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Ashley Anderson

Please describe the program you are participating in.

So I work with the Minorities at Risk Organizational Behavior Study and basically what we do is we research different ethnic groups and try to get information about certain characteristics like whether they participate in the electoral politics, what type of violence they are using, if they’re using violence, and the purpose of this study is really to see what socio-political factors influence a group’s decision to either use terrorism as a strategy or not use terrorism as a strategy.

What is ethnic terrorism and were you aware of such a concept before coming to START?

I think terrorism is basically attacks on civilians, which is the terrorism part, that is perpetrated by an ethnic group or organization that is claiming to represent an ethnic group, and ethnicity is basically you know, shared religion, shared language, etc.  Did I have an idea of what it was? No, I didn’t.  I knew there was ethnic violence, but I just never thought of ethnic terrorism as a separate field. I just kind of thought people may be engaged in terrorism, maybe they were ethnic maybe they weren’t.

What interesting things have you learned about the cultures you have studied thus far?

One of the most interesting things I learned was that most of the groups in the Middle East actually don’t participate in terrorism. I used to think, you know, terrorism was rampant in the Middle East because that’s all you see in U.S. news, but after looking at the data set I think only a third of the groups actually use terrorism as a strategy and some of them only used it for a year and then quit. So that is pretty interesting how many participate in politics and just regular types of protest.

How has this experience made you grow as a student?

As I student I think it’s given me a lot of discipline as far as how to do good research, how to sit and code and go through a lot of articles at a really quick rate, and while that may not seem very relevant to everybody I think that if you’re going to be a graduate student it’s something you’re definitely going to have to do because you’re going to have to engage in your own research projects and  most of the time you have to do it from the ground up, so I’m really glad I’ve gotten this experience.

How has it shaped your plans for your career goals?

I’d say it’s shaped my career goals in two distinct ways. For graduate school, I guess that it has really given me the type of training that I need to be able to do to the research that I have to do in graduate school. It’s also given me a focus for my graduate studies because before I just wanted to do ethnic conflicts, but now that there is this whole ethnic terrorism thing I’m very excited to kind of be at the forefront of this because it’s new research.

Amber Stoesser

Please Describe the Program you are participating in.

The START Curriculum Development Program really seeks to collect resources for instructors who teach terrorism and counter terrorism courses currently here at the University of Maryland and potentially we’re going to expand the program to other universities in the START consortium. We’re also working on developing new programs for instructors at the University of Maryland and again potentially for instructors across the consortium.

Describe the Global Terrorism Database and how it is incorporated in your research.

It is currently the largest open-source database of terrorism incidents across the world, and we’ve really been working on including it in different instructional programs, but the really good thing about it is that it can be used across all different types of courses.

How has this experience made you grow as a student?

It’s really taught me a lot about terrorism in general and specifically about the different components of educating responsibly about terrorism. So often students learn from the media and learn a lot of myths about it and it has been really, really interesting and really good for me as a student to learn about it first hand by using data and also by helping future generations of terrorism scholars learn about it in a responsible and educated manner.

How has it shaped your plans for your career goals?

It really has helped shape my career goals in that I will be starting full time here in the fall as the education assistant here at the university. I’ll be furthering the curriculum development side but also I will be working on managing fellows and scholars like myself in the future, so it’s been very exciting.

How does it feel to contribute to a project that is timely and is extremely relevant to our nation’s security?

It’s really, it’s humbling in a sense to know that I’ve been working on this database and being able to teach students in such an important topic and a topic that will be important for the next x-many years. It’s been a very humbling experience and been very rewarding at the same time to get to work on those factors and everything like that.