Measures of Effectiveness in Counter-terrorism. A Quantitative Approach: DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.18847/1.3.5
- Terrorism,
- Counter-terrorism,
- Measures of success,
- Metrics,
- Terrorist attacks
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Abstract
Fighting against a terrorist group is, frequently, a time-consuming process. During this process, all the actors involved need to know if they are making significant progress in the struggle. It is very important to have reliable indicators for measuring success or failure, in order to maintain the commitment of all stakeholders, as well as to evaluate the success of policies and anti-terrorist measures implemented and to allocate correctly the limited resources available.
This paper aims to determine if the quantitative analysis of the attacks conducted by one group over operational life could provide some valid indicators to determine if the group is in a development phase or in a declining one. The thesis states that a terrorist group in a declining phase has lower operational capacity, and this would affect different parameters such as the number of attacks conducted, the geographical scope of the attacks, the effectiveness of its members and the complexity, discrimination and lethality of the attacks. A change in the parameters recorded during the development phase could be an indicator of the proximity of the end of the terrorist group or, at least, of its violent activity.