“What is dear to you?” Survey of beliefs regarding protection of critical infrastructure against terrorism

Up to the present, there is only very little research on how the population perceives terrorism and its threats, even though support from the population is crucial for effective counterterrorism. By eliciting beliefs and subjecting them to content analyses, six factors were found that determine the protection worthiness of a target in the people's view: the potential damage to “people,” “symbolism,” “economy,” “politics,” “nature,” and “image/publicity.” These empirically found factors are in line with factors specified by terrorist target selection models. They differ in the strength of their cognitive representation among participants and, thus, their subjective importance to the people. The first three factors are shared among all participants, whereas the latter ones could only be found in a part of the participant sample. People's judgments of the targets' protection worthiness differ substantially from their judgments of the targets' attractiveness to terrorists, even though the same factors seem to be involved. This study offers an insight into the people's mental model about protection worthiness of targets. Together with classical risk analysis and knowledge about terrorists, these results can form a basis for setting up a holistic scheme for critical infrastructure protection.     

End of the cycle: assessing ETA’s strategies of terrorism

ABSTRACT

In May 2018, the Basque insurgent group Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) officially disbanded after a 60-year struggle. This inquiry assesses ETA’s violent campaigns using recent conceptual and theoretical advancements from the field of terrorism studies. Three conclusions concerning the group’s strategies of terrorism are advanced. First, ETA regularly targeted civilians to achieve goals other than coercing the Government of Spain; these objectives included outbidding rival separatist groups and spoiling negotiation processes. Second, ETA’s most rapid period of organizational growth occurred as the result of an aggressive terrorist campaign, demonstrating that civilian targeting can serve as a stimulus to rebel group recruitment. Finally, while terrorism did not advance ETA’s primary political objective of creating an independent Basque state, it did enable the group to assume a leading position within the radical Basque separatist movement, helping extend ETA’s lifespan and making the group an embedded actor within the contentious political processes surrounding the question of Basque self-determination. Collectively, these conclusions support recent theoretical findings arguing that non-state terrorism often enables insurgent groups to prolong their lifespans while paradoxically making it more difficult for them to advance their long-term political objectives.     

Tests for transient means in simulated time series

We present a family of tests to detect the presence of a transient mean in a simulation process. These tests compare variance estimators from different parts of a simulation run, and are based on the methods of batch means and standardized time series. Our tests can be viewed as natural generalizations of some previously published work. We also include a power analysis of the new tests, as well as some illustrative examples. © 1994 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.