LabNotes

When a “Usually Reclusive” Terrorist Leader Gives a Press Conference

2008-06-02T20:41:00Z

While fundamentalist jihadi leaders decry the ills of modernity and globalization, they surely know how to exploit modern, global media and communication for their propaganda - in favor of turning back the clock of history to times past. Benjamin Barber's important mid-1980s book Jihad vs. McWorld attached the “jihad” label not specifically to Muslim fundamentalists but to other religious and secular anti-globalization/modernization extremists as well; he concluded that the two sides need each other in spite of the deep gap between them.

Media Power and Terrorists

2008-05-11T17:33:02Z

Once upon a time, Karl Marx assigned power to those who own the means of production. Today it's safe to say that power is in the hands of those who either own the means of communication or otherwise manage to communicate their messages directly to their target publics. Governments and influential interest groups have always understood this, and so have terrorists. This point was once again driven home in the latest clash between the Lebanese government and its backers and Hezbollah, the terrorist organization that has actually grown into a mighty guerilla and de facto ruling force.

Regulating Complex Terrain in Counterinsurgency

2008-04-27T23:20:00Z

I just fired off two paper abstracts/proposals to the Small Wars and Insurgencies Working Group. It's organizing conference panels for the British International Studies Association meeting at the University of Exeter in December 08, and the International Studies Assocation meeting in New York in early 09. I thought I'd take a risk and post them here, as well, in the hopes of generating some feedback and discussion. The first, for the BISA conference, is an extension of the CTLab's raison d'etre, the second, for ISA, extends things a bit further. There's some contextual overlap between the two,

The State of State Failure

2008-04-25T15:22:16Z

What word or phrase best describes the state of Somalia? Iraq? The Democratic Republic of Congo? The Solomon Islands? All of these have been described as ‘failed’ states, although the buzzword among policymakers these days seems to be ‘fragile’ states. What we call them is more than just playing with words. Words shape ideas.

It's useful to think of the problem of statehood in historical context. The current international order was established in 1945 amid the rubble left by a world war. When the United Nations was founded in that year it had 51 member states

Human Terrain Mapping - An Historian's Perspective

2008-04-19T13:16:29Z

[Brian Glyn Williams] As an historian who has carried out field work for the US government in Afghanistan, my feelings are that this debate about the morality of human terrain is a storm in a tea-pot. Anthropologists, political scientists, historians, and of course scientists of all backgrounds have contributed to US understanding of the wars it has fought in

The Spatial Dynamics of COIN

2008-04-14T19:21:32Z

With all the discussion of the "cultural turn" in U.S. counterinsurgency, I find it interesting that the geoscience of conflict and security continues apace. Two programs in particular caught my attention recently. One is at the Centre for Geospatial Science at the University of Nottingham in the UK. Its website notes several projects that can clearly be connected to the COIN challenge. "Learning and Predicting Spatial Behaviour" is the most intriguing of the Nottingham offerings, written up thus (image from the original site):

Complexity and COIN FM

2008-01-27T20:32:02Z

This is follow up to my last post on Dr. Paul Torrens' application of geosimulation to urban crowd behavior, and to the discussion of its implications at the Small Wars Council. I'm not a GIS specialist, but I see it increasingly being used for conflict modeling. Where things get tricky is figuring which tools to use for which environment. I keep harping about terrain complexity, but I don't think there's any avoiding the issue - developing some sort of framework understanding of it is the whole point of what we want to do with the Complex Terrain Lab.

Geosimulation of Urban Crowd Behavior

2008-01-26T18:10:59Z

Paul Torrens, a geographer at Arizona State University, posted some visuals of a geosimulation he's put together modeling urban crowd behavior in response to a car fire/explosion (http://www.geosimulation.org/crowds). His site's been swamped with hits since the thing was mentioned on a few blogs and word spread through the b-sphere.