Preventing Violence and Terrorism

This project will support a student to create a map of places in Syria that require new sub-national boundaries to stabilize governance and stop violence and its impacts, including death, suffering and refugees.

The chaos in Syria and the rise of extremism in the region pose a complex threat. The experts in studying complex, real world problems have the tools to analyze this conflict, but they need your help.

The New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI) is a research and education institute based in Cambridge, MA. A pioneer in the field of complex systems science, NECSI addresses questions previously considered to be outside of the realm of scientific inquiry, including complex global phenomena like ethnic violence and terrorism. Its goal is to expand the boundaries of knowledge and to solve problems of science and society.

NECSI’s past research   has shed light onto the roots of ethnic violence, showing that one factor can strongly predict instances of sectarian strife: spatial geography of ethnic groups. NECSI has already successfully mapped the sources of ethnic tension in India, the former Yugoslavia , and even Switzerland. Other NECSI research  quantitatively demonstrates how the Arab Spring and Syrian civil war were sparked by high food prices, the result of short-sighted US market policies. This demonstrates the potential impacts of policy decisions and the need for thoughtful analysis.

Understanding the conditions that lead to violence and terrorism can show us the best places to intervene. NECSI would like to study the ethnic geography of Syria, in order to identify sources of potential conflict. We will create a map of locations where interventions are needed to separate ethnic groups, which may serve as a guide for policy decisions.

To build this map, we need your help. As an independent research group, we rely on donors like you to fund our critically important work. Your contributions will support a student researcher to work on this project. He surely would appreciate the help.

By supporting our research, you can help avert ethnic violence and terrorism.

I am the Science Writer at NECSI, working in their Cambridge, MA, headquarters. For more information about our organization, go to necsi.edu .

NECSI is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization and donors will be provided with receipts for their tax deductible contributions.