Narrow Results

A counterterrorism model is developed where a government and a terrorist allocate resources over two periods. Escalation to period 2 occurs if a threshold for the government’s period-1 damage is exceeded. Without escalation four scenarios exist, including deterrence and nonprovocation. With escalation and unitary contest intensity, both players’ fractions of their resources allocated to period 1 equal the sum of their potential period-1 damages divided by the sum of their potential damages in both periods. As the government’s resource superiority increases, the terrorist allocates all its resources to the period-1 attack, and the government deters escalation. Uniform distributions of the contest intensity and the government’s resource superiority over various intervals are considered. Observing that the terrorist’s utility may be U-shaped in the escalation threshold, the government is enabled to determine both its resource allocation and escalation threshold. The government prefers no threshold when it lacks resources and should always escalate, and when it has abundant resources and can deter. For intermediate resource superiority, the government prefers an intermediate threshold. Six game outcomes are shown where escalation is deterred for two disjoint intervals of the government’s resource superiority.

We review a series of models of sociophysics introduced by Galam and Galam et al. in the last 25 years. The models are divided into five different classes, which deal respectively with democratic voting in bottom-up hierarchical systems, decision making, fragmentation versus coalitions, terrorism and opinion dynamics. For each class the connexion to the original physical model and techniques are outlined underlining both the similarities and the differences. Emphasis is put on the numerous novel and counterintuitive results obtained with respect to the associated social and political framework. Using these models several major real political events were successfully predicted including the victory of the French extreme right party in the 2000 first round of French presidential elections, the voting at fifty–fifty in several democratic countries (Germany, Italy, Mexico), and the victory of the "no" to the 2005 French referendum on the European constitution. The perspectives and the challenges to make sociophysics a predictive solid field of science are discussed.

The phenomenon of terrorism has riveted world's unwavering attention since 9/11. The underlying study investigates the determinants of terrorism in the South Asian region. Applying negative binomial regression, the study finds that both political structure and economic conditions are responsible for terrorism. On the economic front, relative deprivation represented by income disparity is the major cause of terrorism. On the other hand, deprivation of the people of their political rights and civil liberties, exhibited by political repression, compels them to be involved in terrorist activities. Our findings illustrates that high literacy rate is one of the foremost reason for terrorism in the region.

This paper examines the impact of 410 terrorist attacks on the performance of five Asian stock markets. The empirical findings indicate that terrorism has a significant impact on the stock markets. Furthermore, the magnitude of these effects varies with respect to country, attack type, target type and severity of the attacks. In target type, terrorist attacks on business sector and security forces are particularly destructive for the stock markets. Likewise, in attack type, suicide attacks and bomb blasts particularly generate a significant downward movement in the stock markets. Furthermore, the more severe attacks have larger negative impact on market returns.

In this study, we examine the asymmetric effects of terrorism and economic growth in Pakistan over the period 1970–2016, while considering the role of capital per worker and structural breaks. We use the non-linear ARDL approach to establish the long-run association and to estimate the short-run and long-run effects accordingly. The results indicate the presence of asymmetries in both long and short run. Moreover, 1% decrease in terrorism results in an increase of per capita income by 0.02% in the long run and 0.001% in the short run. Assuming symmetry, the long run capital share is 0.47. In asymmetric relation, a 1% increase in capital share increases output by 0.55%, whereas a 1% decrease in capital stock decreases output by 0.26%. The break effects show that the years 1993 and 2004 have negative effects on growth. The vector error correction model-based causality results indicate a unidirectional causality from terrorism to per capita income. Overall, the results highlight that terrorism is growth retarding.

A system of components can be in series, parallel, or combined series/parallel. The components and system are protected individually and overarchingly by a defender, and attacked individually and overarchingly by an attacker. Both layers of protection have to be breached for an attack to be successful. Each component, and the system as a whole, have vulnerabilities determined by individual and overarching protection and attack. The agents choose their effort variables simultaneously and independently to maximize their utilities. Each component and the system have unit costs of protection and attack, and a contest intensity. We show for both the parallel and series systems that the defender always prefers overarching and individual protection and attack, while the attacker always prefers individual protection and attack. Analytical expressions are developed for the agents' effort variables, each individual component's vulnerability, and the system vulnerability. The expenditure ratio, between individual protection and attack, and overarching protection and attack, is shown to increase in the number of components for the parallel system, and decrease in the number of components for the series system. Special cases are considered and interpreted. Comparisons are made with only individual protection and attack. The model is applicable to determine how the defender and attacker should strike the balance between choosing efforts to protect and attack components individually versus overarchingly.

This paper analyzes the short- and long-term effects of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on a comprehensive sample of stock market indices from 33 industrial and emerging economies. From a finance-theoretic point of view, we employ the international capital asset pricing model (ICAPM) to analyze the incidence of the 9/11 event. Consistent with expectations, we document statistically negative short-term stock market reactions to the 9/11 event for 28 countries. More importantly, we find increases in the level of systematic risk for 10 stock markets which attest to the presence of negative permanent effects emanating for the 9/11 event. However, a great many capital markets (including the US, Canada, Japan, China, Russia, and the largest European economies) did not experience statistically significant increases in systematic risk in the post-9/11 period. The decisiveness of the evidence clearly points in the direction of resilience and flexibility of the world capital markets.

Location of Heart Attack Genes Found.

Australia-made SIRT Administered in First US Patient.

Study Concludes Loss of Sexual Function with Menopause.

Giant Step forward for the Tasmanian Tiger Cloning Project.

Genetic Research into Soybeans Proposed.

Rare Cattle Successfully Cloned.

China to Produce First Cloned Giant Panda.

"Solid Water" Helps Trees Grow in Deserts.

Super-bra to Detect Breast Cancer.

Chinese Scientists Develop Single DNA Molecular Nanomotor.

Trials on More GM Seeds.

Japanese and Thai Scientists Inoculate Monkeys against Simian AIDS.

Korea's Latest Car to "Drive" out Terrorism.

Bed-sharing May Increase Chances of Cot Death.

Rice Researchers Win Major Environmental Prize.

How are the risks and returns of industrial and market portfolios altered as a result of terrorist events? This paper investigates the effects of five international terrorist attacks on equities listed on the Malaysian Stock Exchange. It uses an event study methodology to explore the relationship between equity stock returns, terrorist attacks and asset pricing models to assess whether systematic risks change after these events. The evidence demonstrates that strategies such as closing down an exchange during a crisis are ineffective. Furthermore, after the September 11, 2001 attacks, Malaysian equity markets were insensitive to subsequent terrorist attacks in other countries.

Multiple governments are modeled as intervening through time and selectively against terrorism sponsors and a terrorist organization’s three labor stocks, i.e., ideologues, criminal mercenaries, and captive participants. The three labor stocks and sponsors are modeled with four differential time equations. Differential equations and game theory are combined in interesting ways. The governments play games with each other on how to intervene. Depending on the unit intervention cost from high to low, the paper shows how governments may refrain from intervening, may free ride on each other in a prisoner’s dilemma, may intervene as in the chicken game, may intervene unilaterally, may coordinate between multiple equilibria, and may intervene jointly. Mixed strategies are analyzed for governments preferring to create uncertainty, or decrease the uncertainty, for example, when playing the chicken game. Intervention may successfully curtail or terminate the terrorist organization over various time horizons, or may fail to do so causing unbounded growth. This paper provides a tool for decision and policy makers to understand the evolution and composition of a terrorist organization through time depending on intervention.

This paper presents a simplified approximate analysis of the overall collapse of the towers of World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001. The analysis shows that if prolonged heating caused the majority of columns of a single floor to lose their load carrying capacity, the whole tower was doomed. Despite optimistic simplifying assumptions, the structural resistance is found to be an order of magnitude less than necessary for survival.

This study explores the constraints on women entrepreneurs running SMEs in conflict zones. The research is carried out in the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK), a conflict affected province in Pakistan close to the border of Afghanistan. The findings reveal that women in the region are in a complex family situation exacerbated by terrorism, which has created stress, depression and fear of failure. Better understanding of their circumstances may aid those seeking to help such businesses in Pakistan and other regions beset by conflict.

In this paper, we determined how well an OECD country is achieving the Received Interpol goals with respect to the SDGs pertinent to them. We found that the Scandinavian countries were at the top in the achievement. In combatting terrorism in general, we found that the Scandinavian countries were at the top. We also show that the fuzzy similarity measure of the ranking of countries used by the SDGs relevant to terrorism compared with SDG 16 alone was high. Let $A,B,$ and $C$ be rankings of a set $X$ and ${\mu }_A,{\mu }_B,$ and ${\mu }_C$ the associated fuzzy subsets, respectively. Consider the similarity measures $S$ and $M$ [J. N. Mordeson and S. Mathew, Journal of Mahani Mathematical Research 13(1) (2024) 279–291]. Suppose that $S({\mu }_A,{\mu }_B)$ and $S({\mu }_A,{\mu }_C)$ are known, but $S({\mu }_B,{\mu }_C)$ is unknown. It is shown in the reference by J. N. Mordeson and S. Mathew [Mathematics of Uncertainty for Coping with World Challenges, Climate Change, World Hunger, Modern Slavery, Coronavirus, Human Trafficking (Springer, 2021)] that if  $S({\mu }_A,{\mu }_B)$ is near $1,$ then $|S({\mu }_A,{\mu }_C)-S({\mu }_B,{\mu }_C)|$ is near $0.$ In this paper, a similar result for $M$ is shown.

Information provided by the US Department of Homeland Security regarding potential terrorist attacks significantly affects US Treasury securities markets. When the government announces heightened terror alert levels, investors' perceptions of risk increase and investors purchase 1-month and 1-year Treasury bills and 3-year, 5-year, 7-year, and 10-year US Treasuries in a "flight-to-quality" episode. Partial anticipation of increased threat level announcements is stronger than the anticipation of announcements regarding the federal funds rate during the 10 days prior to an announcement.

Globalization has often been suggested as a phenomenon that leads to terrorism due to the disruptions it causes. In the case of the former centrally planned economies of East Europe and Eurasia, however, greater levels of globalization have led to less terrorist incidents and casualties rather than more. Further, the terrorist attacks that did occur did not deter foreign direct investment in the region.

This paper investigates the impact of the recent terrorist attacks on the Turkish banking sector. Specifically, an event study analysis is executed to estimate the abnormal returns of banks’ stocks in Turkey. According to the results, negative and significant abnormal returns were observed on the event dates of terrorist attacks, those of which especially occurred at international points and touristic places. The study continues with a regression analysis that looks into the cross-bank variation of abnormal returns by using important bank characteristics as predictors. The regression analysis exhibits that banks with higher leverage and larger size are prone to getting more negatively affected by the terrorist attack. On the other hand, banks with higher liquidity and higher income level are likely to have less negative abnormal returns.

With the ever-growing number of online social media platforms, the world has shrunk even further with regards to communication and knowledge-sharing perspective. However, communication, at times, can be deterrent when misused using such widespread social media tools. The acts of terrorism become seemingly convenient as the barrier of communication is nullified. This propagation of hateful content becomes much more easier and even recruiting anti-socials gets easier. Oddly, these social media platforms are the ones that prove essential during such crisis situations. This paper reviews most of the works reported by various authors in the last 10 years on the use of social media during a time of terrorist attack to addressing how to use social media for public communication with the emergency organization and military or police during terrorist attack, how to perform post-attack social media analytic and how to detect acts of terrorism, unrest, and hatred using social media analytic. With this objective, the authors also hope to inspire other researchers to work in this direction and use this review as a guide for instigating future research to counter-attack terrorism as it is the need of the hour for our country in the wake of recent Uri and Pulwama attack.

The choice of targets for terrorist attacks is often considered to be random or illogical. In other cases targets are seen as being chosen for their symbolic importance to the audience the terrorists are seeking to reach or to indicate that no area of the country is safe. Terrorist groups, however, also choose their targets because of the economic impact that the attacks will have. There are patterns in economic attacks since different groups choose different kinds of targets. There may be increases in economic targeting, especially in the tourism sector where attacks create economic hardship and to reduce revenues for the governments. Foreign investment projects have also become frequent targets because of their economic potential for increasing government capacities. Trade activities and foreign aid projects have also become targets. In an increasingly global economy, such attacks have an even greater potential for destabilization effects.

The city of Surabaya in Indonesia experienced its first bomb attacks on 13 and 14 May 2018. Over the course of two days, bombs went off at three different churches and the city police headquarters in Surabaya. In total, the attacks resulted in 24 deaths and dozens of injuries. Since the attacks, the affected communities and the people within them have managed to recover. This study aimed to describe the affected communities and their post-terror attack recovery in Surabaya. Documentary analysis, interviews and observations were used to collect data. The findings show that the members of the churches and Surabaya citizens were affected by the attacks. The attacks brought psychosocial, physical health, economic and built environment impacts. Support to recover was given by various sources, including the government, the churches where the attacks happened, other churches, mental health professionals, the interfaith community and the general public. Various forms of support were provided, such as mental health aid, security and protection, emotional support and financial support. One year after the attacks, the communities had generally returned to their usual activities even though some victims still struggle with grief. A number of community members have also built more interfaith friendships.

This chapter concludes this book about the contexts of Western Asia, a very diverse region with striking contrasts. It observes changes over time and emphasises the need for firms to adapt to changing contexts. Borders change and mindsets evolve. The chapter distinguishes between explicit and implicit assumptions that reflect cultural values. It reviews the characteristics of the bazaar and the firm-type economy. It then discusses the New Economy of high-tech booms and emphasises the similarity between the structured bazaar and the World Wide Web. After providing thoughts for the business sector, the chapter concludes with thoughts for policy-makers.