Social Network Analysis

studies patterns of relationships (such communication, information and resource flow, etc.) among individuals and organizations, and is particularly adept at revealing otherwise “hidden” patterns inside of a network; for example, information-flow bottlenecks and other vulnerabilities of, say, a business organization, that are not obvious from a wire-diagram of its members.

While social network analysis has traditionally confined its attention to the study of relatively small (and static) networks, the emerging interdisciplinary research field of network science studies the statistical properties of very large, complex networks, focusing on the relationship between the structure and function of evolving networks. As the size and complexity of a network of interest increases (beyond that of a manageably small size of at most, say, a few dozen nodes that can all be easily visualized at once), there is a growing need to develop algorithms to graphically render the structure of complex networks. Novel graph visualization techniques have recently been developed that facilitate the visualization of multidimensional feature spaces and the mapping of conceptual spaces into physical space.

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This paper examines the proposition that terrorist networks, such as Al Qaeda, are complex adaptive systems; that is, they consist of widely dispersed, autonomous cells that obey a decentralized command and control hierarchy; their mission operatives are highly adaptive and mobile; their cells are strongly compartmentalized, structurally robust, and largely impervious to (unfocused) local attack; and, though the networks, as a whole, are typically covert and amorphous, they can also rapidly coalesce into tightly organized local swarms.

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