Carleton PhD Student Finds a Way to Combat Terrorism

A Carleton PhD student thinks he may have one answer as to why some terrorist groups may be more effective than others.

Josh Kilberg spent the last five years working on his PhD thesis that looked at this question. He says: “There appears to be a link between how these groups are structured and their lethality in terms of the number of people they kill, number of attacks they undertake, the kinds of targets they would go after or the kinds of weapons they use.”

“My research found that a more bureaucratic group, that is a group which is clearly centralized with a defined leader and lines of authority, is much more efficient and lethal,” says Kilberg. “And the reverse is true so less centralized groups are less lethal.”

Using advanced statistical techniques and approaches, Kilberg analyzed the structure of the 254 most prolific terrorist groups from 1970 to 2007 listed in the Global Terrorism Database.

He found that terrorist groups in poor countries with low political rights and civil liberties tended to be more bureaucratic, “whereas in richer countries like Canada, where intelligence services and police forces are much more effective at counter-terrorism measures, terrorist groups have to focus more on their own security and end up adopting a much more decentralized structure.”

Kilberg did case studies on Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and the Basque separatist group Euzkadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA). Both groups underwent major structural changes. “AQI used to do a lot of suicide bombings before their leader was killed in 2006 and the group became less centralized. After that, the bombings pretty much stopped and they moved into more hijackings which is a less sophisticated and less lethal approach.”

“When ETA decentralized, it became less likely to attack full military convoys and more likely to attack easier targets such as private citizens. Again, the group became less effective and the number of people they killed dropped dramatically.”

Kilberg says he hopes that counter-terrorist groups will be able to use his findings in their ongoing fight to combat terrorist groups. “My research won’t be of any use to terrorist groups because, by necessity, they have to evolve their organizational structure according to their environment.”

Dane Rowlands, Kilberg’s PhD thesis adviser, said: “Josh’s research has provided some very fundamental key pieces of the puzzle in this area. There is a huge amount of research that will follow directly from his thesis.”

Kilberg and Rowlands are about to publish an article about the leadership decapitation of terrorist groups. Kilberg says they found that killing the leader doesn’t really do a lot to the group in the long term as a leader can be replaced. “So it’s not a good strategy to use in the fight against terrorism.”

Kilberg will be the first person to graduate from the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs’ (NPSIA) PhD program.

He says that he was actually en route to medical school when he was approached by Fen Hampson, the director of NPSIA, about coming to Carleton for grad studies. “I worked with Fen at a terrorism summit in Madrid. He sold me on coming here as he said, if you want to work in public policy, Ottawa is THE place to study. And he is right.”

Like many Carleton grad programs, the NPSIA program is interdisciplinary, allowing its graduates to examine policy-relevant questions from different perspectives with different methodologies, often introducing novel approaches to the analysis. Last year, NPSIA collaborated with the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering to introduce the Master of Infrastructure Protection and International Security (MIPIS) program which is the first of its kind in North America.

Kilberg is now on a long awaited trip to Asia, his own reward for completing his doctoral degree at Carleton.