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Kinetic Action and Radicalization: A Case Study of Pakistan

  • George Mason University

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

2 Scopus citations

Abstract

Drone strikes have been ongoing and there is a debate about their benefits. One major question is what is their role with respect to radicalization. This paper presents a data-driven approach to explore the relationship between drone strikes in Pakistan and subsequent responses, often in the form of terrorist attacks carried out by those in the communities targeted by these counterterrorism measures. Our analysis of news reports which discussed drone strikes and radicalization suggests that government-sanctioned drone strikes in Pakistan appear to drive terrorist events with a distributed lag that can be determined analytically. We then utilize these news reports to inform and calibrate an agent-based model which is grounded in radicalization and opinion dynamics theory. In doing so, we were able to simulate terrorist attacks that approximated the rate and magnitude observed in Pakistan from 2007 through 2018. We argue that this research effort advances the field of radicalization and lays the foundation for further work in the area of data-driven modeling and kinetic actions.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationSocial, Cultural, and Behavioral Modeling - 14th International Conference, SBP-BRiMS 2021, Proceedings
EditorsRobert Thomson, Muhammad Nihal Hussain, Christopher Dancy, Aryn Pyke
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
Pages321-330
Number of pages10
ISBN (Print)9783030803865
DOIs
StatePublished - 2021
Event14th International Conference on Social, Cultural, and Behavioral Modeling, SBP-BRiMS 2021 - Virtual, Online
Duration: Jul 6 2021Jul 9 2021

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume12720 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference14th International Conference on Social, Cultural, and Behavioral Modeling, SBP-BRiMS 2021
CityVirtual, Online
Period07/6/2107/9/21

Keywords

  • Agent-based modelling
  • Data-driven modeling
  • Drone strikes
  • Pakistan
  • Radicalization
  • Terrorism

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