Research on the Structural Characteristic of Global Terrorist Organization Cooperation Network

Terrorist organizations are not completely independent, however, they frequently interact with each other. Emerging researches have studied the consequence and influential factors of these relationships. But there have rarely been given precise empirical analysis on its interactive strength and effectiveness. Social Network Analysis (SNA) is considered as an effective method to quantify and analyze relationship between different social actors. In this paper, our focus is the cooperation relations between terrorist organizations. Based on the terrorist incident dataset from 1970 to 2014, this paper establishes the cooperation network of terrorist organizations and studies its structural characteristic. The results have shown that both the states of cohesion and separated can be found in the cooperation network. The relationship between organizations is more closely in the central part of the network, and the organizations within the same subgroups have obvious similarities in political goals and activity regions. Additionally, some important organizations in the operational cooperation have been identified. The removing of these organizations will have a significant impact on the cooperation network structure.