Criminal, terrorist, and insurgent networks have become powerful world actors. They utilize network forms of organization to make fast decisions, cover a wide operational space, remain resilient in the face of state reprisals, and have a capacity for learning and self-correction that many top-down organizations lack. Lately, many analysts have written about decentralized network forms that exhibit emergent behavior. Emergence occurs when many actors’ simple interactions combine to form a complex system. For example, mathematician Steven Strogatz shows in a TED talk how animals such as flocks of birds synchronize together based on simple evolutionary rule-sets. These are interesting observations that have been taken too far.
December 29, 2008, 6:28am
