Jonathan Mautner Wins CMES AM Thesis Prize for Paper on ISIL and Financing Terrorism

May 22, 2015

Congratulations to graduating master's student Jonathan Mautner, who won the 2015 CMES Thesis Prize for best master's thesis in Middle Eastern Studies. His project was entitled “Financing Jihad: ISIL, Al-Qaeda and the Money Behind Mass Casualty Terrorism,” and his advisor was James Baker.

Using an array of primary and secondary sources, Mautner’s thesis explores the central question “What can we learn from the financial anatomy of Al-Qaeda to help understand the financial organization of ISIL and the threat it poses to the West in terms of mass casualty terrorism?”

In seeking to answer this question, Mautner simultaneously exposes how such questions may in fact be misguided (because mass casualty terrorism is actually not that expensive) while providing a persuasive cautionary tale about how easy it has been to misrepresent, overstate, and obscure deeper questions about the financing, costs, and revenue-generating potential of groups like ISIL. In his meticulously researched essay, Mautner concludes that ISIL is neither as wealthy as has been reported nor as capable of sustaining its wealth as has been feared.

He writes “[A]ssume ISIL is a $26 billion dollar organization with a $200 million surplus. Would that make it a greater threat […] than al-Qaeda on the eve of 9/11? Recent experience indicates that the answer is ‘no,’ because the steadily declining cost of mass casualty terror suggests that the allocation of vast sums to such operations will yield diminishing returns.”

Mautner also concurs with the 9/11 Commission Report, that “a crusade against terrorist financing would not alone achieve security,” and argues that the wealth of a terrorist organization is irrelevant to its success in executing mass casualty terrorism.

Susan M. Kahn, Associate Director and Director of the AM Program at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, lauded the thesis for being “deeply researched” and employing a “very persuasive argumentative style” to make the point that a terrorist group can execute a mass casualty attack with a relatively small investment, beyond which the addition of more dollars will not make a successful attack significantly more likely.

The CMES thesis prize is awarded annually by a faculty committee to recognize the most outstanding master's thesis in Middle Eastern Studies.