Terrorist organizations have long threatened the security, infrastructure, and citizens of nations and communities throughout the world. Since the early 1970s, RAND has explored the structure and activities of terrorist organizations—most recently al Qaeda and its offshoots—to understand their motivations, their recruitment and training methods, and why some are more successful than others.
Research conducted by:
RAND National Security Research Division;
RAND Project AIR FORCE
Journal Articles (15)
Understanding how terrorist groups innovate and adapt is key for anticipating future shifts in terrorist threats.
Counterinsurgents are more successful in campaigns in which they decapitate the insurgent leadership than in those in which they do not, regardless of the group's aims or ideology.
The relationship between leadership decapitation and campaign success holds across different types of insurgencies.
This article reviews and synthesizes social science knowledge on the connections between popular support and terrorist/insurgent sustainment.
The authors examine the threat of subversion after the end of the Cold War.
This article investigates the determinants of armed group organization and the downstream effects of organization on civil wars.
Details various models al-Qaida may be using to attract new members.
Offers a perspective on significant trends in terrorism over the past fourdecades.
Addresses the important issue of the ideological differences between theUnited States and al-Qaida and the necessity to win the war of ideas.
Appropriately describing the properties and defining the boundaries of terrorist groups is frequently challenging.
Despite claims that the traditionally tolerant Muslim populations of Kenya and Tanzania are being radicalized, evidence suggests that Islamist radicals have in fact made little headway.
Since 9/11, the FBI has undertaken an ambitious program to build the bureaus capacity to prevent future terrorist attacks on the American homeland.
The Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) has become one of the main centres of extremist Islamic activity in South Asia.
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