Over the weekend Small Wars Journal put out a piece by Clinton Watts entitled “Foreign Fighters: How Are They Being Recruited? Two Imperfect Recruitment Models.” The consensus of the paper is that the two theories-du-jour on recruitment are flawed. Watts asserts that there is insufficient evidence to support the theories of both top-down hierarchical (initiated by Al-Qaeda leadership, etc.), or bottom-up (self-selecting) recruiting. Instead, Watts proposes an hypothesis that:
Former foreign fighters embedded in family, religious and social networks in flashpoint North African and Middle Eastern cities produce between 60 and 80 percent of global foreign fighter recruitment. Jihadi veterans and their networks are the center of gravity not only for al-Qa’ida but also for decades of Jihadi militancy.
Though Watts uses only one data source for his analysis, he still effectively illustrates the problems with the top-down and bottom-up models. His hypothesis is intuitive; unfortunately, in this piece Watts provides no evidence to support his model other than well-informed assumptions. A stronger case for this model can be made, however, by understanding its structural implications.
In network theory, the “former foreign fighters” in Watts’s model can best be described as ‘hubs’, or individuals with a high a preferential attachment coefficient (i.e., new actors in the network desire connections to these hubs). For these former foreign fighters to account for 60-80 percent of new recruiting they would most certainly need to exhibit such structural characteristics. A popular network model that produces such hubs is the Barabasi-Albert (BA) model. Networks fitting the BA model generally have a scale-free degree distribution, tight clustering, and very short average distance between nodes. Describing the recruitment network as he does, whereby linking it to the BA model, Watts inherits a tremendous amount of research focusing on scale-free network topologies and behaviors. Some of this research can be directly applied to Watt’s model.
First, though the data is limited, studies on terrorist and insurgency networks have shown a strong resemblance to scale-free networks, most notably in the high clustering around central hubs. Given the geographically diffuse nature of both terrorist and insurgency networks, it follows that recruitment networks would have the same formation and growth patterns as the organizations they serve. Second, scale-free networks have been studied for their resistance to attack, and were shown to be extremely resilient to random failure, but susceptible to targeted attack. Logically, if major hubs are removed, the functionality of the network is degraded. Our inability to affect insurgent and terrorist recruiting may be the result of focusing on the wrong actors. Turning collection efforts to former foreign fighters may illuminate the most significant portion of these networks, providing the data needed to truly degrade their operation.
There are undoubtedly several other aspects of the scale-free network research that may benefit Watts, and as he moves forward with his model, a thorough review of this literature may be very beneficial.
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