Networks and Netwars. The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy

Netwar is the lower-intensity, societal-level counterpart to our earlier, mostly military concept of cyberwar. Netwar has a dual nature, like the two-faced Roman god Janus, in that it is composed of conflicts waged, on the one hand, by terrorists, criminals, and ethnonationalist extremists; and by civil-society activists on the other. What distinguishes netwar as a form of conflict is the networked organizational structure of its practitioners-with many groups actually being leaderless-and the suppleness in their ability to come together quickly in swarming attacks. The concepts of cyberwar and netwar encompass a new spectrum of conflict that is emerging in the wake of the information revolution. This volume studies major instances of netwar that have occurred over the past several years and finds, among other things, that netwar works very well. Whether the protagonists are civil-society activists or "uncivil-society" criminals and terrorists, their netwars have generally been successful. In part, the success of netwar may be explained by its very novelty-much as earlier periods of innovation in military affairs have seen new practices triumphant until an appropriate response is discovered. But there is more at work here: The network form of organization has reenlivened old forms of licit and illicit activity, posing serious challenges to those-mainly the militaries, constabularies, and governing officials of nation states-whose duty is to cope with the threats this new generation of largely nonstate actors poses.