An Epidemiological Approach to Terrorism

There are many types of models for counterterrorism, explaining different problems that the military faces in the fight against terrorism. This thesis proposes that one of the fundamental assumptions underlying existing models of counterterrorism is that the struggle with terrorists can be understood as a war in the traditional sense of the term. We propose to rethink the struggle against terrorism as a fight against an infection. The epidemic of terrorist ideology within part of the world is a result, from this perspective, of the infectiousness of that ideology. Using the insights of the field of the epidemiology of ideas, this research looks into the models and methods used to understand and fight biological epidemics. We work with the SIR model from mathematical epidemiology, which partitions populations into susceptible, infected, and recovered categories, and apply that model with notional starting rates to the epidemic of terrorist ideology.