Terrorism Myths

The Department of Sociology presents a lecture by Gary LaFree, director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland. LaFree says his lecture deals with two characteristics that complicate public policy related to terrorism - terrorism's "black swan" quality and its "burstiness." Black swan incidents are those that fall outside the realm of regular expectations, have a high impact, and defy predictions, he notes. An example of that is 9/11. At the same time, LaFree posits, terrorism tends to be "bursty" - highly concentrated in time and space. "My talk will put high-profile attacks like 9/11 into a broad context by showing how they compare to the thousands of other attacks that have taken place around the world since 1970," he says. "In stark contrast to the 9/11 attacks, many terrorist attacks produce no fatalities, they frequently rely on common, low-technology weapons, they do not involve a great deal of planning, and they are carried out by groups whose life expectancy is less than a year. At the same time, when terrorist organizations find methods that work they use them rapidly and repeatedly. Balancing the mundane everyday nature of terrorism with its occasional capacity for mass destruction is a unique policy challenge of the 21st century." A reception will follow. For more information, contact Enrique Pumar, chair of the sociology department, at pumar@cua.edu .