It's being called the Manhattan Project of counterterrorism: great minds coming together from across the insular disciplines of social science, united by national security, to attack a problem until it is solved.
The problem is global terrorism. The scholars will identify and study the groups that plot political violence and the disciples who join them, finding ways to stop the groups before they form, to stop the recruits before they join, to stop the bombs before they detonate.
The minds will come together at the University of Maryland at College Park, a short drive from some of the targets terrorists prize most.
"For every [Osama] bin Laden, there are scores of bin Laden wannabes. For every al Qaeda, there are scores of al Qaeda-like organizations," Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said last month at the campus's student union.
Created in January and called the Homeland Security Center of Excellence for Behavioral and Social Research on Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism, the team of scholars led by a Maryland criminologist aims to study terrorists as they have never been studied before.
Their tools will include a special database of more than 70,000 terrorism incidents, successful and failed, that criminology professor Gary LaFree recently made ready for computer use.
The researchers will conduct surveys in other nations to better understand the societies that produce terrorist groups. They will assemble focus groups in those nations to study shared opinions and beliefs underlying terrorism. They will run laboratory simulations to study how members of a political group might reach the decision to deploy terrorist methods.
The Maryland center, funded with a $12 million grant from the Homeland Security Department, is one of four set up to study aspects of the agency's mission. The University of Southern California leads a center to study potential terrorism threats, and the University of Minnesota and Texas A&M University run separate centers to study risks to agriculture and the food supply. A fifth center, still in the application stage, will study preparedness and recovery in the event of large-scale disasters.
Ridge said that the Maryland academics and partners at other universities would be "engaged, in many ways, in the same kind of enterprise as our troops overseas."
LaFree, who will be the center's director and one of three principal investigators, sees an analogy to the way World War II united American academia in chasing knowledge and scientific advances.
"During World War II, there was this big push in interdisciplinary research in the social sciences," he said, "and I think homeland security could play the same role today."
Terrorists resemble other criminals in some ways, LaFree said. Terrorism, like other crimes, is "disproportionately committed by young people and disproportionately committed by men," he said.
LaFree and his colleagues want to study whether prisons have become a breeding ground for terrorists. Prisons have yielded a disproportionate share of white supremacists and other potentially violent extremists, he said. Intercepted al Qaeda documents have spoken of the potential to recruit in prisons. Two of the most prominent terrorism suspects since the Sept. 11 attacks, foiled shoe bomber Richard Reid and "dirty bomb" suspect Jose Padilla, might have made terrorist connections behind bars, he said.
"The real answer is, we don't know," LaFree said. "We can think of the shoe bomber; we can think of Padilla; we can think of a few good examples. I think it's worth looking at, and I think nobody's done it, to tell the truth."
