Taking a New Perspective: Mapping the Al Qaeda Network Through the Eyes of the UN Security Council

Eric Stollenwerk, Thomas Dörfler and Julian Schibberges

Terrorism and Political Violence, 2016, vol. 28, issue 5, 950-970

Abstract: Network analysis has attracted significant attention when researching the phenomenon of transnational terrorism, particularly Al Qaeda. While many scholars have made valuable contributions to mapping Al Qaeda, several problems remain due to a lack of data and the omission of data provided by international organizations such as the UN. Thus, this article applies a social network analysis and subsequent mappings of the data gleaned from the Security Council's consolidated sanctions list, and asks what they can demonstrate about the structure and organizational characteristics of Al Qaeda. The study maps the Al Qaeda network on a large scale using a newly compiled data set. The analysis reveals that the Al Qaeda network consists of several hundred individual and group nodes connecting almost all over the globe. Several major nodes are crucial for the network structure, while simultaneously many other nodes only weakly and foremost regionally connect to the network. The article concludes that the findings tie in well to the latest research pointing to local and simultaneously global elements of Al Qaeda, and that the new data is a valuable source for further analyses, potentially in combination with other data.

Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09546553.2014.987341 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:ftpvxx:v:28:y:2016:i:5:p:950-970

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/ftpv20

DOI: 10.1080/09546553.2014.987341

Access Statistics for this article

Terrorism and Political Violence is currently edited by James Forest

More articles in Terrorism and Political Violence from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().