Understanding Terrorist Organizations with a Dynamic Model

Terrorist organizations change over time because of processes such as recruitment and training as well as counter-terrorism (CT) measures, but the effects of these processes are typically studied qualitatively and in separation from each other. Seeking a more quantitative and integrated understanding, we constructed a simple dynamic model where equations describe how these processes change an organization's membership. Analysis of the model yields a number of intuitive as well as novel findings. Most importantly it becomes possible to predict whether counter-terrorism measures would be sufficient to defeat the organization. Furthermore, we can prove in general that an organization would collapse if its strength and its pool of foot soldiers decline simultaneously. In contrast, a simultaneous decline in its strength and its pool of leaders is often insufficient and short-termed. These results and other like them demonstrate the great potential of dynamic models for informing terrorism scholarship and counter-terrorism policy making.Comment: To appear as Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science v2: vectorized 4 figures, fixed two typos, more detailed bibliograph

Exchange of goods or exchange of blows? New directions in conflict and exchange

Although defense and peace economics has expanded its interest toward post-Cold War violence, our theme is that conflict potential weaves itself into the decisions of consumers, producers, and traders in ways that economists have essentially ignored. This is the lesson of our model which combines Ricardian trade with the potential for appropriation under ratio and logistic conflict technology. The model shows that economic activities like production and exchange are fundamentally altered in the presence of conflict potential. The model also implies that arms rivalry and the technology of conflict exist in non-international forms within the production/exchange economy.Conflict, Appropriation, Property rights, Exchange,

EXCHANGE, RAIDING, AND THE SHADOW OF THE FUTURE

A two-period exchange model is developed where production decisions in the first period determine the amount of resources available in the second period. Each agent allocates resources to defend its production and attack the production of the other agent. Production, conflict and exchange occur simultaneously in a dynamic model. This extends earlier exchange models, which are static and preclude defense and appropriation. The agents jointly determine price through their export decisions. Upon introducing exchange endogenously, raiding in the first relative to the second period decreases with growth, appropriation cost, and when the future becomes more important, and increases with defense cost, production cost, and usability of appropriation. Increasing the usability of appropriation and defense cost causes a transition from pure exchange via joint exchange and raiding to pure raiding. This implies that agents gradually substitute from defense to appropriation, they exchange less, and utility decreases. Utility isoquants in a usability of appropriation versus discount factor diagram are concavely increasing for joint exchange and raiding, and can be convexly decreasing for pure raiding. Cobb-Douglas utilities are assumed. The results are confirmed with CES utilities.Production, Exchange, Trade, Appropriation, Defense, Mutual raiding, Dynamics, Growth, Discounting, Predation, Attack,