Dr. Hugh Neary is a Professor and Associate Director in the Vancouver School of Economic at the University of British Columbia. He has written on the economics of conflict and considers terrorism to be an aspect of the more general field of conflict.
He is currently conducting research in partnership with Mukesh Eswaran, working on a project that models terrorism as a response to fundamental shocks to identity suffered by a group/ethnicity. This social-identity shock will trigger us-solidarity and them-enmity behavioural dispositions in the affected group and may lead individuals at an extreme of the distribution of behavioural types to undertake active terrorist actions. Modelling the rational outcomes of us-solidarity and them-enmity behaviour in an individual and social (game-theory) context will provide us with hypotheses about terrorism that we expect to test against relevant data.
