This thesis describes for the first time the mechanism by which high-performing terrorist networks leverage new iterations of information technology and the two interact in a mutually propulsive manner. Using process tracing as its methodology and complexity theory as its ontology, it identifies both terrorism and information technology as complex adaptive systems, a key characteristic of whose make-up is that they co-evolve in pursuit of augmented performance. It identifies this co-evolutionary mechanism as a classic information system that computes the additional scale with which the new technology imbues its terrorist partner, in other words, the force multiplier effect it enables.
The thesis tests the mechanism’s theoretical application rigorously in three case studies spanning a period of more than a quarter of a century: Hezbollah and its migration from terrestrial to satellite broadcasting, AlQaeda and its leveraging of the internet, and Islamic State and its rapid adoption of social media. It employs the NATO Allied Joint Doctrine for Intelligence Procedures estimative probability standard to link its assessment of causal inference directly to the data.
Following the logic of complexity theory, it contends that a more twenty-first century interpretation of the key insight of RAND researchers in 1972 would be not that ‘terrorism evolves’ but that it co-evolves, and that co-evolution too is arguably the first logical explanation of the much-vaunted ‘symbiotic relationship’ between terrorists and the media that has been at the heart of the sub-discipline of terrorism studies for 50 years. It maintains that an understanding of terrorism based on co-evolution belatedly explains the newness of much-debated ‘new terrorism’. Looking forward, it follows the trajectory of terrorism driven by information technology and examines the degree to which the gradual symbiosis between biological and digital information, and the acknowledgment of human beings as reprogrammable information systems, is transforming the threat landscape.
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[…] As a result, the output is Communication (Jenkins 2015a) in the form of the terrorist attack, using the new information technology in a manner consistent with its design, while also achieving the element of ‘Surprise’ specified by Crenshaw (1987) as characteristic of terrorism ‘par excellence’.
In the detail of its structure, the co-evolutionary mechanism sits comfortably with social systems as defined by Luhmann (2002, 1995, 1987, 1986), who, uniquely in sociology, promotes communication, in particular the specifics of how information is dealt with to achieve understanding and communication (Lenartowicz et al. 2016, p. 17), to the dominant position in the pantheon of life systems, reflecting the central position it also occupies in terrorism studies (Jenkins 2015a; Nacos 2007, p.14; Hoffman 2006, p. 198), while relegating human actors to the role of Catalysts.
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CLUSKEY, Peter, 2023. The co-evolution of networked terrorism and information technology. doctoral. Dublin City University. page 
[Accessed 5 February 2024].