Emerging Trends in Social Network Analysis of Terrorism and Counterterrorism

A key issue in tracking transnational terror trends is the utility of social network analysis, both as a theoretical perspective and as a methodological toolkit, for understanding and assessing terror organizations, and for developing counterterror policies and practices to detect and disrupt terror attacks. Foundational efforts were case studies of particular groups or operations, culling data from newspaper reports and court trial documents, then creating matrix files for analysis with social network computer programs. Mathematicians, game theorists, and computer scientists are dramatically expanding research beyond foundational case studies of terrorist networks. Much of their work centers on devising strategies for counterterror organizations to destabilize clandestine organizations. They develop elegant and precise mathematical models and computer algorithms, then systematically change parameters to assess capabilities of detecting and disrupting terrorist activities under varying conditions. Key issues for future network research include: conducting rigorous comparative analyses of four historical waves of modern terrorism for clues about the present and future waves; building more comprehensive, cohesive, and integrated theoretical models capable of explaining the formation, structure, and consequences of terrorist networks; developing new methods of measuring network relations among terrorists; performing more laboratory experiments as an alternative to collecting inaccessible and dangerous field observation data; and creating large, high-quality relational datasets to test social network theories of terrorism. Keywords: social network analysis; transnational terrorism; counterterror organization; cell structure; matrix; graph theory; computational methods; agent-based modeling