Aaron Mannes (born 1970) is an American expert on evaluation of terrorist risk. He has been director of research at the Middle East Media Research Institute and a researcher at the Information and Network Dynamics Laboratory and the Laboratory for Computational Cultural Dynamics at the University of Maryland. In 2004 he published Profiles in Terror: A Guide to Middle East Terrorist Organizations.
Mannes earned a master's degree from St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland.[1] In 2014 he completed a doctorate in Public Policy at the University of Maryland with a dissertation entitled "The Evolving National Security Role of the Vice President".[2] [3]
From 1998 to 2001, Mannes was the director of research at the Middle East Media Research Institute.[4] [5] From 2004 to 2007, he worked on semantic web analysis of terrorism-related issues at the Information and Network Dynamics Laboratory of the University of Maryland.[3] [6] He then became a researcher at the Laboratory for Computational Cultural Dynamics within the university's Institute for Advanced Computer Studies,[4] where he has worked on computerized forecasts of terrorist activity,[7] such as work with V.S. Subrahmanian on predicting attacks by the Indian Mujahideen.[8]
In 2004 Mannes published Profiles in Terror, in which he profiled more than twenty terrorist organizations.[9] With V. S. Subrahmanian and others, he has co-written Computational Analysis of Terrorist Groups: Lashkar-e-Taiba (2012) and Indian Mujahideen: Computational Analysis and Public Policy (2013), and he wrote the chapter "Qualitative Analysis & Computational Techniques for the Counter-Terror Analyst" in Handbook of Computational Approaches to Counterterrorism (2013), edited by Subrahmanian. A 2008 article in the Journal of International Policy Solutions, "Testing the Snake Head Strategy: Does Killing or Capturing its Leaders Reduce a Terrorist Group's Activity?" has been cited as one of several quantitative studies in the first decade of the 21st century casting doubt on the usefulness of leadership decapitation as a counter-terrorism tactic.[10] [11] [12]