A systems approach to analysing sub-state conflicts

The Authors

Steve Wright, The Praxis Centre, Leeds Metropolitan University, Leeds, UK

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Nick Green whose enthusiasm about presenting some of these research findings helped him to produce this paper, and to Stafford Beer who earlier helped in deciding how to present such a conflict systems approach.

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide a more holistic approach to analysing the impact of all the behaviour of a conflict's participants its overall dynamics, using the example of the Northern Irish troubles.

Design/methodology/approach – A novel multivariate time series approach developed by Professor Paul Smoker is presented which can map the dynamics of this conflict and its causal inferences as a series or “systemograms”.

Findings – The case example reveals high levels of autocorrelation in the variety of techniques used by the state security authorities to suppress terrorism, indicating their strong role in maintaining this conflict. When more than one party exhibits such behaviour, the conflict “locks in”.

Research limitations/implications – The work remains preliminary and historical. Data was collected on a month-by-month basis which suggests associated rather than direct causal influence. It would be useful to further explore these findings using data from similar conflicts.

Practical implications – Suggests that some counter-terrorism approaches may be dysfunctional especially those adopting sub-lethal weapons. Provides some insight into behavioural changes required to prevent conflict destabilisation.

Originality/value – Provides a novel conflict research methodology which allows the strong structural dynamics of the conflict to be seen – much the way that elapsed time photography enables hidden processes to be revealed. The raw statistics are presented here.

Article Type:

Research paper

Keyword(s):

Cybernetics; Time series analysis; Conflict management; Northern Ireland.

Journal:

Kybernetes

Volume:

35

Number:

1/2

Year:

2006

pp:

182-194

Copyright ©

Emerald Group Publishing Limited

ISSN:

0368-492X

1 Introduction

This paper is essentially an introduction to a new methodology which uses multivariate time series analyses to examine some of the hidden dynamics of the Northern Irish conflict from 1969 to 1981. It draws on the conceptual work of one of the pioneers of peace research, the late Professor Paul Smoker, to describe systemic conflict relationships between all the parties to this conflict. Using some of the most comprehensive statistical documentation ever compiled on an internal conflict, the methodology reveals the highly structured nature of this conflict over a sustained period of time. The paper and its ancillary web sites present not only the data archive, but also make public the univariate, bivariate and multivariate time series programmes used to make the analyses, for the first time. The outputs are presented in the form of descriptions of associated influence or “systemograms” which can describe the dynamic and changing conflict ecology where apparently disparate conflict behaviour such as house searches, plastic bullet firings and the killing of military personnel, are highly correlated.

Measures of autocorrelation are used to suggest a loss of freedom in the actions of particular conflict participants. Particular attention is given to the use of “less-lethal weapons” and their impact on overall conflict dynamics. What emerges is that sectarian killings form a distinct conflict subset, whereas the counter-insurgency behaviour of the state security forces act as a conflict driver, ratchetting up the conflict as each more severe phase of the counter-insurgency programme is introduced. The paper attempts to introduce a more holistic or whole systems conflict approach which is both dynamic and puzzling, since in many paradoxical respects, it indicates co-operation between the various participants to carry on the conflict at a systemic level. A further concept which remains under explored is that of time level. Like elapsed time photography using different speeds to enable hidden processes to be revealed, the multivariate time series approach allows the in connectivity of the conflict's participants to be studied at different time levels. In nature many processes can only be seen if that right time level is accessed. This technique permits further exploration of that concept in regard to conflict.

The provisional lessons of this study are that sub-state conflict control measures can prove dysfunctional, especially when new technologies are used to attack combatants and civilians alike. The author represents it at this time simply because it potentially opens up the prospect of repeating the research methodology in other sub-state conflicts such as Israel and Iraq, if reliable data were ever to become available. It is also timely because of a push by US military planners, to redefine international law – in such a way that it permits the application of sub-lethal weaponry during sub-state conflicts at a level and on a scale which we have never seen before.

2 Background

The roots of this paper lie in work first undertaken when the author was a postgraduate student at the Richardson Institute, at the University of Lancaster, nearly three decades ago. The early research originally reported in the Journal of Peace Research (JPR) in 1978 outlined a series of nine hypotheses on how sub-lethal acts by state security forces, might dysfunctionally alter a conflict's dynamics in ways which led to a loss of control (Wright, 1978).

The first challenge was to find sufficient and accurate data on a conflict to test the nine hypotheses outlined in the JPR report and then to design a methodology capable of describing inferred causal influences. Fortunately, the Director of the Richardson Institute during that time, the late Professor Paul Smoker, had pioneered the use of new methodologies to examine the ways in which conflict processes could lock in. His time series study of the Sino-Indian conflict during the 1960s (Smoker, 1969) is seminal. Also instructive was Smoker's creative approaches to locating suitable data. According to one surreal account, he found the raw statistics for his Sino-Indian Study in the bins outside the Indian embassy where the bound telex exchanges between China and India were waiting to be cast away. He used this unique treasure trove of statistics to show that it was possible to use time series analysis of just two variables (the frequency and length of these respective telex messages), to predict when this conflict would break down.

Smoker was a founding pioneer of quantitative and simulation approaches in peace and conflict research and he was willing to adapt his Sino-Indian work to the much more complex task of examining the interaction and associated influences of scores of variables over different time levels. Part of that work was written up as a PhD thesis (Wright, 1987); some of it found its way into one of the first volumes on quantitative perspectives on terrorism (Wright, 1981). However, apart from a passing reference to the work in a report for the European Parliament's Scientific and Technological Options Assessment Unit on approaches to testing and assessing the hidden social and political impacts of technologies of political control in 1998 (Wright, 1998), the work lay moribund and too complicated and problematic to excite peace researchers not enthused by mathematics. The author was working on proofs of the 1978 Journal of Peace Research article referred to above when the secret police carried out their first raid on a British University trying to root out anyone who knew about the then top secret echelon system of mass telecommunications interception. The time series research was the only documentation they left behind – perhaps a telling negative indicator of the political utility of quantitative methods?

But for 9/11, the work may have continued to gather dust. However, the new US strategies of ignoring international law, the emergence of new polices seeking to target civilians and combatants together with new weapons technology and the dysfunctional effects of the current military containment strategies in the Middle-East including Iraq and Israel, provoked the author to re-understand the challenge of attempting to quantify or even accurately describe, implied causal inferences in complex conflict dynamics. The following presentation, data, programmes and analyses should not be viewed as finished piece of work but more as a demonstration or illustration of an approach to those whom we hope can reassess their implications and limitations from a deeper understanding of statistics than the author possesses. In many senses this is a tribute and a plea to continue the creative work of Paul Smoker, whose imagination created the methodologies which are applied to illustrate this study. It is, however, argued that a whole systems approach is essential if we are to understand why certain peacekeeping functions and approaches do not work.

3 Testing hypotheses on destabilizing conflict processes in Northern Ireland

The hypotheses outlined in Wright (1978) were originally designed to examine the hidden and longer term impacts of so-called “less-lethal weapons” such as plastic bullets – an area of armaments which has subsequently become much more significant as the US and other states develop new technologies for fighting asymmetric warfare after 9/11.

In short, the theory went like this “In certain circumstances, the use of less-lethal weapons may be considered as an over corrective response.” Through a cybernetic process of destabilizing feedback, over corrective responses can bring about an opposite effect to the one intended. Instead of containment, an over corrective response would lead towards an induction of uncontrollable conflict and further polarization. Thus attempts to control a situation with over corrective responses are thwarted because in effect the resulting system works against itself. This early study argued that the impact effectiveness of such technological\fixes would decline over time so that increasing amounts would be required to obtain the same powers of control. If powers of control were lost in this way, then a resurgence of the phenomena under control might develop as the fix lost potency. If the underlying dynamics were not realized, reliance on ever more powerful fixes would prove counterproductive as such cycles of destabilization would repeat themselves.

The paper argued that even if these hypotheses were true, it was likely that in the short term such weapons would appear to be an effective means of crowd control.

The possibility that they constitute a destabilizing factor in a conflict might only be revealed by a study which correlated their effects on a range of indicators for longer periods of time.

One methodological challenge was that an input of aggression into a conflict by one party during one point in time which results in an output of retaliatory aggression at another period of time, the form in which this output manifests itself might be quite different from the form of input.

The British Army in Northern Ireland had adopted strategies from their Land War Operations Volume 111 which were essentially “counter-revolutionary operations”. A key concern here therefore was that if a successively more oppressive set of phased counter-insurgency strategies comprised the software which programmed the behaviour of the dominant system of socio political control, then a self generating conflict could ensue. Thus the introduction of the second most severe phase of the counter-insurgency techniques may be legitimated through the waves of violent retaliation amplified by the use of less-lethal weapons during the first phase. Subsequently, phase two is likely to generate further dissent, which if handled by even more severe riot weapon deployment, may destabilize the situation sufficiently to legitimate the introduction of phase three and so on. Of course there were other factors and approaches applied which also played a role such as the coercive mechanisms used to facilitate internment without trial and the high levels of abuse suffered by the detainees.

The parallels with the current conflict in Iraq and Israel reveal similar dynamics but with rather more lethal than less lethal force being deployed. The sickening images of Abu Ghraib remind us that the sensory deprivation techniques using hooding and violent softening up treatments have transformed into standard operating procedures. But the concerns here are similar in that if the authorities fail to realize the impacts of their chosen conflict containment approaches, they risk having to deploy the entire gamut of the counter-insurgency spectrum of operations, in a manner tantamount to self-fulfilment. For Northern Ireland, even a crude time point analysis of political killings graphed against changes in socio-political control tactics, appeared to support this thesis (Figure 1). Of course in the case of the Northern Ireland conflict, the authorities were willing to release detailed statistical data. In Iraq, the coalition forces merely count their own dead and have refused to do body counts on killed oppositional forces or civilians caught in the crossfire for fear of raising echoes of Vietnam. However, one study published in the Lancet in October 2004 suggests nearly 100,000 casualties (http://image.thelancet.com/extras/04art10342web.pdf).

4 Data considerations

Clearly, establishing the statistics of any sub-state conflicts is always going to be problematic: Northern Ireland was no different, almost every provider of information might be accused of having a partisan view. The problem with the first crude model was that its description was based on the changes in only one empirical conflict indicator, namely the overall death count. It was, however, fruitful in suggesting that there were unforeseen relationships between state and non-state conflict activities which could be measured. It also provides a rudimentary framework to consider such changes. It also implied that the influence of a conflict action may persist within a conflict system, long after the event.

The challenge in attempting to develop even a basic holistic approach to just describing the Northern Irish conflict raised fundamental questions about how to select representative conflict indicators, how to find such data and how could substantial amounts of information on this conflict be presented in a meaningful way? The challenge was not just academic since any commentator on this conflict and others of its ilk is likely to draw fire because of inferred political bias. Paul Smoker saw a clear need for the process of interpretation to be clearly separated from the actual conflict description so that subjective bias could be eliminated as far as possible. We decided to pick variables that characterised incidents which most people would regard as being symptomatic of internal war. These included activities of state security personnel (such as house and vehicle searches, gas and plastic bullets fired, internment; paramilitary activists (shooting attacks, bomb explosions, Catholics assassinated, protestants assassinated, state security personnel (army, RUC and UDR) killed or wounded, kneecappings, etc.) and civilian victims of the conflict processes (e.g. civilians killed and wounded). Few other studies at the time had anything like this data – except perhaps for the Italian studies on terrorism published by Carlton and Scaherf (1981) but these had nothing like the level and frequency of events which characterised the Northern Irish troubles.

Taken together, these variables provide a significant measure of the Northern Ireland conflict's level and intensity. The data was collected from official sources such as the Northern Ireland Office, and the British Army and RUC Press Offices in the form of a monthly breakdown from 1969 to 1981. The full dataset and source references are provided here for the first time (www.imresearch.org/PraxisCentre/NIrelandStudy).

Of course all such conflict data are problematic since each “event” is a summation of a much richer set of conflict processes and it is more usual for conflict participants to disagree on conflict statistics than agree (Omega Foundation, 2003) in regard to baton round figures, for example). However, it is arguable that this conflict is better documented than almost any other of its type and provides researchers with a unique framework to understand more about the conflict dynamics at work in what is now known as military operations other than war (MOUT).

5 Some methodological considerations

Briefly, the univariate TSA enables a description of the level of influence which any variable's past behaviour exerts on that variables subsequent activity. This autocorrelation measure as it is termed provides an important indicator of emergent processes especially a loss of freedom. Highly auto-correlated behaviour is especially important since it is often associated with episodes where conflict participants lock in to their own conflict behaviour and become less responsive to actions of other conflict actors. In Figure 2, for example, a univariate time series analysis of riot munitions (CS gas cartridges, grenades and rubber bullets) shows not just highly predictable behaviour but also consistent mean level moving averages over considerable periods of time, as if the supply itself was the greatest determinant of the number of sub-lethal munitions fired.

The bivariate TSA enables a description to be made of the influence one variable's behaviour has on another, or more precisely, it provides a measure of the extent to which processes associated with the formation of variable A are implicated in the processes associated with the formation of variable B.

The multivariate TSA is a more complex technique, created to display the extent to which one variable's behaviour is implicated in the influences responsible for generating all the others, as it and they change over time. More precisely, it quantifies the overall connectivity of the influences generating all the variables; a measure of the strength of particular linkages together with an indication of the direction of any flows of associated influence which are revealed.

Smoker designed the technique as a multivariate cluster time series analysis, that is an amalgam of two different techniques, i.e. a clustering procedure and a time series analysis procedure. The clustering procedure is essentially a form of typal analysis derived from the work of McQuitty (1957). As a component of this methodology it is used to define each variable's time series as a member of a type, if its behaviour is more like the behaviour of other members of that type than it is like anything else. The time series components are derived from the works of Smoker (1969), Quenouille (1952) and Wold (1949).

The time series element serves to ascertain the direction and strength of any associated influences flowing within and between variables. The technical conventions, concepts and measures used to perform these measures together with the technical methodologies for interpreting the results are provided in our Praxis web site for those who wish to undertake a more detailed scrutiny (www.imresearch.org/PraxisCentre/NIrelandStudy). The web site also provides detailed instruction on constructing a map of all these influences from the output of the multivariate TSA. This is an important element of this approach, since the descriptive systems map of flows of associated influences or “systemograms” can then be compared with other conflict data to make comparisons and evaluations of the impact of policies or any particular episode or activity on the overall conflict dynamics. The actual process of drawing out the “systemograms” is laboriously time consuming. However, in 1985, a research student at UMIST, Walker (1985) managed to semi-automate the process and this work is also available for anyone interested in taking such work further.

6 Mapping key participants contributions to a conflict's dynamics

Mapping out the associated influence of key indicative variables of all the representative participants in a conflict, provides a more systemic picture of the conflict and enables us to at least describe the level and extent to which participants are actually cooperating to structure and maintain their conflict behaviour. It also enables us to identify the highly auto-correlated activities of any group which has in effect become autistic, being most influenced by their own behaviour rather than any of the other conflict participants. For the purpose of this study, a complete output of systemograms for time series 24, has been created on the associated url (www.imresearch.org/PraxisCentre/NIrealndStudy). Here we will discuss only some of the structures and sub-systems emerging from a typical sequence and how this methodology could be applied to other conflicts experiencing similar forms of conflict behaviour.

In many ways, the multivariate systemogram approach enables a broad trawl of the data sets to actually identify highly structured behaviour. In practice, sub-systems emerge either between or within variable clusters as a consequence of undertaking this tracking exercise on the “systemograms”. Variables within each sub-system develop certain patterns which sustain as typical features within each systemogram. These can be characterised as follows.

Active variables which have only strands of influence emanating out from them. They act on other variables rather than being significantly acted upon themselves; reactive variables have only strands of influence feeding into them; mixed variables both give and receive influence from other variables; interactive variables neither receive or give influence but correspond their influence with other variables to which they are linked; highly auto-correlated variables which feed a large part of their influence back into themselves indicating a pattern of self generation. Such variables are easy to spot in the systemograms since they are represented by conspicuous concentric circles or semi-circles. Eyeballing an illustrative systemogram sequence is perhaps the best way to understand this methodology.

7 An illustrative systemogram sequence

If the conflict time sequence contained in www.imresearch.org/PraxisCentre/NIrealndStudy, is examined systemogram by sytemogram, it is possible to discover whether the changing influence processes between different variables or within variable clusters are growing stronger or weaker. The change in the strength of the systemic process is revealed by the change in the level of correlation over selected time periods. Strengthening processes are associated with an increase in the level of correlation, whilst processes which are weakening, exhibit a decline in the level of correlation.

The systemograms used here (Figures 3 and 4) are provided simply to illustrative the methodological approach but a full analysis can potentially determine whether any political, military or NGO decision, policy or tactic is significant by empirically establishing when the particular “event” entered the sequence. If we define the influence horizon of an event as being the time period limit of the systemogram when its influence is first felt, the relevant systemogram TP=tn+L.

Where t=the chronological number of the appropriate month; n=the series length and L=the maximum time lag used.

For example, if we are interested in discovering whether or not the decision to introduce internment produced a measurable influence on the dynamics of the conflict, then we can find the first relevant systemogram if we know the following:

  1. t=August 1971 (=12+12+8)=32
  2. n=24 (in this illustrative sequence)
  3. L=2 (in this particular study)
  4. TP=32−24+2=systemogram 10

In systemogram 1, the most significant patterns of influence to emerge concern reactive variables, all of which are strongly auto-correlated. These include the process of vehicle searches (81); house searches (75) bomb explosions (93) and shooting incidents (89). By systemogram 5, these processes have structured with strong links between them. Bomb explosions and house searches are mutually influencing each other and bomb explosions are actively influencing vehicles searched (83). Some of these links confirm common sense – e.g. its natural to up searches of vehicles if bomb attacks are taking place but in systemogram 1 baton round firings are strongly acting on military killed (93). This is an interesting finding since traditionally any killing of military personnel is usually associated with punitive house searches, e.g. not just in Northern Ireland but in Iraq and Israel where the military action is so severe, that civilian houses are destroyed. In this first sytemogram, military killed is empirically described as actively influencing houses searched (87+84).

By systemogram 9, CS fired forms a separate cluster, reacting to the influence from Republican Internment (74 and 55); baton rounds are driving influence towards bomb explosions (75), which continues to drive influence into house searches. The assassination of Protestants and Catholics has become interactively linked (88) as military personnel killed continues to drive influence towards vehicles searched (82) as both variables yield high levels of autocorrelation (84 and 80, respectively) suggesting that these aspects of the conflict processes have become self organising structures. (A full preliminary breakdown is provided in Wright (1987).)

If we tabulate the auto-correlated variables across the entire time sequence (Figure 5), we should expect a conflict “lock in” when several of the different conflict participant groups manifest some degree of autistic behaviour as measured by highly auto-correlated variables. In fact a series of “lock ins” emerges. At the beginning of the conflict, government searching and firing of CS was locked in with paramilitary bombings; shooting and killing of army personnel, until time period 25. A short phase of lock in emerges from the period 25 to 33 and then another from time period 33 to 44 and so on. According to Beer (1980):

… this is a system in homeostatic equilibrium. Each part is structuring the other. So the structuring goes mutually on. If one part stops in this creative, evolutionary process, then the whole system breaks down. In Northern Ireland terms that is, the war is over.

Exactly why so many of the British Army reactions developed such highly deterministic traits is a question which must be answered by future studies. Obviously military behaviour, by definition is variety reducing and incorporates standard operating procedures which can be systematically taught. The physical survival of urban guerrilla activists on the other hand, often literally depends on their unpredictability. The “variety increasing” aspects of their behaviour enables them to remain effective, alive and at large. The key issue here is of course the possibility that certain military doctrines are actually dysfunctional – in other words conflict exacerbating rather than conflict resolving.

The presence of so much self-legitimating behaviour in the activities of military personnel should be of concern. Traditional counter-terrorist theories suggest such wars must be fought by taking out the hard men. Yet when freedom of decision is lost in the military group of participants on the level described above, the efficacy of such an approach to conflict resolution must be deeply questioned. The range of associated activities in this process appear to have just as much efficacy in evolving more hard men to get.

8 Conclusions

Having said that, it must be acknowledged that such quantitative approaches to whole systems conflict analysis are fraught with difficulties and their findings can seem opaque to non statisticians – including most policy makers. Anecdotal analyses is much easier to churn out and is far more accessible to sound-bite formation. Indeed any conference bringing the approaches of mathematical and conflict analyses together in system's terms is unusual. Richardson's conflict models are much less well known today that his weather forecasting equations – perhaps because with the advent of computers, his erstwhile laborious log calculations can now be instantly converted into understandable weather pictures that most of us can grasp (Richardson, 1960).

So few people work in these fields. A 1996 analysis of terrorism research in terms of the evolution of a body of knowledge, identified just 32 major members of the community (Reid, 1997). And the majority of these contributors make qualitative rather than quantitative contributions. Of course after 9/11, the media appetite for terrorist and conflict experts has been voracious but few new quantitative approaches are emerging except at the most basic death count level. Of course there has emerged a plethora of chronologies – many of which are open to challenge about objectivity and reliability. And even that is revealing since as was mentioned earlier in the ongoing Iraq conflict, the coalition partners would appear not to be as seriously documenting non coalition casualties, or at least not outside the prisons where different agendas for documenting conflict activities prevail.

A key question is utility. What can such studies tell us or reveal that is not more accessible from more anecdotal- or story-based analyses? The short answer is they can yield tremendous insight into the hidden structuring of conflict processes. This becomes increasingly important as the tactics and technologies being offered for asymmetrical warfare alter not only the casualty count but also the selection of who becomes a designated casualty. Nevertheless, such statistical studies need to be capable of showing a facility for generating testable hypotheses. A concern of this study has been to put reliable conflict data in the public domain for use by other researchers to do so. This sharing is slowly helping to birth new approaches.

For example, White and Falkenberg-White, in a ground breaking piece of research applied regression analysis to some of the data collated here and discovered that deaths caused by loyalist paramilitaries increased the number of persons killed by British soldiers. They concluded that one explanation for this curious finding given that mostly of those killed by the army were Catholics, might be evidence of “some kind of co-ordinated activity between Loyalist paramilitaries and members of the security services” (White and Falkenberg White, 1995). Whilst there is evidence now since 2002 to support such claims – especially in the light of the Steakknife double agent fiasco, at other moments alternative agendas have emerged including protecting key members of Sein Fein to ensure the peace process was not derailed (Moloney, 2002).

A further possibility as yet not followed, is that other, ostensibly independent variables may be systematically linked to conflicts in ways which seem counter-intuitive. It is often remarked that more people have died in car accidents in Northern Ireland than in the troubles themselves, but no real research on possible hidden links has emerged yet. This methodology would enable other, less obvious conflict pathways to be measured and initially described and this would certainly be an area where even in conflict ridden countries such as Israel or Iraq, good data in principle may be sought.

Many of the counter-insurgency spasm wars which are characterising the early part of this century in Afghanistan, Israel and Iraq, are generating similar activities to the conflict in Northern Ireland: shooting incidents, car bombing episodes, civilians and military personnel killed, house and vehicle searches and internment, abuse and torture of suspected terrorists. If the authorities ever release their weekly or monthly statistical data on these wars, it would be worth establishing whether similar dysfunctional conflict structures and conflict “lock-ins” emerged.

In conclusion, we have entered a time when public presentation and information management are as much a part of conflict processing, as implementing military theories of peace keeping and conflict reconciliation. During periods of military intervention, the costs of following a misinformed policy are huge, yet the level of efforts and resources devoted to independent conflict assessment and monitoring activity are minuscule. During future periods of conflict, we need to find a way of more independently collecting the raw data of war if we are ever to effectively evaluate existing policies, especially the new “wars against terror”. Without such objectivity we are all prey to propaganda. The important lesson from Northern Ireland is that if we are to truly understand future armed conflict dynamics, accurate data is paramount.

There needs to be much more pressure on governments to provide it and to set up structures which enable sufficient accountability for modern states to be legally challenged about the veracity of their statistical conflict data. The challenge to future researchers is to create descriptions and simulations of war which have sufficient truth content to challenge. One day we may even have an official operations research programme dedicated to sustaining peace.

ImageMilitary counter insurgency phases and political killings in Northern Ireland
Figure 1Military counter insurgency phases and political killings in Northern Ireland

ImageHigh levels of autocorrelation and associated “Loss of Freedom” in riot weapon use
Figure 2High levels of autocorrelation and associated “Loss of Freedom” in riot weapon use

ImageSystemogram
Figure 3Systemogram

ImageSystemogram 2
Figure 4Systemogram 2

Image“Lock In” profiles of Northern Ireland conflict participants 1969-1981
Figure 5“Lock In” profiles of Northern Ireland conflict participants 1969-1981

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About the author

Steve Wright is a Visiting Professor in the School of Information, Associate Director of the Praxis Centre and an SSRC Global Security Research Fellow. Born in Newcastle, he began his academic career in Manchester studying Liberal Studies in Science. The course inspired him to look at the political consequences of innovation, which he followed through with postgraduate study at Lancaster University's Richardson Institute, looking at “New Police Technologies and Sub-State Conflict Control”. Alas, the work progressed too well and resulted in the intelligence agency of a foreign power, America's NSA, instructing British Police to raid Lancaster University (motto Omnibus Patet Veritas – ironcially “Truth Lies Open to All”). In 1985, he became Head of Manchester City Council's Police Monitoring Unit, watching the local police force. He went on to become Director of the Omega Foundation in 1989, working with Amnesty International and the European Commission to track the transfer of military security and police technologies. He consequently developed a healthy appetite for travel and a sound expertise in sub-lethal weapons, writing for the Guardian and Le Monde Diplomatique. In 1998, Steve authored the European Parliament's widely influential STOA report on the Echelon Global Spy System which revealed the extent to which all communications are read by Yorkshire's Menwith Hill station, which taps two million calls an hour. The US “war against terror” and its human rights fallout has pre-occupied him ever since and he became Chair of the trustees of Privacy International in 2004. His current work covers information warfare, new border control technologies (he is a trustee of the Mines Advisory Group) and the emergence of weapons of mass paralysis.