Project Description The Institute of Security and Global Affairs (ISGA) seeks to appoint a full-time PhD candidate to carry out research activities related to adaptations and evolution in violent non-state actors’ tactical and strategic behaviors and decision-making. The successful candidate will join the Terrorism and Political Violence Research Group at ISGA. This is a 100% research position, but opportunities to develop teaching expertise, gain experience, and potentially obtain a BKO (Basic Teaching Qualification) can be provided in consultation with ISGA and the PhD supervisor. The research should lead you to obtain a PhD within a four-year timeframe.
The PhD candidate’s research is part of the project
Terrorist Group Adaptation & Lessons for Counterterrorism (TERGAP). To understand why terrorism is a persistent problem, we must explore and analyse how terrorist groups adapt their strategic use of violence and group decision-making in response to changes in their environment. For example, when governments install or expand security checkpoints, some groups adapt their violence by recruiting and deploying (more) female suicide bombers because they are less vulnerable to interception at checkpoints. TERGAP builds from this logic of adaptation to theorize and identify systematic changes and patterns in terrorist groups’ strategic violence in response to two changes in their environment: 1. New opportunities to radicalize, recruit, and mobilize aggrieved and vengeful individuals following government repression; 2. New counterterrorism policies, practices and operations.
To study the impact of the first change and identify adaptative mechanisms, TERGAP integrates emerging arguments in political science and international relations that rely on political psychology theories to understand how individuals’ needs influence group-level strategies. To study the impact of changes in counterterrorism, TERGAP identifies empirical models of organizational, organism, and/or other adaptation or adaptive behaviors and applies and tests them using new counterterrorism policy and/or counterterrorism event datasets generated by the project.
Terrorist groups have found ways to adapt to changes in their environment and stay relevant. We need to rethink existing frameworks of terrorism and counterterrorism strategies to improve our understanding of terrorist group adaptation that enables the continued threat.
The project is structured around three key pillars:
- Terrorist Group Behavior:
Reframe how we think about terrorist groups’ motivations for violence to focus on recruitment and building support by developing a theoretical model and testing the expectations using statistical analyses and big data analytics. It is widely accepted in the empirical study of political violence, that terrorist groups are rational and strategic actors, but these groups rarely accomplish their political goals yet continue to use violence. This creates a fundamental puzzle. We accept terrorist groups as strategic, but we do not understand their motivations. One of the basic principles TERGAP explores is that in addition to the political objectives of terrorists, recruiting individuals seeking vengeance or retribution is of central importance to terrorist groups and motivates adaptation in their strategic use of violence. - Measuring Counterterrorism
Build two new cross-national datasets. The first data collection effort is completed using human-coding and focuses on counterterrorism policies and institutional practices. The second data collection effort uses NLP and/or LLMs machine-coding and focuses on identifying and recording counterterrorist actions and events. - Identifying Adaptation Patterns & Behaviors
Improve our understanding of terrorist group adaptation by applying inter/cross-discipli