La guerra contra el terrorismo: ¿están ganando los Estados Unidos?

Este documento evalúa la estrategia estadounidense de lucha contra el terrorismo internacional tal y como ha evolucionado en los últimos cinco años. Centrándose en la dimensión internacional de las acciones estadounidenses, el documento presta una especial atención al alcance y la coherencia interna de los objetivos declarados, así como a la idoneidad de los medios escogidos para librar la guerra contra el terrorismo. Cinco años después de los trágicos atentados de Nueva York y Washington el 11 de septiembre de 2001, ha llegado el momento de evaluar el progreso estadounidense en la lucha contra el terrorismo. Esta evaluación, que se centra fundamentalmente en las dimensiones internacionales de las acciones estadounidenses, sugiere que los objetivos fijados por EEUU para la guerra mundial contra el terrorismo quizá sean demasiado ambiciosos y ambiguos. También parecen estar basados en una caracterización incorrecta del adversario y de la naturaleza de la lucha. Algunos de esos objetivos muestran además una incoherencia interna, en el sentido de que son incompatibles entre ellos. Por otro lado, los medios escogidos para librar la guerra contra el terrorismo quizá no sean adecuados al fin, ni tampoco adecuados entre ellos. Algunos de los modos de proceder quizá no resulten viables, ni siquiera con el enorme poderío económico y militar de EEUU. Además, en las declaraciones oficiales sobre su estrategia, el Gobierno estadounidense ha demostrado que no puede, o no quiere, reconocer los problemas en la conceptualización de la estrategia y su aplicación. Resulta vital tener en cuenta las contradicciones prácticas si se quieren evaluar adecuadamente los progresos entre 2001 y 2006

Countering Far-Right Anti-Government Extremism in the United States

The far-right anti-government extremist movement poses a significant threat in the United States. The January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol illustrates the capacity of this movement to plan and mount violent attacks against government targets and democratic institutions. In this article, we explore how the organisational and tactical characteristics of the far-right anti- government movement in the United States enable it to thrive despite the dangers it poses to the public. We argue that its deep-seated ideological roots, fluid organisational structure, and mix of violent and nonviolent tactics make the movement difficult for federal and state authorities to proscribe, prosecute, and ultimately eliminate. US policymakers need to develop an informed response that accounts for the fluid, decentralised, and public-facing nature of anti- government extremism, as well as the pervasive distrust of federal authority that it reflects. We suggest that this approach will likely differ from the modern counter-terrorism tools that were initially designed to combat terrorist threats emanating from abroad, such as those posed by Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. We ground our arguments in evidence from cases of anti-government extremist groups and followers active in the United States over the past three decades

Transnational Ties Between Selected U.S. and Foreign Violent Extremist Actors: Evidence from the Mapping Militants Project

This report summarizes and assesses open-source evidence about transnational ties between violent extremist groups based in the United States and foreign state and non-state actors. Drawing from the detailed group profiles developed by the Mapping Militants Project, we find that the violent RMVE and AGAAVE universe is characterized by unstructured connections. U.S.-based RMVE and AGAAVE groups do not engage in widespread or systematic cooperation with foreign state and non-state actors. Rather, the connections that do exist across national borders are episodic, informal, fluid, and largely undirected. While we expect that these ties will not result in coordinated mass-casualty attacks in the near term, transnational relationships clearly have the potential to inspire acts of domestic terrorism by amplifying dangerous ideologies and spreading tactics and strategies to commit violence

Going underground: Resort to terrorism in mass mobilization dissident campaigns

© The Author(s) 2018. When and why do groups participating in mass dissent choose to initiate terrorist campaigns? I argue that groups involved in civil wars and mass civil resistance might face similar organizational pressures, which encourage the initiation of terrorism due to higher tactical effectiveness. Internal organizational pressure might depend on leaders’ expectations of a decline in followers’ commitment with protracted use of mass tactics. This is likely to motivate leaders to initiate terrorist campaigns to secure organizational survival. External organizational pressures might depend on increasing dissident campaigns’ fragmentation. This intensifies competition making leaders more likely to initiate terrorism so as to establish themselves at the forefront of their movements. The findings provide empirical support consistent with my claims and indicate no significant difference between civil wars and mass civil resistance movements with regards to these effects. Contrary to the common idea that the use of conventional violence should entail a higher willingness to engage in illegal violence against non-combatants, this finding suggests that conflict dynamics affect the decision to initiate terrorism and that terrorist campaigns have a coherent strategic logic across different types of mass dissent.Economic and Social Research Council (1511095

Genome-wide association study of Tourette Syndrome

Tourette Syndrome (TS) is a developmental disorder that has one of the highest familial recurrence rates among neuropsychiatric diseases with complex inheritance. However, the identification of definitive TS susceptibility genes remains elusive. Here, we report the first genome-wide association study (GWAS) of TS in 1285 cases and 4964 ancestry-matched controls of European ancestry, including two European-derived population isolates, Ashkenazi Jews from North America and Israel, and French Canadians from Quebec, Canada. In a primary meta-analysis of GWAS data from these European ancestry samples, no markers achieved a genome-wide threshold of significance (p<5 × 10−8); the top signal was found in rs7868992 on chromosome 9q32 within COL27A1 (p=1.85 × 10−6). A secondary analysis including an additional 211 cases and 285 controls from two closely-related Latin-American population isolates from the Central Valley of Costa Rica and Antioquia, Colombia also identified rs7868992 as the top signal (p=3.6 × 10−7 for the combined sample of 1496 cases and 5249 controls following imputation with 1000 Genomes data). This study lays the groundwork for the eventual identification of common TS susceptibility variants in larger cohorts and helps to provide a more complete understanding of the full genetic architecture of this disorder

Jihadist Terrorist Plots in the United States

How plots come to fail or to be foiled is of great importance to the study of terrorism and to the development of counterterrorism policy. There can be no comprehensive picture of the threat without analyzing what adversaries planned to do as well as what they actually managed to accomplish. Examining failed and foiled plots is essential to understanding their intentions as well as their capabilities. This specific project, “Comparing Failed, Foiled, Completed and Successful Terrorist Attacks,” examines jihadist plots in the United States (121 plots) and selected allied countries (314 plots) occurring between 1993 and 2017