[BLANK_AUDIO]

Hi, my name is Amy Pate, and I'm a

senior researcher at START's headquarters,
at the University of Maryland.
Today I'll be discussing some of the
results of
a research project that examined the
correlates of organizational violence.
This project was a team effort and I'd
like to acknowledge some of my
collaborators who
included Jonathan Wilkinfeld who is a
professor here
at the University of Maryland, and also
Victor Asal
who you've already heard from who is an
associate professor at SUNY Albany.
We also included involved a large team of
undergraduate and
graduate students who were essential in
the data collection process.
So I'd like to just give them a shout out
as well.
So the first question before us is
why would you study violent and
non-violent groups?
Frequently in the study of terrorism you
have a lot of exclusive focus on just
the violence the terrorist events, who's
carrying
out the terrorist events, who their
targets are.
But if we are trying to answer
the question of why specific organizations
make the
decision to engage in violence, you need
to expand your focus beyond the violent
groups.
Exclusive focus
only on the violent organizations
introduces something called selection
bias.
And you could say that your selection of
the topic of study
is bias because you're only looking at one
side of the phenomenon.
Right?
The flip side of violence is non violence.
So you want to be able to look
at what differentiates the violent from
the non-violent.
So in by including a control
group of the non-violent organizations, we
can now ask why some
organizations choose to use violence and
specifically terrorism, and others do not.
You can start to explore how groups start
to use terrorism
to transition from maybe a non-violent
stance to a violent stance.

Or the other direction.

Why some organizations stop using
terrorism.
So, go from a violence posi, a violent
position to a non-violent position.
So for this project we built a new data
set called Minorities
at Risk Organizational Behavior, or MAROB
for short, building on a
longstanding project called Minorities at
Risk, and this was an initial pilot
so we decided to limit this group in a
couple of ways.
First we focused only on ethnically based
groups as
ethnic identity has proved to be a very
potent means
of political mobilization, both violent
and non-violent in recent decades.
And also we limited geographically, so we
focused on ethnopolitical organizations
that were active in just the
Middle East and North Africa, which is a
region of strategic importance
but also one that has a very, a quite
varied landscape in terms
of its political organizations.
So it has a wider array of both violent
and non-violent organizations.
So again the data that's currently
available from the START website
includes data from Middle East of North
Africa from 1980 to 2004.
We also have data collected that updates
that data through 2009 as
well as data on ethnopolitical
organizations
in former, formerly communist states of,
of Eastern Europe and the former
Soviet Union.
Some data on Latin American organizations
and
also more varied data on a wide variety
of violent and non-violent extremist
organizations both in
Middle East and North Africa and Western
Europe.
And those data sets will be forthcoming
soon.
So for the MAROB database we used all open
sources which includes media,
journalistic accounts academic articles,
books government reports.
And for some of the variables
actually accounts coming from the
organizations themselves.
So organizational websites, manifestos,
statements by leaders, those
types of things to collect a lot of
different types of variables to try to

answer
this question about why violence or why
non-violence.
And all these variable were
collected on an annual basis, which means
we collected data for each year.
And these variables included
organizational characteristics, so things
such as ideology or ideologies of the
organizations.
So in addition to having an ethically
based
identity some organizations were leftist,
some organizations were Islamist.
so, we collect a wide range of different
ideologies that
organizations may espouse, their
leadership structure,
so how centralized or decentralized how
factualized
the organization was, what the grievances
or
demands they were making against the
state.
We also collected information on their
relationship with
their home state, which included whether
or not
they were being repressed by the state and
also their engagement in negotiations with
government officials.
We also collected data on support that
organizations may have received from
external actors.
So diasporas, foreign states outside
non-governmental organizations,
intragovernmental organizations in some
cases and across a
variety of different types of support from
political support to military support.
And then, and this is the largest suite of
variables in
the data set, what were the actual
behaviors of the organization?
And this included things like the types
and targets
and the location of violence but also
included things
like communication strategies, provision
of social services electoral behavior,
so when are they running candidates in
elections and
a variety of protest behaviors as well.
So first let's get a snapshot view of how
overall political strategies evolved over
time in the region.
And umm.
So we focused and grouped on three broad
strategies electoral strategy, protest
strategies and also violent behaviors.

So the x-axis on this next graph shows

time, from 1980, which is the earliest
year we collected data on through
2009, which is the most recent year for
which we have completed data collection.
While the y-axis shows the percentage of
organizations that are
engaged in the particular behavior for
each of the different lines.
So a couple of things sort of jump out
about this graph.
The first notable trend is that the
percentage of at least ethnopolitical
groups engaged in violence has decreased
fairly significantly from the 1980s.
Although some recent years especially
since
2004, there is a slight upward trajectory.
Now a lot that is being driven by, is
driven by sectarian violence in Iraq.
The second sort of
complimentary trend to that is that
non-violent strategies, and this
includes both the electoral strategy but
also non-violent protests,
mobilizations have also increased as the
violent strategies have decreased.
But they're not exact mirrors of each
other.
They're not necessarily always perfect
substitutes.
We do have organizations that use all
three of the strategies at the same time.
So, for example an organization like
Hezbollah has political wing that might
run
in elections they do mass mobilizations
for
protests, and they also engage in
violence.
And there are quite a few organizations in
the Middle East that
show those characteristics of being very
multifaceted in the strategies they use.
It's time to drill down a little bit more
into the use of violence the next graph
focuses specifically
on a particular violent strategy, in this
case attacks on civilians.
Again, once an organization does engage in
violence there are
lots of different types of violence that
can engage in.
They can choose to attack only government
actors like militaries or police.
Or they can choose to attack purely soft
spot targets, so you know civilians,
business interests, those types of things.
Or they can do a mix.
And so for this next graph we're looking

specifically at the prevalence of attacks

on civilians.
So again, the x-axis is the years and the
y-axis is the percentage of organizations
engaging in the behavior.
So again we see a, a pretty significant
decrease
from the 1980s, and the percentage of
organizations then
engaged in attacks against civilians.
And I'm going to insert a clarification
here.
Neither of these graphs speak to the
number of violent
attacks or the general level of violence
in the region, right?
So, even if the number of ethnopolitical
organizations that
are engaging in these types of attacks
decreases, you
can still have an overall increase in the
number
of attacks if you have organizations
consolidating and carrying
out large higher numbers of attacks over
the, over time.
But they do indicate that a lower
percentage of the organizations are
engaging in violence.
At least the ethnopolitical organizations.
And again, it's not ethnopolitical
organizations aren't the
only types of organizations that are
active in
the region, although there are, are a
relatively
large number of them that are out there.
>> So now I am, I'm going to turn to
the results
of a statistical analysis of the
correlance of attacks against civilians.
So first we found that organizations that
held a democratic ideology, and what we
mean
by holding a democratic ideology is that
they support political pluralism, and also
political competition.
They had to have support for both things.
But these organizations were significantly
less
likely to engage an attack against
civilians.
And this may
be because there's something intrinsic
about
democratic ideology this, that encourages
that.
Or it may be a more instrumental approach
a reasoning that if organizations are
depending on

constituents to support them then they may

not
come around and want to attack those very
constituents.
And then we also found four factors that
were
associated with an increased likelihood
that organizations would attack civilians.
So first of all separatist organizations,
so those groups that advocated
for political independence or political
autonomy
were more likely to target civilians.
As for groups whose rhetoric and
communication strategies justified the use
of violence.
Organizations that receive support from
outside their home country, and it didn't
seem to really matter where the support
was coming from, foreign states, or
diasporas, or what have you.
And were also more likely to target
civilians, as
were organizations that faced repression
from their home government.
So if the home government was trying to
eliminate these groups through the
use of force or restrain their movement
they were more likely to attack civilians.
And then analysis found that overall
organizations that did not
have a democratic ideology, while at the
same time having all
those four factors that contributed to
increase likelihood of attacks had
about an 89% likelihood of attacking
civilians in any given year.
And now just a few concluding remarks.
The findings I presented today were really
a first cut at addressing the question of
what are the correlates of organizational
violence.
And so obviously, as a first cut, there
needs to be a lot more
work and research using a variety of
databases, methodologies, looking at
different regions, etcetera.
In order to fully understand the, the
problem set.
For this particular presentation I focused
on organizational targeting of civilians.
However the same research team has also
looked at why or
when ethnopolitical organizations would
attack the state and particularly
armed actors of the state like militaries
or police forces.
And we also have collected data on a
sample
of violent and non-violent organizations

across a range of ideologies.

So far right, far left including also
a sample of the ethnopolitical groups, but
also
religious organizations to see if you see
similar dynamics across a range of
ideologies, or
if there is something particular about
just the ethnopolitical ones to understand
the dynamics of organizational violence or
non violence in the region.
And as I mentioned before we've also
collected data and are
performing an similar types of analyses on
organizations that are active in,
in regions outside the Middle East and
North Africa, again trying
to figure out what's generalizable across
time and space and ideology and
type of group.
So if you're particularly interested in
this
topic I would suggest to stay tuned for
the START, to the START website as
we're able to release and publish
additional studies.
Thanks for listening.