Abstract for: Dynamics in domestic terrorist organizations

The number of incidents provoked by a domestic terrorist organization shows an oscillatory though irregular behaviour over time. There are periods of time where the organization carries out many incidents whereas during other periods, the activity diminishes or even is null. This paper attempts to explain the reasons of that behaviour considering a causal structure that picks up the interrelations between the actions of the organization and the government of the country where the organization focus mainly its activities. While the terrorist organization controls positive feedback loops, the governmental policies implemented to fight against it are led by negative feedback loops fraught with uncertainty. The dynamic emerging from the interrelations between the positive and the negative feedback loops would explain the evolution of the number of attacks carried by the organization. In order to check the strength of the causal structure a simulation exercise is proposed to characterize the number of incidents of a specific organization during a concrete temporal horizon. The aim is to check the degree of fit between the real data and those obtained by simulation, which includes specific features of the organization to study.