Research on the Dynamic Change of Terrorist Organization Cooperation from the Big Data Perspective

Understanding the interactive relations of terrorist organizations is quite helpful for the security department in counter-terrorism. Emerging researches have studied the consequence and influential factors of these relations based on cross-sectional data. However, the dynamic changing of relations between different terrorist organizations over time has not yet been addressed adequately. Longitudinal Network Analysis is considered as an effective method in the studies of political violence, especially based on the Big Data from open source intelligence. In this paper, a framework is proposed for the quantitative analysis of the dynamic change of cooperation relations based on the longitudinal network model. The results have shown that more and more cooperation can be seen between terrorist organizations over time. Although the networks are loosely connected, the rapid expansion of the network scale will have a threat on the international society and lead to the explosion of global terrorist attacks. Important organizations actively involved in cooperation in recent years have also been identified.