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 Re: دراسة جديدة: التعذيب والاحتلال يولدان الإرهاب (Re: Elawad Eltayeb)
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Abstract
We discuss some social contagion processes to describe the formation and spread of radical opinions in the spirit of previous work by Serge Galam. The dynamics of opinion spread involves local threshold processes as well as mean
field effects. We calculate and observe phase transitions in the dynamical variables resulting in a rapidly increasing number of passive supporters. This strongly indicates that military solutions are inappropriate.
Passive Supporters of Terrorism and Phase Transitions
Friedrich August+, Philippe Blanchard_, Sascha Delitzscher_;1, Gerald Hiller+, Tyll
Krueger_;2
+ Dept of Mathematics, TU Berlin, D-10623 Berlin, Germany
_ Dept of Physics, University Bielefeld, D-33615 Bielefeld, Germany
1 Introduction
In this article we discuss some social contagion processes which may play an important role in the dynamics of radical opinion formation. The prime applications in mind are conflict situations as they are met at the time of writing in Afghanistan, Iraq or Palestine where a highly armed alliance of foreign troops fights against a part of the local population which has been radicalized in a way such that western social classification dubs them terrorists. In the following we will use the word ”terrorist” solely to refer to a certain subpopulation (whose interaction features will be described below) in our model environment and do not intend to enter the difficult debate of what constitutes the social essence of terrorism. In terms of our model interaction and shortly speaking one could say that terrorists are those individuals on which counter terrorist throw bombs on.
Besides the radical terrorist groups there is a much larger grey-area of supporters of these terrorists. Support has many faces, ranging from just keeping still about what one knows about terrorists locations or movements up to supporting terrorists by providing various forms of logistic infrastructure. Again, we will avoid specifying exactly what is meant with this notion but use it to describe the potential, predecessor states of an opinion state from which radical groups may (by whatever means and tools) recruitnew members.
The notion of passive supporters was for the first time used in the context of mathematical modeling by Serge Galam. He studied the role of passive supporters in a lattice percolation type model and related terrorism power to the spontaneous formation of random backbones of people who are sympathetic to terrorism but without being directly involved in it. His focus was on the correlation between the number of passive supporters, the physical mobility of active terrorists and phase transitions associated with it. In a certain sense the present work is a continuation of Galams work on the subject.
We arrive at similar conclusions as Galam did, namely that for these type of conflicts military solutions are inappropriate.
In this paper we discuss some aspects of the dynamics of passive support of terrorist activities in virtual social networks. Our main interest lies in the study of phase transitions in the number of passive supporters induced by what is euphemistically called collateral damage as is common as a consequence of counter terrorist attacks on terrorists moving around in populated places. Phase transitions in the opinion of large parts of a population are particularly important since they violate the classical ”linear”
action-reaction view common among military leaders and politicians.
We are not concerned with real terrorist networks and their dynamics, for a recent work on this topic see [1] and the references therein. Our model is based on one paradigm.
Counter terrorist strikes lead to collateral damage. In many cases terrorists live or hide among civilians, and civilian casualties in turn are likely to cause an increase in the number of passive supporters3 and increase the willingness of civilians to become members of radical groups.
Cause and effect are not linearly coupled, there is a phase transition instead. It was widely believed among western observers that in Afghanistan a large part of the population was supporting the Allied forces at the beginning of the operation, in spite of many casualties caused by bombings and other military strikes. Then a change in the public opinion seems to have occurred, the atmosphere inclined to the disadvantage of the allied forces and a transition from Allied-friendly to Taliban-friendly took place,
causing a boost in the number of passive supporters.
Passive supporters usually do not reveal their nature towards outsiders and such phase transitions are hardly observable by Allied forces. The number of passive supporters can only be measured indirectly via the degree of cooperation of the civil population. If the fraction of passive supporters in a population becomes large it is likely that counter terrorists face increased difficulties to gain help and support from civilians. Further the recruiting pool for radical organizations can become nearly inexhaustible, as it has
been popularized in News reports about the Gaza Strip. Such a situation may result in an absurd and tragic solution to secure public safety and to avoid a downward spiral of violence, like the segregation of people from each other with a fence.
2 Description of the Model
Please see the full study on the PDF file.
3 Phase Transitions in the Local Infection Process
Please see the full study on the PDF file.
4 Simulation Results
Please see the full study on the PDF file.
5 Conclusions and Perspectives
The main observation is the existence of a phase transition in the number of passive supporters of terroristic activities. Whenever counter terrorist activities lead to collateral damages, the likelihood of outraging civilians rises. A high number of passive supporters provides a steady pool to recruit active terrorists, so the number of active terrorists and their attacks increases.
Our results not only suggest lowering of the rate _ of removal of active terrorists to avoid the phase transition. The interplay of the mean field term _, which is the rate at which removed active terrorists generate passive supporters, and _ has to be taken into account. Avoidable failures resulting in casualties, high collateral damage, pictures and videos of humiliated inmates in Allied prisons, are factors which increase the probability that the civil population will join the terrorist side instead of fighting against it.
If the Allied forces want to avoid the phase transition in the number of passive supporters to not gain a stable number of active terrorist, capturing or removing active terrorists from the network would make sense therefore only if this happened practically without casualties, fatalities, applying torture or committing terroristic acts against the local population.
If this is not possible - and evidence is pointing towards this - our results strongly indicate that there is no military solution to fight terrorism, so only political solutions are available
References:
Please see the full study on the PDF file.
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Elawad Eltayeb
فيس بوك
تويتر
انستقرام
يوتيوب
بنتيريست