For Immediate Release
 
Contact:
Sean Wagner
781-388-8550
journalnews@bos.blackwellpublishing.net
 
Experts say Bush Administration Misunderstands Terror Networks
Dangerous Assumptions Being Made About al-Qaeda Communication and Organization
 
Santa Barbara, Calif. – March 22, 2007 - According to a new study in Communication Theory, the Bush administration is making critical errors in their anti-terror policy because of false assumptions about how terror networks form and communicate. “The administration’s assumptions about these networks are misguided,” say study authors Cynthia Stohl and Michael Stohl. “Counterterrorist policies need to focus on connections between and among network groups, not on the basic existence of the groups themselves.”
 
According to the authors, the current administration’s policies ignore scholarly theories of how networks function. “Because the Bush administration assumes that there is a cohesive global terror network, rather than recognizing that terror groups greatly differ and are frequently local, every terrorist event anywhere in the world is presented as an al-Qaeda event and thus results in a communication victory handed to Osama Bin Laden. This is short-sighted, ineffective and, ironically, creates the very conditions that generate and maintain terror networks,” say the authors.
 
Stohl and Stohl say that the strength of terror networks do not lie in the number of connections, but on their ability to mobilize and motivate sympathizers. This means that capturing or killing specific terror cells will not stop the network, but may actually strengthen the motivation of the members still operating. “The Bush administration's focus on the "body count" of al-Qaeda members individualizes the problem instead of confronting the processes that produce terrorism.”
 
The study illustrates how the current administration’s assumptions that networks are hierarchical, top-down control structures is consistent with past images of terrorist groups such as the Red Brigade and the PLO, where specific leaders and councils defined strategies and local groups carried out order, but this is an outdated model of organization. Scholars today recognize that “networks are dynamic, temporary, emergent, adaptive, entrepreneurial and flexible structures whose boundaries are continually in flux. Policy based on the outdated assumption turns groups with largely local aspirations into ones that share al-Qaeda’s global agenda,” say the authors.
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This study is published in Communication Theory. Media wishing to receive a PDF of this article may contact journalnews@bos.blackwellpublishing.net.
 
Professor Cynthia Stohl has studied organizational networks for more than 25 years. She has authored more than fifty articles and book chapters on organizational networks and is currently a professor of communication at the University of California at Santa Barbara. She can be reached for questions at cstohl@comm.ucsb.edu.
 
Professor Michael Stohl has studied and published on terrorism for more than thirty years. He has been a guest commentator on National Public Radio, NBC, CBS, and is the author of more than fifty articles, book chapters and the editor/co-editor of ten books on the subject of terrorism. He is the chair of communication at the University of California at Santa Barbara and can be reached for questions at mstohl@comm.ucsb.edu.