Ideologies and Motivations of Terrorist Organizations

Project will involve an effort led by Gary Ackerman (University of Maryland) and Assaf Moghadam (International Institute for Counterterrorism, Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya) to systematically catalog ideological principles and characteristics of terrorist organizations. This effort will move the nature of the data available on terrorist ideologies beyond the imprecise labels in widespread use today in order to facilitate both qualitative and statistical analyses of the relationship between organizations' motivating factors and their actions, thereby addressing an existing empirical gap regarding the degree to which ideology is a determinant of group behavior.