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

CISAC is pleased to announce that 14 seniors have been selected to participate in its Undergraduate Honors Program in International Security Studies. 

The program provides an opportunity for eligible students focusing on international security subjects in any field to earn an honors certificate.

Students selected intern with a security-related organization, attend the program's honors college in Washington, D.C. in September, participate in a year-long core seminar on international security research, and produce an honors thesis with policy implications.

• Bertram Ang
  Departments of Economics & Political Science
  Restructuring of the Military Mindset
• Amir Badat
  Program in International Relations
  Nuclear Disarmament and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
• Daniel Cassman
  Departments of Political Science & Computer Science
  The Restart of Ended Civil Wars
• Philippe de Koning
  Program in International Relations
  Minor in Economics
  The Influence of North Korea and China on Japanese Militarization
• Daniel Leifer
  Department of Biology
  Rapid Mobilization of Health Care Workers in Times of Crisis
• Ashley Lohmann
  Program in International Relations
  Tactical Change by Middle Eastern Terrorist Organizations, 1970-2004
• Raffi Mardirosian
  Department of Economics & Public Policy Program
  The Adaptability of Terrorists and Rogue Nations to Financial Methods of Preventing WMD Proliferation and other Breaches of National Security
• Ben Picozzi
  Department of Philosophy
  Minor in Classical Languages
  Norms and International Security with Respect to the Responsibility to Protect
• Amir Ravandoust
  Department of Management Science & Engineering
  Minor in International Relations
  Nuclear Arab States: Is Proliferation Inevitable?
• Sam Stone
  Department of Mathematics & Program in International Relations
  The Use of Energy Exports as a Foreign Policy Tool in the CIS and Eastern Europe
• Gautam Thapar
  Department of Political Science
  Minor in Economics
  U.S. Aid to Pakistan
• Son Ca Vu
  Department of Management Science & Engineering
  Minor in Political Science
  The A.Q. Khan Network: A Rogue Business Model
• Georgia Wells
  Program in Human Biology
  Explaining the Radicalization of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt
• Hao Yan
  Departments of Political Science & Economics
  China's Global Strategy

As fallout from accelerating climate change and the economic meltdown reveals, today's gravest threats are transnational, demanding unprecedented cooperation among competing nations to find lasting solutions. The policies and strategies developed for the balance-of-power rivalries of the 20th century no longer apply in this one, according to the authors of Power & Responsibility, a book launched March 17 at Stanford.

"Transnational threats create security interdependence between the most powerful states and the weaker states," author Stephen J. Stedman said during the panel discussion hosted by the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. "The United States can't defend itself against any threat without sustained international cooperation from others."

Stedman, a faculty member at Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), Bruce Jones of New York University and Carlos Pascual from the Brookings Institution, said their book seeks to promote the concept of "responsible sovereignty" to rebuild international order and strengthen international institutions such as the United Nations. In other words, the authors argue, their notion of sovereignty demands responsibility from states in addition to according privilege. Furthermore, nations should be held responsible for the harmful international effects of their domestic policies-whether it's producing massive amounts of carbon dioxide or failing to secure national borders and financial institutions, thus enabling terrorist groups to attack targets thousands of miles away.

The book's publication follows a policy oriented Plan for Action booklet released last November on the heels of the U.S. presidential election. Timed to coincide with the start of the Obama administration, the 360-page book, published by Brookings Institution Press, highlights seven issues that demand transnational solutions: nuclear proliferation, climate change, bio-security, civil violence and regional conflicts, terrorism and economic security. According to Stedman, the book was received positively during recent launches in Europe, Asia and Washington, D.C. and, earlier this month, the authors presented their findings to senior White House officials.

While U.S. power is in decline, Jones said, it is the only nation with the military, diplomatic, economic and political power needed to take a global lead in tackling transnational threats. The world's rising powers-China, India and Brazil-recognize that the alternative to U.S. leadership is "entropy and chaos," he said, and that every state stands to benefit more from the former as long as it is geared to structured cooperation.

"This is not a love fest of great powers," Jones continued. "There are real interests here and there [would] be tough and sustained negotiations." But the alternatives-maintaining the status quo where global decisions are made by the outmoded G-7 group of industrialized nations, or establishing a "league of democracies" that would exclude critical players such as China-are simply unworkable. "We recognize that our model is tough but we think it's the most likely to have impact on the threats that face us," Jones said.