled posts as recruiting (YES) or non-recruiting (NO). We observed significant agreement between the judges' labels; Cohen's κ = (0.5, 0.9) at p = 0.01. We tested the feasibility of using naive Bayes models, logistic regression, classification trees, boosting, and support vector machines (SVM) to classify the forum posts. Evaluation with receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves shows that our SVM classifier achieves an 89% area under the curve (AUC), a significant improvement over the 63% AUC performance achieved by our simplest naive Bayes model (Tukey's test at p = 0.05). To our knowledge, this is the first result reported on this task, and our analysis indicates that automatic detection of online terrorist recruitment is a feasible task. We also identify a number of important areas of future work including classifying non-English posts and measuring how recruitment posts and current events change membership numbers over time.

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Section: Offline Recruitment and Manual Social Network Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Automatic detection of cyber-recruitment by violent extremists

Scanlon

Gerber

2014

Secur Inform

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“…They studied that victims of violence experience more personal growth than distress (Tedeschi and Calhoun, 2004); greater collective action (Wood, 2003); greater awareness and political participation Miguel, 2006, 2009) as the aftermath of a violent trauma.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Terrorism risk and democratic preferences in Pakistan

Rehman

Vanin

2017

Journal of Development Economics

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Beyond direct damages, terrorism creates fear and insecurity, potentially reducing support for democratic institutions if these are deemed inadequate to tackle the threat, and increasing support for military governments. To investigate this possibility, we use data from Pakistan, a country that experienced an exponential rise in terrorism since 2001. Exploiting individual level data on democratic attitudes and district level information on terrorist attacks, we document that persistent exposure to terrorism (and more broadly to violence) is associated to a significantly lower support for democratic values. Results are robust to the inclusion of different sets of controls, to sample splits based on gender, urbanization and education, and to endogeneity considerations. Instrumenting terrorism and violence by the distance from the Pak-Afghan border and by religious fractionalization suggests that the documented correlation reflects a causal impact. Terrorism thus threatens not only individuals, but also democratic institutions.

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“…(Arjona & Kalyvas, 2008;Humphreys & Weinstein, 2008;Oyefusi, 2008;Blattman & Annan, 2007;Guichaoua, 2007;Kalyvas & Kocher, 2007b;Weinstein, 2007;Viterna, 2006;Wood, 2003). The unit of analysis in these studies is the individual, and data consist mainly of ex-combatants surveys.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Dynamics of Violence in Vietnam: An Analysis of the Hamlet Evaluation System (HES)

Kalyvas

Kocher

2009

Journal of Peace Research

119

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The authors analyze a unique data source to study the determinants of violence against civilians in a civil war context. During the Vietnam War, the United States Department of Defense pioneered the use of quantitative analysis for operational purposes. The centerpiece of that effort was the Hamlet Evaluation System (HES), a monthly and quarterly rating of 'the status of pacification at the hamlet and village level throughout the Republic of Vietnam'. Consistent with existing theoretical claims, the authors find that homicidal violence against civilians was a function of the level of territorial control exercised by the rival sides: Vietnamese insurgents relied on selective violence primarily where they enjoyed predominant, but not full, control; South Vietnamese government and US forces exercised indiscriminate violence primarily in the most rebel-dominated areas. Violence was less common in the most contested areas. The absence of spatial overlap between insurgent selective and incumbent indiscriminate violence, as well as the relative absence of violence from contested areas, demonstrates both the fundamental divergence between irregular and conventional war and the need for cautious use of violent events as indicators of conflict.

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Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador

Cited by 985 publications

References 100 publications

Automatic detection of cyber-recruitment by violent extremists

Automatic detection of cyber-recruitment by violent extremists

Terrorism risk and democratic preferences in Pakistan

The Dynamics of Violence in Vietnam: An Analysis of the Hamlet Evaluation System (HES)

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