A Study On Terrorist Organization From The Perspective Of Social Network Analysis

Social network analysis (SNA), also known as network analysis, structural analysis or interpersonal relationship research, is a methodological form of analysis that is based on mathematical, psychological, anthropological, and sociological applications of interaction and communication.This framework used dots indicates social entities and lines represent their social relations, it aims to connect the dots between entities and"map and measure complex, sometimes covert, human groups and organisations". Social network analysis has been in the rapid development since the 70s last Century, which is widely used in almost all areas of sociology. In the field of national security, SNA began to attract full attention, and become a hot spot after the "9.11" event. The social network analysis technique applied to study terrorist networks, which uses nodes represent terrorists or their attributes factors such as skills, resources, tasks, location etc, and lines indicate some relations between the terrorists and various elements. The social relationship between terrorists and analysis of it is one of the most important. The network analysis method focuses on uncovering the patterning of terrorist's interaction, and correctly interpreting these networks assists"in predicting behaviour and decision-making within the network".There are many of these social relations, such as the genetic relationship between terrorists, ethnic relations, sectarian relations, friendship, common training or work experience and so on. As a research paradigm, social networks has more sociological explanatory power than the traditional individualistic research approach, it aim direct at model for the social structure of the nature of the relationship, with advantages that the traditional mainstream statistical methods do not have; as a data mining technique, Social network analysis can handle a large number of terrorist intelligence data, dig out useful information, enhance analyst's predictive capability, which shows the application value in preventing and combating terrorist activities.Firstly, this paper describes the development of social network analysis and general develop trajectory, then describes the main contents and characteristics of the terrorist network analysis, and summarizes the development of new terrorism, the terrorism from a perspective of network and the models of terrorist organizational structure, also the causes and characteristics of evolution, which used as an example of social network analysis, to show the advantages compared with the traditional research approach.The basic analysis stages have been illustrated, the construction of social networks of terrorists and analysis methods, proposed a integrate approach based on individual centrality, Index of subgroup participation and command and conduct structure, for analysis the vulnerabilities of the terror network. This were tested with a case study of the U.S. Embassy bombing. Finally, attempt to build the East Turkistan terrorist network by gathering resource from the national mainstream media on East Turkistan terrorist event 110 network text, which applied network text analysis(NTA) method. In this work, AutoMap, ORA and UCINET analysis tools were used.Research shows that the application of social network analysis on the covert network of terrorists and their organizations have advantages the traditional statistical analysis of individual properties do not have. The network analysis tools can make the covert terror networks visualized, construct the graph models based on the data collected. The density criterion measures the exchange amount between members of terrorist organizations and captures its behvavior feature, while cohesion and structural equivalence of subgroups are measurements help find the internal gang of terrorist organizations, then to analyze the subtle characteristics of the terrorist oraganizations, this provide insight help to understand the terrorist organization's current stage of development and patterns of operation, from which the development and evolution of terrorist organizations can be observed. In the analysis of individual level, this study through a combination of structural equivalence analysis, the human interaction flow based command and conduct structure, individual centrality, and faction participate index methods, digging out of key members of the hidden terrorist organization networks, analysis and figure out their roles and deciding vulnerabilities to disrupt the terror network. Efforts were made try to construct the East Turkistan terrorist network through 110 text files, inspection the application of social network analysis criteria. The large network of East Turkistan terrorist obtain from the Network Text Analysis of the 110 files shows different characteristics compare to the typical random network, the core-periphery networks or cellular networks, but has the same feature of the sub-networks, and a distinct core network which contains the majority nodes. The core members measured by centrality criteria have been verified, and although from the density criteron, the network is sparse, there are a lot of close members that with the strong similarity, and many organizations interrelated, shows that their relationship structure is not a strong hierarchical, though with majority of the members tight connected, their affiliation groups just different.