Complexity and Social Networks Blog: The Venn diagram of "terrorist" and "network"

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15 March 2007

The Venn diagram of "terrorist" and "network"

Alex's recent post on Dark Networks started me thinking about how and why network structures evolve. This turned into a conversation with my friend and colleague Jon Lindsey, a PhD candidate in Political Science at MIT and an intelligence officer in the Navy soon to deploy in Iraq. He suggested that the network form is actual quite fragile with respect to organizational forces: given the opportunity, many of these organizations will grow quite hierarchical with the standard bureaucracies we would expect to see else where.

Sure enough, from the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point comes a project called "Harmony and Disharmony: Exploiting Al-Qa'ida's Organizational Vulnerabilities". The full report (116 pp, pdf) makes for an interesting read, but I am fascinated by the translated original sources that are included. I was particularly drawn to the Al-Qaeda employment contract, with details as mundane as:

The bachelor Mujahed qualifies for a round trip ticket to his country after one year from
joining the organization. He can take a one month vacation. He doesn't get reimbursed if
the ticket is not used, but he has the right to change it to a ticket to perform
the pilgrimage. This period starts from the date of joining AL-QAEDA.

The married Mujahed and his family qualify for round trip tickets to their country of origin
after two years, and one month vacation. Tickets can not be reimbursed if unused.

This seems as bureaucratic as any employment agreement that I've signed, with the exception of the organizational goals. This document was discovered in Afghanistan, where the the administration of the organization appears to have become more mundane that the "4th Generation warfare" theory might suggest. Absent the constraints of a hostile, ubiquitous surveillance and law enforcement state, Al Qaeda starts to look a little like The Office.

At the same time, the demand for a network analysis approach for understanding and combating terrorism might be coming even more important. The Washington Post reports that

With new plots surfacing every month, police across Europe are arresting significant numbers of women, teenagers, white-skinned suspects and people baptized as Christians -- groups that in the past were considered among the least likely to embrace Islamic radicalism.

The demographics of those being arrested are so diverse that many European counterterrorism officials and analysts say they have given up trying to predict what sorts of people are most likely to become terrorists. Age, sex, ethnicity, education and economic status have become more and more irrelevant.

Absent the ability to use profiling to detect targets of interest, the type of data that the NSA was accused of collecting (albeit illegally) might be very useful for prevention and threat containment.

Posted by Allan Friedman at March 15, 2007 11:44 AM

Comments

"This document was discovered in Afghanistan, where the the administration of the organization appears to have become more mundane that the "4th Generation warfare" theory might suggest. Absent the constraints of a hostile, ubiquitous surveillance and law enforcement state, Al Qaeda starts to look a little like The Office"

Or a quasi-state like Hezbollah in south Lebanon.

Those documents were indeed, very interesting to read but they are out of date with al Qaida's current organizational behavior. Perhaps we will see more of " the office" emerge in Waziristan but I doubt it will be as elaborate or hierarchical as pre-9/11

Posted by: zenpundit at March 20, 2007 11:20 AM

Let me take Allan's observation a step further:

A strong form of the proposition (you may take it to be a quite strong form) would hold that: Humans are naturally hierarchical. What then of the (so-called) 'network form' of organization?

The question, really, is: what do we observe in nature? You will have your own experience and contributions; I suggest as follows: There appears a sort of ebb and flow, back and forth between hierarchy and a counterpoint with more fluid connections. If viewed over time, a given individual would alternately take an appropriate role in a hierarchy versus try connections outside the stricter hierarchy, for novel relations and the new possibilities that may, or may not, bring.

How does this fit the reported Al Qaeda story?

Just as we see a 'shadow network' within the typical formal organization, Al Qaeda, to account for it in this characterization, is an alternate network, alternate to a nationalistic society tugging on a person for fealty. But no surprise, that alternate network - the 'shadow network' - is just as strongly hierarchical as anything else. Humans comprise it, and by this reckoning humans are naturally hierarchical.

Of course this has implication for understanding the shadow network in any company. Tales of the Cosa Nostra - the classic case for a 'shadow' - make clear how sharp are the workings of its hierarchical authority. So likewise, tales (and for instance movies) of social organization in wartime POW camps underline the strictness of what we otherwise are tempted to call informal nets.

By this view, the tension is not formal vs informal - but rather the tension is between different states across time, when adherence to the strict alternates with more fluid experimentation outside. Further, to understand the 'shadow,' we really have to understand the _numerous_, often orthogonal, dimensions along which any individual participates in equally numerous and strong hierarchies.

Then we have to explain why, among equally strong hierarchies, one of them garners more legitimacy, so that we are tempted to assign it more superior formality than perhaps is accurate.

Of course, the notion of formality itself is set aside - if one takes this approach - and teased apart in effect into two sub-parts: strictness of hierarchical operation and legitimacy (or overtness / covertness ?) accorded by participants.

Posted by: David Allen at March 23, 2007 1:30 PM

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The Venn diagram of "terrorist" and "network"

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