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ID:
170196
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| Summary/Abstract |
Why would an insurgent group turn away foreign fighters who volunteered to fight for its cause? To explain variation in foreign fighter usage, I present a novel perspective on what foreign fighters offer to militant groups. Because foreign fighters possess a different set of preferences from local fighters, integrated teams of foreign and local fighters can self-manage and mitigate the agency problems that are ubiquitous to insurgent groups. However, to create self-managing teams, insurgent leadership must oversee the teams’ formation. When counterinsurgency pressure prevents this oversight, foreign fighters are less useful and the leadership may exclude them. This theory explains variation in foreign fighter use and agency problems within al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI; 2004 to 2010) and the Haqqani Network (2001–2018). Analysis of the targeting of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, AQI’s former leader, further supports the theory, suggesting that leadership targeting inhibited oversight and aggravated agency problems within the group.
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| 2 |
ID:
094734
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| Publication |
2010.
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| Summary/Abstract |
The authors analyze the optimal network structure of two types of terrorist organizations. In the centralized network, the leadership selects the level of individual effort and the level of group connectivity so as to maximize the expected net welfare of the organization's membership. Leaders in loosely connected networks will also seek to balance the trade-off between security and communications. However, with decentralized decision making, the individual nodes may not make optimal decisions from the group's perspective. As a consequence, the decentralized decision-making process is suboptimal from the overall perspective of the network. In particular, the leadership in a centralized network is able to coordinate the activities of all network members and to take advantage of important network externalities.
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| 3 |
ID:
077067
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| Publication |
2007.
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| Summary/Abstract |
After the events of 9/11, U.S. counterterrorism became more proactive in that the Patriot Act allowed the authorities far more freedom to directly attack terrorist network structures. We argue that rational terrorists will attempt to thwart such policies and restructure themselves to be less penetrable. We model the trade-off between security and intragroup communication faced by terrorists. The model is used to derive the anticipated changes in network structure and the consequent changes in the type, complexity, and success rate of potential terrorist attacks.
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