Terrorist Leader Profiles and Comparative Behavioral Analysis

The intent of this book is to answer questions such as which violent leader is more concerned with power and control, and which leader is the most aggressive. The social sciences, particularly linguistic content analysis offer techniques for processing information that leads to answering these types of questions, particularly where it intersects with leadership theories. In this book, a leadership behavioral model is developed and applied to the rhetoric of five terrorist leaders:...
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The intent of this book is to answer questions such as which violent leader is more concerned with power and control, and which leader is the most aggressive. The social sciences, particularly linguistic content analysis offer techniques for processing information that leads to answering these types of questions, particularly where it intersects with leadership theories. In this book, a leadership behavioral model is developed and applied to the rhetoric of five terrorist leaders: Abdullah Yusuf Azzam, Abdelmalek Droukdel, Osama bin Laden, Dokku Umarov Abu Uthman and Ayman al-Zawahiri. The behavioral model consists of 15 characteristics and 86 dimensions within the characteristics, collectively providing detailed comparisons and insight into each of the leaders selected for this research. Linguistic content analysis systems allow for a consistent and repeatable process for quantifying and reporting on the behaviors of people. This utility comes from the ability to associate people with behaviors and actions, and explain those behaviors and actions using leadership theories. Test scores are computed to determine leaders whose speech patterns measure above or below the average when compared to peers. A leader whose score is one degree or more above the standard deviation for a characteristic or one of its dimensional measures exhibits a greater amount of the use of specific language when compared to his peers. In contrast, one degree or more below the standard deviation indicates the leader has less concern for certain language.Characteristic scores represent a rollup of dimensional measures. The characteristics and dimensions of each leader are compared and contrasted with peers to provide insight into terrorist leader behavior, offering the opportunity to define patterns and to apply those patterns toward predicting future behaviors. In addition to predicting behaviors, this information may have utility in the formulation of strategies that exploit or cause intended outcomes, using the leader's behavior as a quantifiable variable.