Counter-terrorism efforts against jihadist groups have been challenging for law enforcement and the military because terrorist organizations constantly update their tactics mimic successful strategies of popular influential groups, such as ISIS, that developed a specific model carrying out destructive acts. ISIS created its terrorism in 2014 has used it to control territory, spread ideology, cr...

A methodology for converting terrorist networks from undirected graphs to simplified directed graphs (or digraphs), and mapping the flow of influence in them, is described. It is based on an “influence assumption”—that important personswithmore links influence less important persons with fewer links. This methodology, which was previously used to analyze the structure of influence relationships...

This article explores psychological factors involved in terrorism and counterterrorism on individual, group, and organizational levels of analysis. On the individual level, we describe attempts to understand terrorist behavior as a form of psychopathology and/or as reflecting a unique constellation of personality traits. We also consider whether there exists a general motivational basis for par...

Why do terrorist groups endure? This question is relevant to scholars and policy makers alike. In the past, this issue has not been addressed in a systematic fashion. Recent work investigates this question using data on transnational groups and finds that factors associated with the home country can influence the group’s endurance. Applying the theory of outbidding to terrorist group survival, ...

ustralian governments of both political persuasions have been embroiled in controversies over military cooperation with Indonesia since bilateral defence relations first began to gather steam under the Keating Labor government in the early 1990s. Prime Minister Paul Keating and Foreign Minister Gareth Evans were enthusiastic proponents of building strong ties with Indonesia, a policy which was ...

The terrorist attacks of 9/11, and subsequent terrorist acts around the world, have alerted social psychologists to the need to examine the antecedents and consequences of terrorist threat perception. In these two studies, we examined the predictive power of demographic factors (age, gender, location), individual values and normative influences on threat perception and the consequences of this ...

A consistent trade-off facing participants in any criminal network is that between organizing for efficiency or security—participants collectively pursue an objective while keeping the action leading to that goal concealed. Which side of the trade-off is prioritized depends on the objective that is pursued by the criminal group. The distinction is most salient when comparing terrorist with crim...

Unfortunately, terrorist attacks became very frequent recently. Terrorism is an unacceptable form of expression of fight and protest, since in the result mainly die and suffer absolutely innocent population. The number of the countries, where terrorist attacks have had place in the last decade, is very large. Unfortunately, Georgia is among them (terrorist attacks on gas and oil pipelines, ther...

The possibility of a terrorist attack using nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons is an ongoing debate in the national security policy arena. While terrorist motivations have traditionally been political ones that would not benefit from such an attack, concern is now voiced over a possible trend of inflicting greater numbers of casualties. Terrorists most likely to attempt attacks with weapo...