Sociology Department Colloquium: Susan Olzak

Please join us for a colloquium being given by Susan Olzak, Professor of Sociology at Stanford University.

"The Impact of Spanning Ideological Categories on Terrorist Organizations"

This presentation builds on a previous paper coauthored with Nandini Roy that examined the impact of category spanning on the lethality of terrorist organizations. This presentation extends this lethality analysis by including measures surrounding the founding conditions of these organizations. I also extend arguments about the effect of category spanning to study its impact on various ways that terrorist organizations disband or disappear. Preliminary findings show that the effect of category spanning on the disbanding of organizations depends the type of ending analyzed. In particular, category spanning significantly increases the chances that an organization will end by military loss, infighting, or arrests, but category spanning has no effect on whether or not the organization evolves into a political party or becomes the ruling regime. For those interested in the first paper from this project, follow this link to find our paper, “The Impact of Category Spanning on the Lethality of Terrorist Organizations.”