Project description
A new way to enhance counterterrorism efforts
Terrorist groups continuously adapt to changes, maintaining their relevance and power despite counterterrorism efforts. This adaptive capacity poses a significant challenge to global security, as traditional strategies often struggle to keep pace with evolving tactics and ideologies. In this context, the ERC-funded TERGAP project will develop a nuanced theoretical framework and use quantitative methods. Integrating political psychology, social movement, and terrorism research, the project uses big data analytics and machine learning to identify adaptation patterns. The project views terrorism as a recruitment tool, exploiting psychological needs like vengeance. TERGAP will test short-term strategic changes post-government repression using Event Coincidence Analysis. It will also collect data on counterterrorism policies and actions globally.
Objective
Terrorist groups find ways to adapt to changes in their environment to stay relevant and powerful. This project offers new insights into this phenomenon by developing a more nuanced theoretical strategic framework and using quantitative methods to examine how terrorist groups survive, and sometimes thrive, despite efforts to combat them. This is accomplished by integrating political psychology, social movement, and terrorism research, and applying big data analytics and machine learning common in brain sciences, natural sciences, and bioinformatics to identify adaptation patterns in terrorist attack target selection and brutality.
First, this project frames terrorism as a recruitment tool for manipulating potential supporters’ psychological needs, like vengeance. Repressive government actions lead to desires for vengeance and thus create opportunities for acts of terrorism specifically attacking the repressive actor to signal a terrorist group’s capability for fulfilling this psychological need. As such, we should observe strategic short-term changes in terrorism following government repression in the data. This is tested using Event Coincidence Analysis, a method for identifying synchronization patterns and trigger rates from one event to another.
Second, because terrorist groups can also adapt to changes in counterterrorism, this project proposes two data collection efforts that enable big data analytics to identify adaptation patterns. The first focuses on counterterrorism policies using government reports and covers a global sample of countries. The second creates a novel large-N cross-national counter-terrorist actions dataset using natural language processing machine coding of news articles. Hierarchical clustering analyses will then be used to detect patterns of terrorist group adaptive behaviours and build predictive models that anticipate adaptation. This has implications to improve counterterrorism and make it more proactive, focused, and effective.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
This project's classification has been validated by the project's team.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
This project's classification has been validated by the project's team.
- social sciences political sciences political transitions terrorism
- natural sciences computer and information sciences data science big data
- natural sciences computer and information sciences data science natural language processing
- social sciences political sciences political transitions armed conflicts
- social sciences political sciences political transitions revolutions
Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
MAIN PROGRAMME
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Topic(s)
Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2023-STG
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
2311 EZ Leiden
Netherlands
The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.