ABSTRACT
Warfare has tended to be conducted by hierarchically organised military actors, from empires, to states, classical guerrillas and insurgents. Today, however, a new breed of amorphous non-state military actors has started to emerge which seeks to compensate for their strategic inferiorities vis-à-vis conventional militaries by adapting a more horizontally organised, deterritorialised and networked nature. While the need for militarily inferior actors to adapt is nothing new in the history of warfare, the contemporary manifestation of these dynamics affords us a glimpse of what the future of warfare might hold. First, the institutional organisation of non-state violent actors is increasingly mimicking the decentralised, networked logic of contemporary information technology. Second, their military operations are increasingly displaying a network logic, from communication strategies to recruitment and violent attacks taking place outside traditional chains of command. In short, merely pointing to how this new breed of non-state military actors is exploiting novel and decentralised technologies such as blockchains, the darknet or encryption codes obfuscates the more profound transformations that are taking place. Instead, we are witnessing the amorphous rise of military actors whose networked and horizontal structural advantage lies in their ability to more fundamentally disrupt the conventional military power of our times.
