{"id":16053,"date":"2014-09-26T12:30:39","date_gmt":"2014-09-26T02:30:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=16053"},"modified":"2014-09-30T06:36:18","modified_gmt":"2014-09-29T20:36:18","slug":"the-strategic-power-of-small-acts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/the-strategic-power-of-small-acts\/","title":{"rendered":"The strategic power of small acts"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Australian<\/a>The recent instances of \u2018home-grown\u2019 terrorism and terrorism-related activities provide a useful basis upon which to reiterate some important dynamics of contemporary global terrorism. The disrupted plan\u00a0in Sydney, and the more recent incident in Melbourne are characteristic of a number of important aspects of the contemporary global terrorist milieu. It\u2019s tempting to see those incidents as the actions of \u2018lone wolf\u2019 terrorists, or as the product of a small, marginalised and disconnected group. But, put in context, they\u2019re also something else: the ultimate manifestation of an intentional, targeted, and sophisticated strategic campaign that seeks to enable and empower individual and small-cell jihadist attacks within Western jurisdictions as a complement to the ongoing conflicts that jihadist entities are engaged in across the globe.<\/p>\n

An analysis of the recent \u2018beheading\u2019 phenomena helps illuminate the model. What began as a series of videos of the beheading of Westerners has transformed, through media saturation and direct instruction and encouragement, into a\u00a0beheading plot and a second individual jihadist action, both in Australia. That relationship between the broader idea and ideology of global jihad, the localised \u2018open front\u2019 conflict in Syria and Iraq, and individual and small-cell jihadist actions elsewhere, sits at the core of the \u2018home-grown\u2019 terrorist threat.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s those individual and small-cell jihadists\u2014what AQ strategist Abu Musab al-Suri called the \u2018resistance units\u2019\u2014that present arguably the greatest challenge to intelligence and law-enforcement agencies. The reason that these otherwise small-scale acts of violence are able to garner substantially disproportionate power and impact, and to strike terror into their target audience, relates directly to the construction of a sophisticated strategic narrative. The development and deployment of increasingly articulate and professional multimedia and social media campaigns deliver those small acts a grossly disproportionate impact and, more importantly, meaning.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s in many ways the core dynamic of terrorism, whereby violence is utilised as a means of communicating an ideological or political agenda and is not an end in itself. The purpose of either beheading an innocent member of the public, of murdering a soldier, or shooting four people at a Jewish museum in Brussels, is not the killing itself, but the garnering of media coverage and exposure for the ideological cause which is cited as the justification for the acts. It also serves to reinforce the existing understanding of, and familiarity with, the message. Indeed, much of the world is now all too familiar with the black banner, cries of \u2018allahu akbar\u2019 and an entire lexicon related to jihadist ideas.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s that context, and the supporting media content produced by entities such as al-Qaeda\u2019s as-Sahab or ISIS\u2019 al Hayat Media Centre, that empowers and \u2018legitimises\u2019 those individual jihadists and their actions. That communicative dynamic of terrorism is exceptionally difficult to counter and as yet there\u2019s been little in the way of successful counter strategies deployed. The increased capacity of terrorist networks, via social media platforms, to circumvent traditional news media and release their own content onto the Internet, has greatly enhanced the power of those narratives. When fused with sophisticated yet practical outputs, such as Inspire <\/em>magazine, potential individual jihadists are readily exposed to content that informs them they are both obligated and permitted to undertake an attack, and provides them with a range of simple targeting and tactical options.<\/p>\n

If the discrete violent acts that embody the majority of recent \u2018home-grown\u2019 terrorist acts are considered in isolation, they\u2019re tragic, but not substantive threats to national security. It\u2019s only when they\u2019re contextualised within the narrative of the global jihadist idea that those acts obtain national security significance. It\u2019s that intangible component of terrorist activity that\u2019s challenging to confront. While Australia has been effective at disrupting and preventing in-country mass-casualty terrorism, the challenge of individual and small-cell jihadist terrorism is an all together different question. Part of the appeal of that approach to terrorist activity is the minimisation of exposure to intelligence and law-enforcement agencies by virtue of the absence of direct communication with any organisational structure and the simplicity of an attack. Such an approach minimises the capacity for the plotting of large-scale, mass-casualty events\u2014but enables a proliferation of smaller-scale actions requiring fewer resources and lesser capabilities, while maintaining adequate political and media attention so as to ensure a continual reinforcement of the narrative.<\/p>\n

That evolution of the terrorist threat, and the arrival in Australia of active, offensive, individual and small-cell jihadist terrorism, demands the permanent embedding of our counter-terrorism structures (and funding) into the normal operations of government. There\u2019s a need to view instances of individual and small-cell terrorism as part of an holistic threat that evolves and adapts as necessary, living under the broad banner of global jihadist terrorism. Policy responses must resist transactional, isolated or reactionary responses that treat incidents as discrete activities. If, as Army Chief David Morrison suggests, we\u2019re at the beginning of another \u2018long war<\/a>\u2019 then these individual manifestations of war must be treated as such. Australian security agencies have operated exceptionally well in the years since 9\/11. Governments must continue to ensure that they are adequately resourced, authorised and have sufficient manpower to continue to keep the Australian public secure. That\u2019s, after all, the first duty of government<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Levi West is a lecturer in Terrorism Studies at the Australian Graduate School of Policing and Security, Charles Sturt University, Canberra. Image courtesy of Flickr user Neerav Bhat<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The recent instances of \u2018home-grown\u2019 terrorism and terrorism-related activities provide a useful basis upon which to reiterate some important dynamics of contemporary global terrorism. The disrupted plan\u00a0in Sydney, and the more recent incident in Melbourne …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":47,"featured_media":16064,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[273,191,895,218,274,127],"class_list":["post-16053","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-counterterrorism","tag-iraq","tag-islamic-state","tag-middle-east","tag-syria","tag-terrorism"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe strategic power of small acts | The Strategist<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/the-strategic-power-of-small-acts\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The strategic power of small acts | The Strategist\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The recent instances of \u2018home-grown\u2019 terrorism and terrorism-related activities provide a useful basis upon which to reiterate some important dynamics of contemporary global terrorism. 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