Hezbollah: The Dynamics of Recruitment

Abstract

Abstract : Hezbollah, a successful and respected terrorist organization, has survived over a 28 year period by creating and extending its mobilization base. Hezbollah's recruitment process has contributed to its successful growth. However, little is known about the recruitment processes employed by this organization. There is little to no data available, except for those figures published by Hezbollah through their formal communications. The purpose of this monograph is to examine Hezbollah's recruitment process combining the strengths of political science and mathematical modeling communities by applying qualitative analysis and quantitative modeling to the dynamics of terrorist recruitment. The novel contributions of this monograph are: [1] it addresses an area seldom examined in terrorism research, the dynamics of recruitment; [2] it blends techniques from deterministic mathematical modeling with qualitative techniques of case study analysis from the political science discipline; and [3] it provides a novel model of recruitment based on enzyme kinetic dynamics. The results of this monograph comprise four findings that may be useful to the military researcher. The first finding suggests that the indirect approach is more likely to degrade a recruiter's ability to recruit than the direct approach of targeting the recruiter. Building on the first finding, the second finding implies that reducing the following parameters (in order of preference) contribute to the degradation of recruiter's ability to conduct the recruitment process: non-suicide violence, education, and then the numbers of recruiters. The third finding highlights logistic growth as a driver of adaptation for Hezbollah's recruitment process. Building on the third finding, the fourth finding illustrates the utility of using the logistic growth model to estimate the potential recruitment pool of Shiite youths in the absence of validated data.