Getting the Cart Before the Horse
This article on Leaderless resistance today by Simson L. Garfinkel at First Monday seems to me to have identified an emergent process and tried to make of it a strategy. It smacks of the idea that Chaos Theory, because it describes with some accuracy, certain processes in social activities such a markets or politics, can be used to predict those markets, conveniently ignoring the fact that the theory specifically excludes prediction as a valid application of the argument.

Garfinkel gets aerated about Leaderless Resistance as if it is an ideologically based, leadership cadre driven activity, a strategy that "people can adopt" to get their agenda carried out. Doesn't work like that. By definition, any group that attempts to "use this strategy" is a self-defined leadership organisation and incompetent to be involved in the strategy.

The whole point is that leaderless groups arise from a common understanding of a common articulation of a problem or agenda. That common articulation is, by definition, commonly engineered in public. It is very difficult to have a hidden agenda in a leaderless group because, by its nature, the outcomes have to be publicly negotiated and achieve consensus. As soon as the components start to disagree about aims, objectives or strategies, the group begins to decay, unlike leader-based groups which can use various strongarm tactics to enforce compliance, leaderless groups may not even know who belongs, let alone be able to enforce anything.

While Al Qaeda may be a valid instance of this phenomenon, I suspect there are two Al Qaeda's; one tied together by Bin Laden's money, and the other, a idea propagated by shared feelings of frustration, anger, powerlessness or humiliation and to which many can "sign up" without ever having to pay their dues.

A similar, although less successful example is the Global Cities dialogue, where membership is not only voluntary, but participation is initiative based. Those cities that identify themselves as part of the dialogue and then act in accordance with its agreed principles are part of the dialogue, otherwise not.

The current anti-war movement that has spread so rapidly and effectively around the world is another leaderless movement that has exhibited other, more interesting characteristics.

For example, permission for the American events has been applied for by ANSWERS, a fairly radical group to whose platform, the vast majority of participants do not subscribe. Attempts by some commentators to tar the movement with the worst aspects of ANSWERS has failed because the participants already know who they are and why they are there, they are self defining, the ability of the media to define them is minimal. Furthermore, the non-fitting parts of the constituent groups have been simply excluded from the process. Those who want to participate can only do so by agreeing to the consensus formulation of what the process is about, otherwise they can't. A side effect has been that those who, under more controlled circumstances might have been able to hijack the events by taking over the leadership, have found themselves powerless because there is no structure or process to hijack and the peer pressure on the ground ensures that any attempts to act outside the parameters of the agreement is treated either by enveloping and smothering or, as I saw in Sydney a couple of days ago when a group of ferals began an aggressive chant outside the PM's office, by being cut out of the march which flowed around them and left them behind. The exposure contributed strongly to their inability to provoke any further response; it was almost organic, an infection being identified and excluded from the body politic.

Which brings me to the biggest leaderless group of all, the Internet. As A World of Ends has noted, this is nothing more than an agreement in which you participate or not. If you don't agree, you exclude yourself, if you attempt to subvert the agreement you are treated as damage and circumvented.

This does not for a moment suggest that leaderless groups cannot act to the detriment of others, of course they can, but their development and co-ordination must be done in plain sight, when the attack comes, the one thing you can't say is that you were not warned. Bin Laden said for a decade that he was going to war with the west and stated clearly and often why that was so. Those who did not listen and treated him as of no consequence, contributed to their own destruction; but the plan, the casus belli was there in plain sight all the time. Garfinkel needs to go back to the drawing board.