Benjamin Acosta

Dr. Benjamin Acosta is a senior network analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). Prior to joining FDD, Benjamin worked in academia and private intelligence.

Benjamin holds a Ph.D. in political science from Claremont, an M.A. in Middle East studies from Ben-Gurion University, and a B.A. in international relations from California State University. He also studied at the Center for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies at the American University of Beirut and held a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Political Science at The Ohio State University. Benjamin’s previous appointments include: chief data officer at tech startup Arcturus Intelligence, assistant professor of political science and international studies at Louisiana State University, lecturer of government at IDC Herzliya, and senior fellow at the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT). In 2017, Benjamin had the honor of representing the State of Israel as a member of its academic delegation to NATO.

Benjamin’s research often combines large-n data analyses with process tracing, ethnographic field investigations, or rich historical analyses. Over the last 15 years, he has constructed a number of datasets: The Revolutionary and Militant Organizations Dataset (REVMOD), which documents the attributes, allies, and adversaries of more than 500 contemporary militant organizations at yearly intervals; the Suicide-Attack Network Dataset (SAND), which marks the most comprehensive dataset on contemporary suicide attacks; the 1993 Terrorism and Political Violence Dataset, which reconstructs the lost Global Terrorism Database (GTD) data for the year 1993; and, he co-constructed the Rebel Organization Leaders (ROLE) Database, which codes numerous variables related to the personal attributes of 488 modern rebel, insurgent, and terrorist leaders.

His scholarly articles appear in The Journal of Politics, Journal of Peace Research, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Terrorism and Political Violence, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, Cooperation and Conflict, Journal of Global Security Studies, the Middle East Journal, and Middle East Quarterly. Benjamin is also an optioned screenwriter, telling stories in the genres of neo-noir, near-future sci-fi, and neo-Western.