GSG-REG Talk: Understanding Terrorist Finance

FEATURING:

DR. TIMOTHY WITTIG

TIME: 7 – 8:30 PM –WEDNESDAY 7 NOVEMBER 2012

LOCATION: (13)13.0309

Did you know…

•Most counter terrorist financing law and policy has little or negligible impact on terrorist groups?

•Terrorists interact with both legitimate and criminal businesses?

•Wealth can actually lead militants to give up violence?

•Targeting terrorist finances is a potent (and cost-effective) counterterrorism tool, but only if done correctly.

Dr. Timothy Wittig will explore the above questions in a presentation in which he provides powerful new insights in the financial and economic realities of terrorist groups. Dispelling popular myths, Wittig presents the first unified coherent framework for the systematic analysis of terrorist finance and includes empirical studies of the financing of groups in Europe, Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East. Wittig finds that the activities typically represented as 'terrorist finance', such as donations, criminal activities and weapons procurement, ought to be understood in terms of how terrorists – as socio-political actors – access and interact with flows of economic value rather than as elements of an illicit financial edifice supposedly underpinning global terrorism.