Understanding Terror Networks

"Marc Sageman, on the other hand, says al Qaeda is a loose network, small groups of guys hanging out, not in the pursuit of an objective or a political goal but just satisfying the demands of their small social network even if that includes carrying out acts of terror. I think this is a problem you get when you are looking at an organisation from above and below. Both are true. If you look at any phenomenon that involves leaders… Take Communism, for example. You had small groups of revolutionaries who called themselves Bolsheviks and had a coherent political philosophy for which they were willing to fight. That doesn’t explain, however, why Joe Smith in America decided to join the Communist Party. He could have had all sorts of social and economic reasons for joining which, again, do nothing to describe where the Bolsheviks come from or what they’re up to. So the two theories are not contradictory. They only seem contradictory if you say: mine is the only theory and yours is wrong. Well, I’m not going to name anyone individually, but academics can be that way sometimes. No. I would like to add that Sageman offers an explanation for individual motivations for terrorism. He looked at 400 European members of terrorist organisations and asked them the questions you’d expect – about poverty, lack of opportunities, lack of education. The responses showed that the terrorists had more education than was average, belonged to a higher socio-economic class and had more opportunities, not less. That is the revolutionary thing about Sageman’s work."