Aaron Mannes
Aaron Mannes (born 1970) is an American expert on evaluation of terrorist risk. He has been director of research at the Middle East Media Research Institute and a researcher at the Information and Network Dynamics Laboratory and the Laboratory for Computational Cultural Dynamics at the University of Maryland. In 2004 he published Profiles in Terror: A Guide to Middle East Terrorist Organizations.
Education
Mannes earned a master's degree from St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland.<ref name=author>"About the Author", Profiles in Terror, archived at the Wayback Machine on May 24, 2005.</ref> In 2014 he completed a doctorate in Public Policy at the University of Maryland with a dissertation entitled "The Evolving National Security Role of the Vice President".<ref>Aaron Mannes, "The Evolving National Security Role of the Vice President", PhD dissertation, University of Maryland, 2014.</ref><ref name=PP>"CISSM Forum: The Whole Equation: The Vice President as Advisor", University of Maryland School of Public Policy, November 2014.</ref>
Career
From 1998 to 2001, Mannes was the director of research at the Middle East Media Research Institute.<ref name=Politico>Arena profile: Aaron Mannes", Politico, retrieved May 24, 2017.</ref><ref>Defence Journal, Volume 10, Issues 9-11, 2007, p. 63.</ref> From 2004 to 2007, he worked on semantic web analysis of terrorism-related issues at the Information and Network Dynamics Laboratory of the University of Maryland.<ref name=PP/><ref>"MINDSWAP and Profiles in Terror", in Brandy E. King and Kathy Reinold, Finding the Concept, Not Just the Word: A Librarian's Guide to Ontologies and Semantics, Oxford: Chandos, 2008, Template:ISBN, p. 188.</ref> He then became a researcher at the Laboratory for Computational Cultural Dynamics within the university's Institute for Advanced Computer Studies,<ref name=Politico/> where he has worked on computerized forecasts of terrorist activity,<ref>Jim Giles, "And here is tonight's conflict forecast...", New Scientist, March 15, 2008, {{#invoke:CS1 identifiers|main|_template=doi}}: "Aaron Mannes of the University of Maryland is also using the model to develop predictions for the coming year. ... [A]t the request of New Scientist he took a look at what the model says about the present violence in Gaza." (Payment required).</ref> such as work with V.S. Subrahmanian on predicting attacks by the Indian Mujahideen.<ref>"Laboratory for Computational Cultural Dynamics" Template:Webarchive, University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, retrieved May 24, 2017.</ref>
Publications
In 2004 Mannes published Profiles in Terror, in which he profiled more than twenty terrorist organizations.<ref>"Muslim Sects and Militant Groups", Choice, Volume 45, Issues 1-3, 2007, pp. 50–53.</ref> With V. S. Subrahmanian and others, he has co-written Computational Analysis of Terrorist Groups: Lashkar-e-Taiba (2012) and Indian Mujahideen: Computational Analysis and Public Policy (2013), and he wrote the chapter "Qualitative Analysis & Computational Techniques for the Counter-Terror Analyst" in Handbook of Computational Approaches to Counterterrorism (2013), edited by Subrahmanian. A 2008 article in the Journal of International Policy Solutions, "Testing the Snake Head Strategy: Does Killing or Capturing its Leaders Reduce a Terrorist Group's Activity?" has been cited as one of several quantitative studies in the first decade of the 21st century casting doubt on the usefulness of leadership decapitation as a counter-terrorism tactic.<ref>Steven J. Barela, Legitimacy and Drones: Investigating the Legality, Morality and Efficacy of UCAVs, London / New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis, 2016, Template:ISBN, p. 220.</ref><ref>Stephanie Carvin, "The Trouble with Targeted Killing", Security Studies, Volume 21, Issue 3, 2012, pp. 529–55, {{#invoke:CS1 identifiers|main|_template=doi}}: "[P]erhaps the most devastating evidence indicating that policies of targeted killing are ineffective come from a series of quantitative studies published in scholarly journals over the last decade, particularly Hafez and Hatfield, Jordan, Kaplan et al., and Aaron Mannes".</ref><ref>Arian Sharifi, "The Futility of Insurgent Leader Assassination", Ex-Patt Magazine of Foreign Affairs, Spring 2014, pp. 7–18.</ref>
References
External links
- TerrorWonk, Mannes's blog