Dr. Levi West will articulate a framework for understanding the manner in which innovative forms of violence, narrative and communicative dynamics, and emergent information and communications technologies can be integrated by terrorists and other violent non-state actors to achieve strategic effect.

The framework will be applied to a contemporary case study, namely the Islamic State, while additionally making use of historical case studies including transatlantic anarchist terrorism in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and political violence undertaken in support of the liberation of Palestine in the aftermath of the 1967 War. The framework seeks to provide explanatory insight into the means by which asymmetrically weak actors are able to cause disproportionately consequential strategic effect on their adversaries. The framework can assist with understanding the non-kinetic purposes and impacts of terrorist violence, while also providing a degree of insight into the strategic utility of highly calibrated, choreographed, targeted violence. In identifying a consistent strategic calculus that underpins terrorist violence across temporal and ideological contexts, the framework also suggests that it is possible to understand the enduring nature and strategic logic to terrorist violence, despite its frequently changing character.

About the Speaker

Dr. Levi West is the Director of Terrorism Studies at the Australian Graduate School of Policing and Security at Charles Sturt University in Canberra, and the Executive Director of Leviathan Analysis, a bespoke consulting firm that provides research, advisory, and professional development services to the law enforcement and national security sectors.

Moderator

Paul Lushenko is a U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel and a PhD student in International Relations at Cornell University.

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Presented by the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies. Co-sponsored by the Department of Government and the Gender and Security Sector Lab.