Data-based Computational Approaches to Forecasting Political Violence

The challenge of terrorism dates back centuries if not millennia. Until recently, the basic approaches to analyzing terrorism—historical analogy and monitoring the contemporary words and deeds of potential perpetrators—have changed little: the Roman authorities warily observing the Zealots in first-century Jerusalem could have easily traded places with the Roman authorities combatting the Red Brigades in twentieth century Italy. This has changed with the exponential expansion of information processing capability made possible first by the development of the digital computer, followed by the phenomenal growth in the quantity and availability of machine-readable information made possible by the World Wide Web. Information that once circulated furtively on hand-copied sheets of paper (or papyrus) is now instantly available— for good or ill—on web pages which can be accessed at essentially no cost from anywhere in the world. This expansion of the scope and availability of information in all likelihood will change the dynamics of the contest between organizations seeking to engage in terrorism and those seeking to prevent it. It is almost certainly too early to tell which group will benefit more—many of the new media are less than a decade old—but the techniques of processing and evaluating information will most certainly change. This chapter provides an extensive overview of inductive statistical and computational methodologies used in the analysis and forecasting of political violence, and some of the challenges specific to the issue of analyzing terrorism. It is intended for the non-specialist, but assumes a general familiarity with data and computational methods. Our purpose is not to exhaustively explore any of these methods—each