What factors make it more likely that an organization uses violence? This paper builds a model that tries to answer this question and validate the model using out of sample testing. This paper draws from a new data base created through a collaboration between the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of and the Minorities at Risk (MAR) Project focusing on ethno-political organizations in the Middle East to test factors that make it more or less likely that an organization will choose to use violence. In this paper we argue that the choice of violence is impacted the ideological motivations of the organization , the capability of the organization, the behavior of the government and the place of the organization in “regular politics.” Analytically we use multiple approaches for data massaging, classification and forecasting to achieve high classification accuracies (measure in terms of precision, recall, and F-measure).
Publication Information
Asal, Victor, and Kihoon Choi, Krishna Pattipati. 2009. "Forecasting the Use of Violence in Ethnic-political Organizations: Middle Eastern Minorities, At Risk Minorities and the Choice of Violence." Presented at the ISA National Conference, New York, NY. http://citation.allacademic.com/meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/3/1/2/1...