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]
Career
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]
Publications
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]
^Defence Journal, Volume 10, Issues 9-11, 2007, p. 63.
^"MINDSWAP and Profiles in Terror", in Brandy E. King and Kathy Reinold, Finding the Concept, Not Just the Word: A Librarian's Guide to Ontologies and Semantics, Oxford: Chandos, 2008, ISBN9781843343196, p. 188.
^Jim Giles, "And here is tonight's conflict forecast...", New Scientist, March 15, 2008, doi:10.1016/S0262-4079(08)60668-5: "Aaron Mannes of the University of Maryland is also using the model to develop predictions for the coming year. ... [A]t the request of New Scientist he took a look at what the model says about the present violence in Gaza." (Payment required).
^Steven J. Barela, Legitimacy and Drones: Investigating the Legality, Morality and Efficacy of UCAVs, London / New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis, 2016, ISBN9781472446879, p. 220.
^Stephanie Carvin, "The Trouble with Targeted Killing", Security Studies, Volume 21, Issue 3, 2012, pp. 529–55, doi:10.1080/09636412.2012.706513: "[P]erhaps the most devastating evidence indicating that policies of targeted killing are ineffective come from a series of quantitative studies published in scholarly journals over the last decade, particularly Hafez and Hatfield, Jordan, Kaplan et al., and Aaron Mannes".
