policy swarming.

OLD MODELS OF BUREAUCRACY are not irrelevant. Adoption of hierarchy yields a strong infrastructure, designed around a common corporate orthodoxy, neatly dividing labour into particularized tasks. Where common creed meets common purpose, bureaucracies often result. Yet where such creeds are many and demands diverse, modern network theory has illustrated the utility of fluid networks. The ‘flat world’ is here.

SWARMING: A NONLINEAR APPROACH

Transposed into the world of security, learning from the adversary has proven key to this nonlinear approach. From guerrilla insurgency and low intensity conflict, irregular formations have long adopted a manoeuvre of swarming in which dispersed units (or nodes) converge on a particular target from any number of locations. This tactic allowed for tremendous flexibility beyond the capabilities of the conventional set-piece mentality. What makes swarming of particular importance today is its keen adoption as a strategy, rather than merely a tactic. Insurgent groups from Iraq to Afghanistan to Chechnya have each adopted strategic visions principled on the swarming model, making them true networks more than organizations.

Academics across the political and departmental spectra have universally recognized the utility of networks to modern campaigns of violence. Indeed, even beyond insurgent and terrorist endeavours, network analysis has been genuinely significant in comprehending a wide range of transnational security threats, from pandemic disease to criminal enterprise. More often than not, successful transnational activities are authored in the language of networks more than conventional bureaucracy.

As a transnational enterprise itself, the Transnational Crisis Project represents a ‘lessons learned’ for modern analysis; a cosmopolitanism of means mirroring its cosmopolitan ends. For the Project’s policy swarming, as it might be called, a wide team of disparate Associated Scholars are leveraged for a particular report, directed at a particular government, with a particular set of recommendations. No one nation, consumer, or viewpoint will therefore consume the whole of the Project’s venture.