Researchers simulate mafia and terrorism recruitment
One of the crucial steps to weaken and eradicate mafia and terrorism is blocking their means of enlisting new forces. The challenge is to change the social conditions that allow their networks to expand and regenerate themselves despite investigations and arrests. “Mafia and terrorism can be fought at the root, by studying how recruitment processes are undertaken in our cities. Computational science can help us,” says Giulia Andrighetto, researcher at the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies at CNR in Rome, “We are developing a simulation model, then a computer model, to understand the recruitment processes and identify possible strategies to limit this phenomenon.” Andrighetto’s colleague Mario Paolucci, in front of his computer, shows us the model used to study terrorist groups: “We simulate the daily activity in a district of Berlin called Neukölln. Here the so-called ‘agents’, representing the population of the neighbourhood, move between homes, offices and meeting places.” “Among the 40,000 agents, three or four are recruiters. If these recruiters encounter a person who is ‘susceptible’, then that person may be recruited. How do you become susceptible? At the base of this model lies a theory called opinion dynamics. Each of these agents has a personal opinion on some facts, and these facts are those that the research has found to be detectors of possible recruitment: for example opinions that people have about the authorities or their perception of discrimination within their group,” he adds. The research has an innovative approach that integrates social and computational sciences. “The factors we incorporated into these models have been selected on the basis of knowledge and meta-analyses provided to us by experts, who are partners within the EU project PROTON, which includes many European countries. There are also countries outside Europe, including Israel and the United States. So, it’s a great consortium that has allowed us to access a lot of knowledge,” says Andrighetto. To study mafia recruitment, researchers work on a different model: it is not a reproduction, although simplified, of a neighbourhood, rather it is a network simulating the social relationships within a certain group which may expand or contract according to the policies that are implemented. “There are parameters that can be varied to attack the phenomenon of organized crime in a preventive [for example with welfare policies, ed. note] or a destructive way [for example with police operations and arrests, ed. note],” explains Paolucci. Therefore it is a new tool that will be made available to “the institutions, the political forces and the judiciary that have to make decisions every day to counter this recruitment phenomenon,” says Andrighetto, “It will give them the opportunity to respond, for example, to questions such as ‘if we increase police on the street, what happens? If we open new places of education and socialisation, what happens?’ The simulations allow us to understand the effects of these types of intervention in both the short and long term, as well as quantify the economic and social costs, which otherwise would not be possible.” Palermo, with its dramatic history linking the Sicilian city to the mafia, will soon test this new instrument. The Municipality is in fact one of the project’s partners. Mayor Leoluca Orlando says: “To arrest a fugitive, five minutes are enough. To convince the son of the fugitive murderer that his father was in the wrong, five minutes are not enough. However, if we don’t convince the son that his murderer father was on the wrong path, we will have a second murderer.” Read the full article: https://www.projectproton.eu/researchers-simulate-mafia-terrorism-recruitment/
Keywords
mafia, crime, psychology, terrorism