Martha Crenshaw, a senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), has been awarded $500,000 by the National Science Foundation to identify patterns in the evolution of terrorist organizations and to analyze their comparative development.

The three-year grant is part of the Department of Defense's Minerva Initiative launched in 2008, which focuses on "supporting research related to basic social and behavioral science of strategic importance to U.S. national security policy."

Crenshaw's interdisciplinary project, "Mapping Terrorist Organizations," will analyze terrorist groups and trace their relationships over time. It will be the first worldwide, comprehensive study of its kind-extending back to the Russian revolutionary movement up to Al Qaeda today.

"We want to understand how groups affiliate with Al Qaeda and analyze their relationships," Crenshaw said. "Evolutionary mapping can enhance our understanding of how terrorist groups develop and interact with each other and with the government, how strategies of violence and non-violence are related, why groups persist or disappear, and how opportunities and constraints in the environment change organizational behavior over time."

According to Crenshaw, it is critical to understand the organization and evolution of terrorism in multiple contexts. "To craft effective counter-terrorism strategies, governments need to know not only what type of adversary they are confronting but its stage of organizational development and relationship to other groups," Crenshaw wrote in the project summary. "The timing of a government policy initiative may be as important as its substance."

"Mapping Terrorist Organizations" will incorporate research in economics, sociology, business, biology, political science and history. It will include existing research to build a new database using original language sources rather than secondary analyses. The goal is to produce an online database and series of interactive maps that will generate new observations and research questions, Crenshaw said.

The results, for example, could reveal the structure of violent and non-violent opposition groups within the same movements or conflicts, and identify patterns that explain how these groups evolve over time. Such findings could be used to analyze the development of Al Qaeda and its Islamist or jihadist affiliates, including the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, she said.

The findings may also shed light on what happens when a group splits due to leadership quarrels or when a government is overturned, Crenshaw said. "Analysis that links levels of terrorist violence to changes in organizational structures and explains the complex relationships among actors in protracted conflicts will break new ground," the summary noted.

Extensive information on terrorist groups already exists, but it has been difficult to compile and analyze. Despite such obstacles, Crenshaw said, violent organizations can be understood in the same terms as other political or economic groups. "Terrorist groups are not anomalous or unique," she wrote. "In fact, they can be compared to transnational activist networks."

Crenshaw should know. Widely respected as a pioneer in terrorism studies, the political scientist was one of a handful of scholars who followed the subject decades before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. She joined CISAC in 2007, following a long career at Wesleyan University, where she was the Colin and Nancy Campbell Professor of Global Issues and Democratic Thought. In addition to her research at Stanford, Crenshaw is a lead investigator at START, the Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and the Response to Terrorism at the University of Maryland.

End goal

Crenshaw wants to use the findings to better analyze how threats to U.S. security evolve over time. "Terrorist attacks on the United States and its allies abroad often appear to come without warning, but they are the result of a long process of organizational development," she wrote. "Terrorist organizations do not operate in isolation from a wider social environment. Without understanding processes of development and interaction, governments may miss signals along the way and be vulnerable to surprise attack. They may also respond ineffectively because they cannot anticipate the consequences of their actions." The project seeks to find patterns in the evolution of terrorism and to explain their causes and consequences. This, in turn, should contribute to developing more effective counter-terrorism policy, Crenshaw said.

Conflicts to be mapped

• Russian revolutionary organizations, 1860s-1914.
• Anarchist groups in Europe and the United States, 1880s-1914. (Note: although the anarchist movement is typically regarded as completely unstructured, there was more organization than an initial survey might suppose, and the transnational dispersion of the movement is frequently cited as a precedent for Al Qaeda.)
  
• Ireland and Northern Ireland, 1860s-present.
  
• Algeria, 1945-1962 and 1992-present
  
• Palestinian resistance groups, 1967-present.
  
• Colombia, 1960s-present.
  
• El Salvador, 1970s-1990s
  
• Argentina, 1960s-1980s
  
• Chile, 1973-1990
  
• Peru, 1970-1990s
  
• Brazil, 1967-1971
  
• Sri Lanka, 1980s-present
  
• India (Punjab), 1980-present
  
• Philippines, 1960s-present
  
• Indonesia, 1998-present
  
• Italy, 1970s-1990s
  
• Germany, 1970s-1990s
  
• France/Belgium, 1980-1990s
  
• Kashmir, 1988-present
  
• Pakistan, 1980-present
  
• United States, 1960s-present (especially far right movement)
  
• Spain, 1960s-present
  
• Egypt, 1950s-present
  
• Turkey, 1960s-present
  
• Lebanon, 1975-present
  
• Al Qaeda, 1987-present

'Survival' editor's note:

In the June-July 2009 issue of the journal 'Survival,' Scott D. Sagan argued the current case for the United States to adopt a declaratory policy of nuclear no first use. 'Survival' invited four experts from Europe, Asia and North America to comment on Sagan's argument. The author concludes the debate with his own final thoughts.

Note from editor of Survival:

In the June-July 2009 issue of Survival, Professor Scott D. Sagan argued the current case for the United States to adopt a declaratory policy of nuclear no first use. Survival invited four experts from Europe, Asia and North America (listed below) to comment on Sagan's argument, with a final conclusion from the author:

Morton H. Halperin worked on nuclear issues in the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Clinton administrations in the Department of Defense, the National Security Council and the State Department. He is a member of the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States and senior advisor to the Open Society Institute. He has written numerous books and articles on nuclear policy.

Bruno Tertrais is a senior research fellow at the Paris-based Foundation for Strategic Research and a contributing editor to Survival. He is the author of War Without End (New York: The New Press, 2005).

Keith B. Payne is president and co-founder of the National Institute for Public Policy, head of the Graduate Department of Defense and Strategic Studies of Missouri State University, Washington, D.C. campus, a member of the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Review of the United States, Policy Panel chairman of the U.S. Strategic Command's Senior Advisory Group, and a member of the Department of State's International Security Advisory Board.

K. Subrahmanyam is an Indian strategic analyst and journalist. He served as the director of the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses and has held a number of other government positions, including chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee.

Scott D. Sagan is professor of political science at Stanford University and co-director of Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation.

Joseph C. Martz, a nuclear materials scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), has been named the inaugural William J. Perry Fellow in International Security at Stanford University.

Stanford established the fellowship in 2007 to celebrate the 80th birthday of William J. Perry, the 19th U.S. Secretary of Defense from 1994 to 1997 and co-director of Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) from 1988 to 1993. Perry, the Michael and Barbara Berberian professor, and CISAC Co-Director Siegfried S. Hecker currently lead the center's Preventive Defense Project, which seeks to forestall dangerous security developments before they require drastic military intervention.

In a statement announcing Martz's selection as the first Perry Fellow, Hecker said CISAC supports scholarship on nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation, particularly at the intersection of science and policy-making. "Your background in understanding the configuration, manufacturing, design and certification of nuclear systems [that] support deterrence and the accompanying weapons complex is of timely relevance to the evolving policies in these areas," Hecker wrote. "Of particular interest is your evaluation of the elements of agility and confidence of the weapons complex and nuclear stockpile that will facilitate further reductions in nuclear weapons, and what effect these may have on international arms control initiatives."

The new Perry Fellowship honors an early or mid-career researcher from the United States or abroad with a record of "outstanding work in natural science, engineering or mathematics...who is dedicated to solving international security problems." Martz, 44, will spend a year at CISAC conducting research on how the United States might be able to reduce the size of its nuclear arsenal by configuring the nation's weapons stockpile more securely and strategically.

"I am honored to serve as the first Perry Fellow, in particular to salute Dr. Perry's extraordinary career and dedication to making the world a safer place," Martz said.

The scientist said his work dovetails with Perry's efforts to reduce and eliminate nuclear weapons around the globe. Perry, alongside former secretaries of state George Shultz and Henry Kissinger, former U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn and Stanford physicist Sidney Drell have joined together to promote this far-reaching objective, which President Barack Obama and the U.N. Security Council endorsed in a unanimous vote last month. "Dr. Perry's focus is a world with fewer weapons," Martz said. "My goal is to find a roadmap to that world."

At LANL, Martz led projects related to nuclear weapons design and maintenance, plutonium storage and disposal, stockpile life extension and plutonium aging, nuclear operations and nuclear systems analysis. He also directed New Mexico's team in the 2005-2007 nationwide Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) design competition sponsored by the federal government.

Martz said he was first drawn to nuclear issues during his senior year of high school. He grew up in Los Alamos -- his father worked at the lab. In 1983, Martz and a group of science-minded students were invited to join a gathering marking the lab's 40th anniversary. For three days, renowned scientists from the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb, returned to Los Alamos. Martz said one of them, Nobel-winning physicist Hans Bethe, told the students about his generation's atomic legacy and that it was up to Martz's generation to find a way out of what he characterized as the nuclear trap.

Today, Martz is interested in what he calls "capability-based deterrence." As he explained in the March 2008 issue of Currents, LANL's employee magazine: "If we are extremely competent and demonstrate the capability to reconstitute nuclear weapons -- convincing both allies and adversaries that the capability is assured and agile -- that capability in and of itself becomes a component of deterrence. It's a compelling idea. Our security rests not so much on the products of our work, but on our work itself." Martz, who has worked at LANL for 26 years, plans to pursue and refine this argument at CISAC and produce a manuscript during his year in residence. Martz holds a doctorate in chemical engineering from the University of California-Berkeley.

William J. Perry and the Perry Fellowship
Perry earned bachelor's and master's degrees in mathematics from Stanford in 1949 and 1950, and a doctorate from Pennsylvania State University. He went on to found the Silicon Valley electronics company ESL, build a venture capital company and pursue a distinguished career in public service. At the heart of Perry's work is a commitment to bring the rigors of science to international security issues. The William J. Perry Fellow in International Security at Stanford University will pursue this commitment.