ABSTRACT
Traditionally, most terrorist movements have organized along the lines of the predominant hierarchical model of other organizations, whether they were of the legitimate kind, such as governments or corporations, or the illegitimate variety, such as crime syndicates. However, many terrorist movements increasingly abandoned the hierarchical structure and adopted the “leaderless resistance” principle once practiced by the Communist Party. In a 1992 pamphlet, Louis Beam, a notorious American right-wing extremist, explained the advantages of dropping the hierarchical organization model as a means of preventing government agents from infiltrating and destroying the movement. According to Beam, At first glance, such a type of organization seems unrealistic, primarily because there appears no organization. Some of the regimes also provided financial support to terrorists or allowed individuals and organizations within their countries to do so as long as the militants did not strike inside their borders.
