21st century Social Science

a post at Mind Hacks summarizes an article in the New Yorker about terrorism and social networks - and also a nice summary on Mark Granovetter's weak ties theory as background.  The New Yorker article quotes an Australian Army captain David Kilcullen:

I saw extremely similar behavior and extremely similar problems in an Islamic insurgency in West Java and a Christian-separatist insurgency in East Timor.  After 9/11, when a lot of people were saying, ‘The problem is Islam,’ I was thinking, It’s something deeper than that. It’s about human social networks and the way that they operate.
...
What that told me about Jemaah Islamiya is that it’s not about theology. There are elements in human psychological and social makeup that drive what’s happening. The Islamic bit is secondary. This is human behavior in an Islamic setting. This is not ‘Islamic behavior.'

Since then Kilcullen has become a chief strategist for counterterrorism for the U.S. State Department.  He aims to reform the "War on Terror" in light of what we know about how the terrorist social networks recruit and gain sympathy.

Kilcullen speaks of the need to “disaggregate” insurgencies: finding ways to address local grievances in Pakistan’s tribal areas or along the Thai-Malay border so that they aren’t mapped onto the ambitions of the global jihad. Kilcullen writes, “Just as the Containment strategy was central to the Cold War, likewise a Disaggregation strategy would provide a unifying strategic conception for the war—something that has been lacking to date.”
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By speaking of Saddam Hussein, the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, the Taliban, the Iranian government, Hezbollah, and Al Qaeda in terms of one big war, Administration officials and ideologues have made Osama bin Laden’s job much easier. “You don’t play to the enemy’s global information strategy of making it all one fight.”

The New Yorker article is long and worth the read.

 

Comments

[Alex Soojung-Kim Pang]

Definitely well worth it. A very interesting piece.