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I get that you can get upvotes just for the (gwern.net), but come on, this is one of his worst. >There is a commonly-believed “strategic model” of terrorism wh

by tedks 11y ago

I get that you can get upvotes just for the (gwern.net), but come on, this is one of his worst. >There is a commonly-believed “strategic model” of terrorism which we could describe as follows: terrorists are people who are ideologically motivated to pursue specific unvarying political goals; to do so, they join together in long-lasting organizations and after the failure of ordinary political tactics, rationally decide to efficiently & competently engage in violent attacks on (usually) civilian targets to get as much attention as possible and publicity for their movement, and inspire fear & terror in the civilian population, which will pressure its leaders to solve the problem one way or another, providing support for the terrorists’ favored laws and/or their negotiations with involved governments, which then often succeed in gaining many of the original goals, and the organization dissolves. {{who}}? Come on. Not even a single source on this. It's easy to burn your enemies if they're straw men.

readymade 11y ago
I agree, it's rather appalling scholarship and it’s disappointing that this is being taken seriously here. A novice writes a paper with no citations, an amateur writes one with practically nothing but them. Any one of the academic articles he links to would shed more light on the topic, on its own, than this essay does in its entirety. The observation that terrorism is somewhat socially driven is interesting but should be backed by a deeper frame of reference, and one that the authors of those papers surely understood: the larger goals of an organization like Al Qaeda don’t align at all with traditional political demands. The long term strategy involves attacking the US to draw them into open war with a muslim country, spreading the conflict to neighboring regions, mobilizing local resistance to the invaders (as in Afghanistan) and drawing the west into a war of attrition. In this sense they’ve been startlingly successful, and a focus on social capital and “branding”, as opposed to concrete demands of existing governments, is actually quite strategic. Whatever commonality this has with the IRA, the FARC, or even Hezbollah and Hamas is superficial at best.

by tedks 11y ago

readymade 11y ago

I agree, it's rather appalling scholarship and it’s disappointing that this is being taken seriously here. A novice writes a paper with no citations, an amateur writes one with practically nothing but them. Any one of the academic articles he links to would shed more light on the topic, on its own, than this essay does in its entirety. The observation that terrorism is somewhat socially driven is interesting but should be backed by a deeper frame of reference, and one that the authors of those papers surely understood: the larger goals of an organization like Al Qaeda don’t align at all with traditional political demands. The long term strategy involves attacking the US to draw them into open war with a muslim country, spreading the conflict to neighboring regions, mobilizing local resistance to the invaders (as in Afghanistan) and drawing the west into a war of attrition. In this sense they’ve been startlingly successful, and a focus on social capital and “branding”, as opposed to concrete demands of existing governments, is actually quite strategic. Whatever commonality this has with the IRA, the FARC, or even Hezbollah and Hamas is superficial at best.