Adversarial Behavior in Complex Adaptive Systems: An Overview of ICST’s Research on Competitive Adaptation in Militant Networks

Abstract

There is widespread agreement among scholars and practitioners that terrorism scholarship suffers from a lack of primary-source field research [1]. The absence of solid ethnographic research has yielded studies that suffer from a lack of rigorous analysis and often result in opinion masquerading as analysis. This dearth of field work stems in part from a failure to integrate ethnographic research into computational modeling efforts. The project outlined in this paper seeks to redress this deficiency by combining the strengths of ethnographic field research with sophisticated computational models of individual and group behavior. Specifically, we analyze data from interview transcripts, news reports, and other open sources concerning the militant activist group Al-Muhajiroun and the terrorist groups Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) and Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Using competitive adaptation as a comparative organizational framework, this project focuses on the process by which adversaries learn from each other in complex adaptive systems and tailor their activities to achieve their organizational goals in light of their opponents’ action.KeywordsAl-Muhajirouncompetitive adaptationnetwork analysis