Resilience to stress in bipartite networks: Application to the Islamic State recruitment network

Networks are resilient to internal failures or external attacks. The resiliency is often beneficial, but there are scenarios where the collapse of a social system, network, or organization would be beneficial to society, such as the dismantlement of terrorist, rebel, or organized crime groups. In this article, we develop a methodology to estimate the effect of knockouts and apply our method to the Islamic State recruitment network. Using our novel application, we demonstrate how coordinated attacks against recruiters might reduce the Islamic State's ability to mobilize new fighters. This analysis has direct implications for studies of network resilience and terrorist recruitment.