Victor Asal

Victor Asal is chair of Public Administration and a professor in the Department of Political Science at the University at Albany SUNY. Dr. Asal is affiliated with the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), a Department of Homeland Security Center of Excellence. Dr. Asal has also been involved in research projects funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Defense Threat Reduction Agency, The National Science Foundation and The Office of Naval Research.   Dr. Asal’s   research focuses on violence by non-state organizations as well as the causes of political discrimination by states against different groups. His recent work looks at what factors impact an organization’s choice of violence, nonviolent contention or mixed strategies and what factors make organizations more likely to use or pursue CBRN capability. Asal specializes in collecting datasets that shine light on topics that have not been explored in a quantitative cross-national fashion with the necessary data.  This work has led to the creation of one of the few time series organizational datasets of terrorist organizations, the Big Allied and Dangerous Dataset, as well as one of the few datasets that has information on comparable violent and nonviolent organizations, the Minorities at Risk Organizational Behavior Dataset.   Asal’s work is multidisciplinary in nature and he has written papers with scholars in the fields of public administration, computer science, criminal justice, sociology, economics, communications and area studies.