Abstract
This paper describes analyses to determine whether there is a space-time dependency for insurgent activity. The data used for the research were 3 months of terrorist incidents attributed to the insurgency in Iraq during U.S. occupation and the methods used are based on a body of work well established using police recorded crime data. It was found that events clustered in space and time more than would be expected if the events were unrelated, suggesting communication of risk in space and time and potentially informing next event prediction. The analysis represents a first but important step and suggestions for further analysis addressing prevention or suppression of future incidents are briefly discussed.
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Notes
Interestingly, much of the empirical work on terrorist attacks supports a rational actor thesis but implicitly suggests that displacement of attacks is inevitable. Clarke and Newman (2006, Chapter 4) argue that displacement is far from certain and the data sources used in such studies are not suited to shedding light on this issue.
Although recently the success rate of attacks has roughly halved.
These data come from the Total Number of Insurgents Detained or Killed and Number of Daily Attacks by Insurgents graphs and the Estimated Strength of Insurgency Nationwide table in O'Hanlon and Kamp (2006). The respective footnotes indicate that, unsurprisingly, these data are imprecise to some degree, although we think that they reflect the general perception that the Iraqi insurgency appears resilient to considerable personnel depletion (10 per cent per month) without a corresponding drop in activity.
A minor note is that this is a time period in the U.S. occupation of Iraq after U.S. President George Bush declared “major combat operations in Iraq have ended”.
The idea is that the observed data is just one realisation of the process. Randomly shuffling dates among events allows other realisations to be created. A total of 999 realisations were created to form an expected distribution. The observed distribution is added to make a sample size of 1,000.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Jeff Reichman and Aiden Sidebottom for comments on an earlier draft of this paper, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments. This research was supported by a British Academy International Collaborative Network grant, and additional funding from UCL Futures, NSCR and the Research Incentive Fund at Temple University.
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Townsley, M., Johnson, S. & Ratcliffe, J. Space Time Dynamics of Insurgent Activity in Iraq. Secur J 21, 139–146 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.sj.8350090
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.sj.8350090