ISIS_Governance

ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Charlie Caris is a Research Analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, focusing on Syria. He lived in Alexandria, Egypt,
where he studied Arabic in 2011. He has also served as an intern with ISW’s Egypt and GCC portfolios. He holds a Bachelor’s
Degree with majors in Arabic and Government from Georgetown University.
Samuel Reynolds is an undergraduate at Hamilton College. He has a major in World Politics with a concentration in
International Security and a minor in Computer Science. He served as a research intern at ISW in the Spring 2014 semester.
This is his first publication.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors would like to thank Dr. Kimberly Kagan, Jessica Lewis, Aaron Reese, and Isabel Nassief for their insight and
guidance. An additional thanks to Alex Bilger, Syria and Iraq team interns for translation, and Nichole Dicharry for graphics
and formatting support.
ABOUT THE INSTITUTE
The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) is a non-partisan, non-profit, public policy research organization. ISW advances
an informed understanding of military affairs through reliable research,trusted analysis, and innovative education. ISW is
committed to improving the nation’s ability to execute military operations and respond to emerging threats in order to achieve
U.S. strategic objectives.
About Our Technology Partners
ISW believes superior strategic insight derives from a fusion of traditional social science research and innovative technological
methods. ISW recognizes that the analyst of the future must be able to process a wide variety of information, ranging from
personal interviews and historical artifacts to high volume structured data. ISW thanks its technology partners, Palantir
Technologies and Praescient Analytics, for their support in this innovative endeavor. In particular, their technology and
implementation assistance has supported creating many ISW maps and graphics.
Praescient Analytics is a Veteran Owned Small Business based in Alexandria, Virginia.
Our aim is to revolutionize how the world understands information by empowering
our customers with the latest analytic tools and methodologies. Currently, Praescient
provides several critical services to our government and commercial clients: training,
embedded analysis, platform integration, and product customization.
Palantir Technologies is working to radically change how groups analyze information.
We currently offer a suite of software applications for integrating, visualizing and
analyzing the world’s information. We support many kinds of data including structured,
unstructured, relational, temporal and geospatial.