Process Modeling for the Study of Non-State Political Violence

Terrorism studies have and continue to face conceptual and analytic challenges that stem from the assumption that terrorism can be understood outside of its social and political context, as essentially a ‘state’ of being and/or set of personal qualities specific to the terrorist (Sageman, 2004; Taylor & Horgan, 2006). An under-explored alternative to this view is to see involvement in terrorism, at least in psychological terms, as a process rather than a state. One consequence of this is that we shift the focus away from individuals and their presumed psychological or moral qualities to an examination of process variables. These, by their nature, are more susceptible to change and thus form the basis of developing interventions. Interpreting these variables, such as changes in operational context or relationships between temporal events and individuals, requires tools capable of capturing time-sensitive semantic content. To date, there are few process-oriented tools and fewer analyses of terrorism data using these tools. In this paper, we present such a tool and offer an initial application for expanding and formalizing computationally our understanding of terrorism.