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Center for Nonlinear Studies |
Much of the research on terrorism and other forms of political violence, perhaps due to a strong prior on rational-actor theories, assumes that the incidence and severity of violence is both highly context-dependent and highly strategic. It is thus commonly assumed that no fundamental laws exist, and that very little can be predicted about the dynamics of terrorism. For some aspects of terrorism, however, these assumptions turn out to be false. In particular, for the frequency and severity of deadly attacks, there exist strongly regular patterns, some of which may admit simple mechanistic explanations. In this talk, I'll summarize some of my recent work on two such patterns: (i) a universal acceleration in the frequency of attacks as a terrorist group gains experience and grows in size, and (ii) an independence in the severity of those attacks from the total experience or size of the group. As time allows, I may speculate about evidence for social regulation of the severity of terrorist attacks and the likelihood of principled forecasting.
Host: Alexander Gutfraind