“Black Swans and Burstiness: Countering Myths about Terrorism.”

RSVP now for Gary LaFree’s upcoming Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Lecture at 4 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 4 in Price George’s Room of Stamp Student Union. A reception will follow. The event is free and open to the public (so invite your friends and loved ones) and a reception will follow, but an RSVP should be made to infostart@start.umd.edu.

Gary is presenting on “Black Swans and Burstiness: Countering Myths about Terrorism.” He’ll discuss how terrorism has two characteristics that make it very challenging from a public policy perspective—its 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 prediction.  Good examples include the four coordinated terrorist attacks on the United States that took place on September 11, 2011.  At the same time, terrorism tends to be bursty; highly concentrated in time and space.

His talk will put high profile attacks like 9/11 into a much broader context by showing how they differ from the thousands of other attacks that have taken place around the world since 1970.  Thus, in stark contrast to the 9/11 attacks, we will learn that 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 often use them employ them rapidly.  Balancing the mundane everyday nature of terrorism with its occasional capacity for mass destruction is a unique policy challenge of the twenty-first century.