Investigation of Terrorist Organizations Using Intelligent Tools: A Dynamic Network Analysis with Weighted Links

Abstract

Law enforcement authorities deal with terrorism in two ways: prevention and legal procedures to establish the offence of forming a terrorist organization. Setting up the offence of a terrorist organization requires proof that the members of the organization acquire distinct roles in the organization. Until today, this procedure has been based on unreliable, biased or subjective witness statements, resulting in questionable criminal court proceedings. A quantitative, unbiased methodology based on Network Theory is proposed in order to address three research questions: “How can the presence of distinct roles among the members of a terrorist organization be revealed?”, “Is the presence of distinct roles related to terrorist activity?”and “Are there early signs of imminent terrorist activity?”. These questions are addressed using selected global indices from network theory: density, small worldness, centralization, average centrality and standard deviation of centrality. These indices are computed for four real networks of terrorist organizations from four different countries.