ABSTRACT
The growing body of knowledge on the structure of terrorist networks, their flexibility to adapt to very hostile environments and their resilience in the face of law enforcement disruption has spawned the idea that “it takes a network to fight a network.” A number of counter-terrorism strategies have resulted from this new philosophy; such strategies attempt to leverage the network paradigm in order to improve the responsiveness and effectiveness of security bureaucracies. However, this chapter argues that some of the risks (or costs) inherent to the adoption of this nodal approach have been underestimated—or simply ignored—despite their serious implications on the democratic governance of security. Three crucial paradoxes (the trust, information and legality paradoxes) faced by counter-terrorism networks will help explain why adversarial isomorphism should be considered with great caution and why bureaucracies should not be discarded from the counter-terrorism toolbox.
