The intelligence of fear

Intelligence agencies long have brought unwelcome news to civilian political and military masters – and sometimes suffered severely for it. Even in Western democracies, insecurities and outright fear produce behavioral responses by individuals and defensive institutional reactions that distort normal intelligence activities and affect the overall performance of intelligence agencies. Causes of fear include: political leaders, overseers, agency managers, and the security elements of their organizations. This article highlights the importance of institutional factors, especially organizational cultures and incentives, on the activities and overall performance of intelligence agencies and suggests that motivated biases, caused by personal and organizational self-interest and fears, are more significant causes of intelligence failures than are commonly believed.     

Terrorism Risk, Resilience and Volatility: A Comparison of Terrorism Patterns in Three Southeast Asian Countries

Objective

This article explores patterns of terrorist activity over the period from 2000 through 2010 across three target countries: Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand.

Methods

We use self-exciting point process models to create interpretable and replicable metrics for three key terrorism concepts: risk, resilience and volatility, as defined in the context of terrorist activity.

Results

Analysis of the data shows significant and important differences in the risk, volatility and resilience metrics over time across the three countries. For the three countries analysed, we show that risk varied on a scale from 0.005 to 1.61 “expected terrorist attacks per day”, volatility ranged from 0.820 to 0.994 “additional attacks caused by each attack”, and resilience, as measured by the number of days until risk subsides to a pre-attack level, ranged from 19 to 39 days. We find that of the three countries, Indonesia had the lowest average risk and volatility, and the highest level of resilience, indicative of the relatively sporadic nature of terrorist activity in Indonesia. The high terrorism risk and low resilience in the Philippines was a function of the more intense, less clustered pattern of terrorism than what was evident in Indonesia.

Conclusions

Mathematical models hold great promise for creating replicable, reliable and interpretable “metrics” to key terrorism concepts such as risk, resilience and volatility.     

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN NEW SOCIAL MOVEMENT THEORY AND TERRORISM STUDIES: THE ROLE OF LEADERSHIP,MEMBERSHIP, IDEOLOGY AND GENDER

This article demonstrates the relationship between new social movement theory and terrorism studies. The revolutionary dimension of new social movements can be correlated to terrorist groups. This article also uses new social movement theory to develop a fuller understanding of the leadership, membership, personal ideology and gender within a new social movement; these then can be used to follow the development of a politically violent group. This article uses the example of the American movement and its by-product—the Weather Underground.     

Target Selection Models with Preference Variation Between Offenders

Objectives

This study explores preference variation in location choice strategies of residential burglars. Applying a model of offender target selection that is grounded in assertions of the routine activity approach, rational choice perspective, crime pattern and social disorganization theories, it seeks to address the as yet untested assumption that crime location choice preferences are the same for all offenders.

Methods

Analyzing detected residential burglaries from Brisbane, Australia, we apply a random effects variant of the discrete spatial choice model to estimate preference variation between offenders across six location choice characteristics. Furthermore, in attempting to understand the causes of this variation we estimate how offenders’ spatial target preferences might be affected by where they live and by their age.

Results

Findings of this analysis demonstrate that while in the aggregate the characteristics of location choice are consistent with the findings from previous studies, considerable preference variation is found between offenders.

Conclusions

This research highlights that current understanding of choice outcomes is relatively poor and that existing applications of the discrete spatial choice approach may underestimate preference variation between offenders.

     

Toward a Theory of Non-State Actors' Intelligence

The literature on intelligence contains many laments that scholars of intelligence have not developed widely accepted theories, or even definitions, of intelligence. This paper describes, compares, and modestly theorizes about intelligence-related activities of two variants of non-state actors – violent insurgent/terrorist groups and advocacy NGOs – focusing on their counterintelligence and covert action-like activities. These groups operate in some ways similarly to, and in other ways dramatically different from, states' intelligence services. This comparative analysis extends the scope of intelligence studies and offers suggestions for additional research.