TY  - JOUR
A1  - Stollenwerk, Eric
A1  - Dörfler, Thomas
A1  - Schibberges, Julian
T1  - Taking a new perspective
BT  - Mapping the Al Qaeda network through the eyes of the UN security council
JF  - Terrorism and political violence
N2  - Network analysis has attracted significant attention when researching the phenomenon of transnational terrorism, particularly Al Qaeda. While many scholars have made valuable contributions to mapping Al Qaeda, several problems remain due to a lack of data and the omission of data provided by international organizations such as the UN. Thus, this article applies a social network analysis and subsequent mappings of the data gleaned from the Security Council's consolidated sanctions list, and asks what they can demonstrate about the structure and organizational characteristics of Al Qaeda. The study maps the Al Qaeda network on a large scale using a newly compiled data set. The analysis reveals that the Al Qaeda network consists of several hundred individual and group nodes connecting almost all over the globe. Several major nodes are crucial for the network structure, while simultaneously many other nodes only weakly and foremost regionally connect to the network. The article concludes that the findings tie in well to the latest research pointing to local and simultaneously global elements of Al Qaeda, and that the new data is a valuable source for further analyses, potentially in combination with other data.
KW  - Al Qaeda
KW  - network
KW  - social network analysis
KW  - terrorism
KW  - UN
Y1  - 2016
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1080/09546553.2014.987341
SN  - 0954-6553
SN  - 1556-1836
VL  - 28
IS  - 5
SP  - 950
EP  - 970
PB  - Taylor & Francis
CY  - London
ER  -