Robert Pape thoroughly examines the misperceptions about and motivations behind suicide terrorism in his book, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism. He uses empirical data and a multidisciplinary approach to support his argument that suicide terrorism is used to meet the secular and strategic goal of compelling the withdrawal of military forces.

Dying To Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism

Talal Asad. On Suicide Bombing. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Pp. 128. Hardbound. ISBN: 978-0-231-14152-9. Price not given. In this slim volume Talal Asad deconstructs the liberal discourse on the current categories of "war" and "terrorism" while extending and adding new dimensions to the already existing studies on contemporary modes of violence and terrorism. He advances his project of "deconstruction" of modernity and liberal democracies and elaborates on the continuities and cleavages between secular modernity and its past by discussing terrorism, one of the contemporary modes of violence. Whereas Asad examines the colonial and post-colonial construction of the categories of "war" and "terrorism," he argues that these are constructed according to different logical criteria: the "war" derives its primary sense from the question of legality, and "terrorism" from the feelings of vulnerability and fear of social disorder. Hence the two cannot be rendered as mutually exclusive. Asad has recourse to a variety of disciplines, theories and scholars to draw his arguments from and respond to the opinions opposed to his own. One encounters, for example, references to Michael Walzer, May Jayyusi, Bruno Etienne, Ivan Strenski, Sigmund Freud (d. 1939), Emile Durkheim (d. 1917), Max Weber (d. 1920), Robert Pape, Roxanne Euben, Richard Tuck, John Keegan, Jacqueline Rose, John Hamilton, Mary Douglas (d. 2007), Michael Hanake, Sayyid Mawdudi (d. 1399/1979) and Sayyid Qu.b (d. 1386/1966), to name just a few. These scholars range from military scientists to political philosophers; from historians of early modern western thought to scholars on religion to psychoanalysts and others. Asad also refers to important contemporary literature including novels related to war, particularly the war on terror. All this reflects the wide scope of the book as well as the author's remarkable grip on the discourse from various possible angles. Asad wants his readers to distance themselves-at least temporarily- from the popular discourse that prepackages moral responses to terrorism, wars and suicide bombing. He does so by offering a critique of liberal thought, especially its discourse on the war on terror and its claims of rational and moral superiority over other ideologies. He questions the popular discourse on terrorism in public, media, and scholarship, which seeks to grasp religious motivations behind acts of suicide bombing. Asad argues that speculations and theories regarding the motivations of a suicide bomber are fiction and hence cannot be verified (p. 3). This discussion is related with the main themes of the book which are: contemporary mode of violence (i.e. terrorism), war on terror, liberal democracies, the psychological aspects of terrorism, the possibilities of a religious terrorism, Islamic terrorism, the psychology of suicide bombers and of its victims, the anthropology of the concept of death in Western thought and of some related political and religious ideas and their development in Islamic thought. Moreover, Asad critically analyses major theories on just war, terrorism, and suicide bombing along with the attempt to establish their relationship with Islam. He also raises the issue of culpability and argues that recent increase in Jihadism and sectarian killings are closely connected with US internationalist interests in the Middle East. He traces the genealogy of the doctrine of jihad, bashing the conception that it ever had a central place in Islamic thought. He finds this concept, however, to be strongly related with the foreign occupation of the Muslim lands. In light of this, for Asad, violence and suicide bombers belong to a modern Western tradition of armed conflict in defence of a free political community. He further pursues the argument that violence and suicidal terrorism are legitimate offsprings of the modern nation state and secular liberalism.1 What really stands out in On Suicide Bombing is Asad's study of the response of horror to suicide bombing in what he calls the "western mind," and his deconstruction of the current categories of "war" and theories of "just war. …

On Suicide Bombing

The role of community-based religious institutions has been largely undocumented, underestimated and overshadowed in the disaster studies literature. This paper explores the role of the mosque, a community-based religious institution, in disaster management by documenting and analysing its role in rural settings in the aftermath of the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan. The study examines the role of the mosque in relation to key actors from the state, civil society and private sector during response, relief, recovery, reconstruction and rehabilitation phases of the Pakistan earthquake. Using qualitative research methods and a case study design, this article analyses primary data collected through 5 months of fieldwork (in 2009 and 2010). The findings demonstrate the multifaceted and distinct contribution of the mosque in cultural, economic, social and political aspects of the lives of the earthquake-affected communities. Possible challenges to engagement with the mosque, both gender inclusiveness and political controversy around its role, are also raised. This research suggests that state, civil society and private sector actors involved in disaster management need to understand complex relationships involving people and their religious institutions, and their impact on the social dimension of recovery. The findings of the study contribute to the scarce knowledge about the role of community-based religious institutions including churches, mosques, synagogues and temples and call for engagement: that is, acknowledging and valuing their role for building a synergy between secular and religious efforts for disaster risk reduction and post-disaster recovery.

Unnoticed but important: revealing the hidden contribution of community-based religious institution of the mosque in disasters

Pedestrian behavior models have successfully reproduced human movement in many situations. However, few studies focus on modeling human behavior in the context of terrorist attacks. Terrorist attacks commonly occur in crowded public areas and result in a large number of casualties. This paper proposes a three-stage model to reproduce a series of complex behaviors and decision-making processes at the onset of an attack, when pedestrians generally do not have clear targets and have to deal with fuzzy information from the attack. The first stage of the model builds a Bayesian belief network to represent the pedestrians’ initial judgment of the threat and their evacuation decisions. The second stage focuses on pedestrians’ global assessment of the situation through an analogy with diffusion processes. The third stage uses a cost function to reproduce the trade-offs of distance, safety, and emotional impact when considering a path to take. The model is validated using a video from the November 2015 Paris attack. The behavioral characteristics and trajectories of three pedestrians extracted from the video are reproduced by the simulation results based on the model. The research can be used to set rules when performing risk analysis and strategic defensive resource allocation of terrorist attacks using agent-based simulation methods.

A three-stage evacuation decision-making and behavior model for the onset of an attack

: This report surveys and provides lessons learned on modeling and operations analysis (OA) in Operations Enduring Freedom (OEF) and Iraqi Freedom (OIF). Operations and environmental complexities in Iraq and Afghanistan placed heavy demands on U.S. military commanders, requiring them to make critical, time-sensitive decisions with limited information. Modelers and analysts provided both direct and indirect, or reach-back, support to commanders in both theaters to help them make wellinformed decisions across the full spectrum of counterinsurgency and irregular warfare (COIN and IW) operations. Based on our analysis of both the literature and interviews with commanders and analysts, we identified four general categories that encompassed most decision support: (1) force protection; (2) logistics; (3) campaign assessment; and (4) force structure. We assess that modelers and analysts were able to successfully inform many force protection and logistics decisions, but they were less effective in supporting campaign assessment and force-structuring decisions (each category is described in greater detail below). Scope, scale, complexity, and the opacity of the operational environment were critical variables: Modeling and analysis were effective at addressing difficult but relatively concrete tactical and operational problems, but less useful in addressing complex strategic problems that required detailed analysis of the operational environment. This finding was perhaps unsurprising given the complexity of the environments and operations in both theaters, but it does help refine understanding of the ways in which modeling, simulation, and analysis might be used most effectively in IW. It also informs decisions on current and future investment in modeling and analytic capabilities. The theory and practical methods for force protection and logistics decision support are generally sound and warrant continued investment, while the theory and methods that support campaign assessme

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Modeling, Simulation, and Operations Analysis in Afghanistan and Iraq: Operational Vignettes, Lessons Learned, and a Survey of Selected Efforts

Suicide bombing has become one of the most lethal and favorite modus operandi of terrorist organizations around the world. On average, there is a suicide bombing attack every six days somewhere in the world. While various attempts have been made to assess the impact of explosions on structures and military personnel, little has been done on modeling the impact of a blast wave on a crowd in civilian settings. The assessment of an explosion's effect on a crowd can lead to better management of disasters, triage of patients, locating blast victims under the debris, development of protective gear, and safe distance recommendations to reduce the casualties. The overall goal of this work is to predict the magnitude of injuries and lethality on humans from a blast-wave with various explosive and crowd characteristics, and to compare, contrast, and analyze the performance of explosive and injury models against the real-life data of suicide bombing incidents. This thesis introduces BlastSim—a physics based stationary multi-agent simulation platform to model and simulate a suicide bombing event. The agents are constrained by the physical characteristics and mechanics of the blast wave. The BlastSim is programmed to test, analyze, and validate the results of different model combinations under various conditions with different sets of parameters, such as the crowd and explosive characteristics, blockage and human shields, fragmentation and the bomber's position, in 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional environments. The suicide bombing event can be re-created for forensic analysis. The proposed model combinations show a significant performance—the Harold Brode explosive model with Catherine Lee injury model using the blockage stands out consistently to be the best with an overall cumulative accuracy of 87.6%. When comparing against actual data, overall, prediction accuracy can be increased by 71% using this model combination. The J. Clutter with Reflection explosive model using Charles Stewart injury model with blockage works best for confined-space incidents with an accuracy of 80%. Blockage in a crowd can increase the accuracy by 17% for all models. Line-of-sight with an attacker, rushing towards an exit, announcing the threat of a suicide bombing, sitting inside a vehicle or building, and standing closer to a wall or a rigid surface were found to be the most lethal choices both during and after an attack. The findings can have implications for emergency response and counter terrorism.

Modeling and Simulation of Explosion Effectiveness: as a Function of Blast and Crowd Characteristics

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Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agents

This paper presents a Monte-Carlo simulation tool based on stationary multi-agent system. The agents are constrained by physical characteristics and mechanics of blast waves. The proposed tool examines the impact of blast waves in an event of suicide bombing on human body. The tool is capable of assessing the impact of crowd formation patterns and their densities on the magnitude of injury and number of casualties during a suicide bombing attack. While various attempts have been made to assess the impact of blast waves and its overpressure on buildings and animals, little has been done on crowd formation, crowd density and underlying geometry to mitigate the effects. Results indicated that the worst crowd formation is street (Zig-Zag) where 30% crowd can be dead and 45% can be injured, given typical explosive carrying capacity of a single suicide bomber. Row wise crowd formations was found to be the best for reducing the effectiveness of an attack with 18% crowd in lethal zone and 38% in injury zones. For a typical suicide bombing attack, we can reduce the number of fatalities by 12%, and the number of injuries by 7%. The simulation results were compared and validated by the real-life incidents and found to be in good agreement. Line-of-sight with the attacker, rushing towards the exit, and stampede were found to be the most lethal choices both during and after the attack. These findings, although preliminary, may have implications for emergency response and counter terrorism.

Random walk in extreme conditions - an agent based simulation of suicide bombing

Reviewers’ ratings have become one of the most influential parameters when making a decision to purchase or rent the products or services from the online vendors. Star Rating system is the de-facto standard for rating a product. It is regarded as one of the most visually appealing rating systems that directly interact with the consumers; helping them find products they will like to purchase as well as register their views on the product. It offers visual advantage to pick the popular or most rated product. Any system that is not as appealing as star system will have a chance of rejection by online business community. This paper argues that, the visual advantage is not enough to declare star rating system as a triumphant, the success of a ranking system should be measured by how effectively the system helps customers make decisions that they, retrospectively, consider correct. This paper argues and suggests a novel approach of Relative Ranking within the boundaries of star rating system to overcome a few inherent disadvantages the former system comes with.

Relative Ranking – A Biased Rating

Intelligent agents in extreme conditions is an attempt to use agent based simulation to save lives, predict the outcome of catastrophic events like suicide bombing, and model the behavior of crowd in emergency situations. This work is set to implement, test, analyze and measure intelligent agents’ behavior and its consequences under extreme conditions like suicide bombing through multi-agent simulation. Suicide bombing has become one of the most lethal and favorite modus operandi of terrorist organizations around the world. It claims 48% of the casualties, while only 3% of all terrorist attacks can be classified as suicide bombing attacks. On average, there is a suicide bombing attack somewhere in the world on every 6th day that claims 13.4 lives (on average) per attack (Usmani a, 2009). While various attempts have been made to assess the impact of explosions on structures, little has been done on modeling the impact of a blast wave for an individual or a crowd. There is no tool exist to determine the impact of explosion as a function of crowd dynamics, and explosive characteristics. And there is not a single method available to map the blast overpressure to human injuries that is calibrated against the real-life victims’ data. All of the existing estimates and pressure-lethality curves are based on experiments on pigs, sheep, and data collected from stationary sensors without any consideration of blockage and 3D environment. Explosion modeling is a complicated task that requires the knowledge of physical properties of explosions, projectiles and debris, chemical properties of explosive materials and their reactions, complex details of simulating gaseous and combustion flows with boundary conditions, complex coding for blast waves and fragmentation models, know-how of computational fluid dynamics, and the overall impact of explosions on humans and structures supported by experimental and theoretical studies. This work explains the physics, explosive models, mathematics and the assumptions we need to create such a simulation. The work also describes human shields available in the crowd with partial and full blockage in both two dimensional and three dimensional environments. A virtual simulation tool (BlastSim) has been developed which is capable of assessing the impact of crowd formation patterns and their densities on the magnitude of injury and 23

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Zeeshan-ul-hassan Usmani

Papers

Modeling and Simulation of Explosion Effectiveness: as a Function of Blast and Crowd Characteristics

Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agents

Random walk in extreme conditions - an agent based simulation of suicide bombing

Relative Ranking – A Biased Rating

Intelligent Agents in Extreme Conditions – Modeling and Simulation of Suicide Bombing for Risk Assessment