The National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), a Department of Homeland Security Center of Excellence housed at the University of Maryland, offers a course looking at the who, what and how of Terrorism Studies, by introducing students to cutting-edge research from the social and behavioral sciences and the experts investigating these topics. The course will begin with a unit looking at widely held myths about terrorism and utilizing empirical data to discuss the realities of broad trends and patterns in terrorist attacks over time. The course will then review the psychological factors at play in individual radicalization and recruitment into terrorism, followed by an analysis of terrorist group dynamics. The course will next look at terrorist group operations, including their attacks and some of the supporting behaviors that allow them to carry out attacks, including use of media, financing, recruitment, and training. The course will conclude by looking at the factors that drive terrorist group persistence or endurance versus terrorist group desistance, and will bring the varied course concepts together through a detailed look at the case of Al-Qa’ida. Throughout the course, students will have the opportunity to study and work with the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database (GTD), the largest database of terrorist incidents in the world, learning its capabilities and developing basic skills in searching and displaying terrorism data.
2.D: Gary Lafree (University of Maryland), "PIRUS"
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En provenance du cours de University of Maryland, College Park
Understanding Terrorism and the Terrorist Threat
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Module 2: Individual Radicalization
Rencontrer les enseignants
Dr. Gary LaFreeDirector
National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism
Bill BraniffExecutive Director
National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism
Kate IzsakEducation Director
National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Reponses to Terrorism
Joyce Rasing
Hello.
In this lesson, I want to introduce you to a database called the profiles of
individual radicalization in the United States or PIRUS for short.
Many of the data collection projects that you've heard about through the START
consortium have focused on terrorism incidents.
For example, you may be familiar with the Global Terrorism Database,
which deals with events, terrorist events, over time.
We have other databases that look at terrorist groups, like the Big, Allied and
Dangerous database maintained by Victor Asal at SUNY Albany.
PIRUS is different than these other databases because instead of focusing
events or on terrorist groups.
It actually focuses on individuals who've either been arrested for
committing some kind of terrorist attack or
perhaps killed in the process of engaged in a terrorist event of some type.
So, we wanted to gather the PIRUS data for four main reasons and
I've got a slide that summarizes these That you can take a look at.
First there have been relatively few large scale
quantitative studies of terrorist in the United States.
In fact it's only been recently that any researchers have started to collect
individual data for terrorism in the United States.
So we though collecting pirates would fill an important need
that other researchers have not yet really fully responded to.
Secondly there have been very few theoretically Informed studies of why
people become terrorists or wh they engage in terrorist violence in the United States
and so our hope in this research was to start coming up with
theories of terrorism in the same way that criminologists have been coming up with
theories of why people engage In more ordinary types of crime.
And third, there have been few comparisons of
different pathways to radicalization in the United States.
So we are pretty sure that there are lots of different ways that people radicalize.
But there hasn't been a lot of empirical research.
Actually tracing these pathways or comparing them.
And finally they've been relatively few studies that use both quantitative and
qualitative data.
So with the PIRUS data we've collected about 1650 individual case
records of individuals so this would include almost 150 variables.
Things like their age and their gender, whether they have any
history of psychological problems, criminal record, and so on.
But in addition to that we've also been collecting more qualitative case studies.
And we have something like 110 of these case studies now.
So these go into much more of a narrative about the individual And
their past experiences.
So we found, this is also a unique aspect of this data that we have both
quantitative and qualitative options.
And I should mention that this project was originally a collaboration between myself,
Dr. John Sawyer, and Dr. Gary Ackerman.
Who wrote the original grant to the National Institute of Justice to
help collect the PIRUS data.
So let's turn to the next slide now which shows the key questions that we hope
to address with this database.
We are especially interested in whether we can find differences between
individuals that have engaged in terrorism but have been violent versus individuals
who have engaged in terrorism and have been non-violent.
For example, your only connection to a terrorist group may not be
committing some act of violence.
It might be you're an Accountant for the group, or a driver for the group, or
a cook for the group.
And quite a few of the cases in our database involve individuals who've
been engaged in.
Supporting a terrorist organization even though they haven't committed violence.
A second thing we hope to do with this project is to
explain better what the relationship is between beliefs and behaviors.
I think when people first started being very interested in radicalization,
the concept of radicalization There was a kind of an assumption that beliefs and
attitudes go together and it kind of locks that fashion that as we get more and
more radical in our beliefs, we naturally get more and
more radical in terms of our behaviors.
But we're seeing kind of these two sides of the same coin.
But as soon as we started doing research in this area,
we found lots of examples where it looked a lot more complicated than this.
If you do interviews, for example,
with people who have engaged in terrorism in the past like x people from IRA or
at the ETA, you quickly find that some of them have very radical
attitudes even though they may not be engaged in terrorism at the moment.
So it's not always the case that people with radical attitudes act on them.
And we also find some examples of the reverse,
where individuals do not seem to have a very detailed.
Attitudinal explanation of why they're engaged in terrorism.
And yet they're engaged in it.
They might have a relatively loose attitudinal affiliation
with terrorist organizations.
And yet in some ways that are pretty alarming they may still be
interested engaging in terrorism.
So we were interested in getting more information about this
linkage between radical beliefs and radical attitudes.
And radical behavior in this project.
A third contribution and type of question we hope to address with this research
is whether we see big differences across ideological forms of terrorism.
We're concentrating really on three main groups in the current project.
Individuals that are involved in various kinds of left-wing terrorist causes.
Those engaged in various types of right wing causes, and
those engaged in various kind of Islamist terrorist related causes.
So we're interested in trying to decide whether there are big differences across
these categories in terms of the kinds of things going on,
the kinds of behaviors going on, and so on.
And finally, fourth question we hope to answer in this research Is to figure out
which theories of terrorism are most promising in terms of understanding it.
Which theories best explain whether an individual is willing,
in fact, to engage in violent extremism and violent behavior.
So in the next slide, I'm going to show the total number of cases that
are classified as Islamists, far right and far left, by year, in the database.
So, this is the total number of PIRUS cases by ideology.
If you take a look at this slide,
the first thing you're going to see if you look at the sort of big picture,
is that the total number of cases in the database Are increasing over time.
That we have a lot more cases in the recent years than we have for
the 1960s, 70s, and 80s.
That there is a pretty steady increase in time.
These results suggest an increasing amount of domestic US radicalization over time.
But I hasten to add that this interpretation is quite tricky.
Because these data are based on open sources and
the open sources were collected quite recently.
It's no doubt the case that part of the reason why you see this upswing
does not have to do with the amount of radicalization you're seeing but
with our ability to capture that radicalization.
Through open source data.
So, my strong hunch is part of the reason you get this upswing, is that we're
better able to find information on cases that happen more recently.
Nonetheless, it does look like a bit of an increase in domestic
radicalization over time.
If you look further at the cases by their ideology you can see that the late 1960s
and the early 1970s were dominated by actions by the far left.
So this would include famous groups like the Weather Underground, some of
the Puerto Rican separatist groups, some of the black nationalist groups, and so
on, which tended to be very active in the 60s, 70s and are much less active today.
In the 1980s, on the other hand, you see a spike among activities from the far right.
And even more so in the 1990s.
Especially after about 1993, and it's during this period you get a lot
off far right activity such as those made famous by the attack on Ruby Ridge.
If you don't remember this attack,
Ruby Ridge was the site of a deadly confrontation and later a siege.
It took place in northern Idaho in 1992 It involved Randy Weaver, his family,
his friend Kevin Harris and agents of the US Marshal's Service and also the FBI.
During the siege Randy's wife Vicky was eventually killed as was her son,
as was a US Marshal.
This incident received a lot of media attention.
There was a kind of public outcry of a Ruby Ridge.
And this outcry was even heightened subsequently during the siege and
wake of Texas which involved many of the same Federal agencies.
This ended up being a huge boost for the Malaysia movement in the United States and
it was sort of part of this huge surge in Far Right activity during this period.
Now if we turn next to Islamist ideologies, we can see for
the most part they come into the scene after 9/11 but it's important to note that
after the 9/11 activity for the far right appear to stay pretty active as well.
So if you sure look at the big picture you got a lot.
Activity from the far left in the 60s and
70s, the rise of the far right in the 80s, the rise of Islamist groups after
9/11 with a continued activity at fairly high levels for the far right.
So the PIRUS data in its current state allows us to start comparing
the characteristics of individuals Who come from different ideologies.
And the next slide will provide a quick overview of some of the things we're
learning about differences between these different ideological groups.
You'll see first, if we look at the Islamist groups,
you tend to find cliques more often with Islamist groups.
That is, small groups of individuals who get together on a regular basis.
This actually epitomizes the groups that worked during the 9/11 attacks,
for example.
Islamic groups not surprisingly are more likely to involve non-US citizens.
They're frequently likely to involve converts.
Quite a number of the Islamists attacks in the United States Involved individuals who
have converted to Islam, they weren't born into a family that was practicing Islam,
but they later converted.
They're also more likely to have been recruited by supporters.
Recruitment seems to be a very important, seems to be more important for
Islamist individuals than it does for the other two groups that we're comparing.
We also find less competition between the various Islamist groups than we do for
the other categories that we're looking.
If we move to the far left, we see that they're more likely to
report a change in performance prior to radicalization.
What do we mean by this?
Well for example, you get a poor evaluation at work or you get failing
grades in school, but there's often what seems to be a kind of triggering event for
the far left that is associated with their individual radicalization.
Also, not surprisingly, the far left are more likely to be students and
this makes sense because a lot of the activities particularly in 1960s and
1970s took place on college campuses.
We move now to the far right,
we also see some differences in this ideological category.
They tend to have the longest period of radicalization.
Sometimes, they've been involved in the kind of far right movement for
a long period of time.
They also tend to be more competitive with other groups.
The far right is distinctive in the sense that they also compete with other far
right groups, much more than either Islamists or far left groups do.
We are able to data to now start looking at some of the variables
that actually are associated with radical ideologies, and
allow us to perhaps distinguish between these radical ideologies.
And I've got some of these listed on the bottom of this slide as well.
We're finding, in fact, that there aren't many psychological differences across
these ideological groups which is kind of interesting because in some of the other
work we're doing we do find psychological differences,
but this does not seem to distinguish ideologies.
We also find no particular group is more likely to produce loners,
that is individuals who operate on their own as opposed to a group,
which is also I think interesting in terms of policy.
We might have thought loners would be more common in one of these groups.
We also aren't finding big differences in terms of social standing.
These groups are not certainly universally drawn from either poor, middle class,
or upper class groups.
They tend to be pretty broadly drawn.
And we also are not finding big differences in terms of prison
experiences, which I think will surprise some.
There it seemed to be pretty equal in terms of prison experiences.
We can also use the data to examine differences between different categories
of terrorism.
One of the categories that we've been especially interested in
is whether the individual acts as part of a group or
does the individual tend to act as a loner, tend to act on their own?
Sometimes researchers refer to the latter category as lone wolves.
So, in terms of the next slide,
it will show some ways we can compare lone wolves to the groups.
The basic analysis here would ask essentially what makes it more likely for
radicals to act alone?
As supposed to were acting as part of the group.
And how do lone actors [COUGH] Excuse me, differ from group actors.
The analysis presented in this part is based on about 1100 cases,
taken from the pirate’s database.
Now once we distinguished lone wolfs from individuals that act as part of a group.
We can ask a question,
what variables best determine whether you're a lone actor or a group actor?
And we provide some indication of variables
that make a difference in terms of this prediction in the next slide.
These are predictors of acting alone And one of the most interesting findings
we have here is that having a problem with psychological factors in the past.
Having some record of mental problems or even a mental illness,
which generally does not seem to be a big predictor of terrorism in general.
Does seem to be a predictor of being a lone actor.
Can see that a much greater proportion of lone
actors have some sort of psychological problems compared to group actors.
It also appears, and obviously this is not surprising, that lone actors are different
from those that work in groups in a couple of other ways.
They are also less likely to be able to maintain strong relationships
which obviously makes good sense, that's why they're lone actors.
And perhaps a good part of the reason why they work alone.
We also find that lone actors are more likely than
group actors to have a record of previous criminal activity.
And this is a bit different than much of the research on terrorism in the past too,
where we find group actors frequently do not have extensive criminal records,
may not have any criminal record at all.
So again, a bit of a departure from past research.
We also find that lone actors are less likely to be part of a radical network.
Again this makes sense this is part of the reason they're loners.
This includes they're less likely than others to
have a person that defines themselves as radical, a friend a radical family member.
A radical significant other.
They tend to be operating much more on their own.
And finally lone actors are somewhat more likely to have have some type of
crisis associated with what psychologists call a quest for significance.
Now in one of the next sessions, Dr is going to talk in much
greater detail about this phenomenal quest for significance.
But we can see here that it shows up as a distinguishing
characteristic of lone wolves versus group actors.
So it could be this person has had some kind of failed aspiration, could be abuse
as a child, abuse as an adult, could be being kicked out of the home by parents,
could be some type of trauma and so forth.
So you'll be hearing more about this in the future.
We can also use PIRUS data to map the total number of lone and group actors
over time and then to start thinking about which kinds of variables distinguish them.
In the next slide, we look at the total number of group actors and lone actors in
PIRUS for a long period of time, all the way back to the end of World War II.
First, we see a gentle increase in individuals engaged in terrorism over
time, and we've seen that in the previous slides as well.
So, in general we also see that group actors are more common than lone actors.
But note that compared to the number of group actors the number of
lone actors is increasing over time.
So much so, that in one recent year,
in 2010 I believe, we actually had more lone actors than group actors.
Now this is very important because it suggests that
this phenomena is going to be growing over time.
But it also is important because lone actors tend to be
deadlier than group actors.
In some other work we've been doing we've found that
lone actors have as much as four times, or are responsible as many as four times,
more casualties than individuals operating in groups.
And in general what the chart shows is that most of the activity from lone actors
happens after 9 11, rapidly increasing after 9 11.
We can now turn to some of the differences between lone actors and
group actors in a statistical sense.
If you look at the next slide,
we highlight some of the key differences between lone actors and group actors.
And we've highlighted here all those that are statistically significant differences.
So again, compared to group actors, lone actors are much more likely
to have psychological issues which we've talked about a little bit earlier.
Interestingly they are also more likely to have radicalized,
at least part, on the Internet.
So, this concern that as the Internet becomes more and
more important in our lives you might get a larger number of lone actors,
seems to be supported by this preliminary information from the PIRUS data.
From individuals who've radicalized in the United States.
We also see they're more likely to have committed violent acts in the past
than group actors.
And they're also more likely to have had a criminal record.
Interestingly, also, lone actors are more likely to
have had some kind of military experience compared to group actors.
Lone actors are also more likely to report what we could
call a conversion experience.
A kind of a-ha moment where they radicalize very rapidly, but
something really sets them off in a very direct way.
Group actors tend to be more gradual in terms of the radicalization experience.
So it essentially tells us that when we compare lone actors and group actors,
that the transition for lone actors may be more abrupt than it is for group actors.
Now we can also compare lone and group actors across ideologies.
And I provide an example of this in the next slide.
As we saw before, the phenomena of lone actors appears to be much more important
in recent years than in the past.
There were few cases in the 1970s and 1980s.
We see a big swing in cases after 9 11.
Relatively few lone wolves from the far left, however,
substantial numbers of Islamists and far-right lone actors.
In fact, for the most recent years after 2009, we find more lone actors
from the far-right than from either the far-left or from Islamist groups.
Okay, I'd just like to conclude this session by pointing out a few important
challenges and weaknesses with open-source data, such as PIRUS.
And by open-source, I mean unclassified data.
What are the challenges, what are the weaknesses of this kind of approach?
Well first off, there's lots of missing data.
For the 150 variables we're trying to record,
sometimes we're missing a lot of cases.
Getting information from online accounts, from court cases and
from records is complicated.
And it's fundamentally different than interviewing respondents.
If you think about it, when you interview a respondent, you'll ask them to answer,
for example, whether they have a criminal record, they can say yes or no.
And it's only missing if they refuse to give you any answer.
That's the only truly missing category.
But when we rely on open-sources on records and do not find information for
something like a criminal record, we often cannot be sure if there really
was no information, or there really was no criminal record, or whether we simply
weren't able to get the appropriate information from the available data.
So, this makes it very difficult for
you to tell whether our particular variable is truly missing or
it just was something that wasn't reported in the information you have available.
We also have greater sensitivity in releasing data
when it comes from open-sources than from some other databases.
In fact, in our own work at the Start Center,
we've sometimes had to take out names, of even convicted terrorists,
from our public databases because of privacy issues.
And these issues are multiplied greatly when you want to compare serious offenders
with individuals who have no criminal record.
You might wonder what the control group is in PIRUS, and the control group is
essentially people who have not engaged in violent activity but
is still engaged in some terrorist related activity.
It's much more sensitive for researchers to actually try to gather data
on individuals who've not engaged in any criminal activity.
So, everyone in PIRUS is the same in the sense they've all committed a crime.
And what this means is what we're really controlling for
is, or what we're really comparing, is not radicalized individuals who have not.
We're comparing individuals who've committed violent acts to individuals
who've been convicted of committing something less than violence.
Now we use a similar system to collect information for
many of our other databases.
You'll hear quite a bit about the Global Terrorism Database in these lectures for
examples.
But I think in some ways it may be easier to collect information from open-sources
on events, or even on groups, than it is on individuals.
Because getting detailed information on as many as 150 variables for
individuals is sometimes just not possible in open-sources.
Now we've just received additional funding for
the National Institute of Justice to be working more on this PIRUS database.
For example, we hope to be able to add data to the PIRUS data-set
to look specifically at foreign fighters, that is, individuals who've been going to
Syria and Iraq and other places to fight for terrorist organizations like ISIS.
We also are doing a project that's going to be looking at how individuals who've
radicalized in the United States compared to gang members in the United States.
So we'll be using the PIRUS data in the future in a variety of new, and hopefully,
creative and useful ways for policy makers.
In general, our hope is that the PIRUS data will be increasingly
useful as a source for understanding how and why people turn to terrorism.
Thanks very much for your intention in this module.
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