ABSTRACT
Terrorism can be viewed as an emergent phenomenon of complex, dynamically interacting social, technological and institutional systems. Considering terrorism through this lens has significant implications for social and behavioral research and analysis, made possible by advances in understanding complex systems over the past twenty years. First, the universal principles that govern the behavior of complex systems provide a much needed, common framework that transcends traditional academic boundaries and allows synergistic consideration of knowledge from diverse conceptual domains, multiple cultural perspectives, and a
wide range of behavioral scales. Second, technical advances in analytic methods derived from complexity science – such as multi-scale dynamic network analysis, evolutionary computing algorithms, agent-based modeling and simulation and multi-dimensional pattern analysis – provide means for data analysis and hypothesis generation and testing that have been computationally intractable in the past. Third, new paradigms for sense-making in situations of high complexity and ambiguity provide intelligence and policy analysts the means to explicitly consider complex social and behavioral phenomena such as emergence, innovation, adaptation, self-organization and surprise in developing counterterrorism strategies. This chapter provides an analytic framework based on the principles of complex systems analysis and describes how key analytic methods fit into that framework thereby providing new paradigms for sense-making.
