Getting the Cart Before the Horse
This article on Leaderless resistance today by Simson L. Garfinkel at First Monday seems to me to have identified an emergent process and tried to make of it a strategy. It smacks of the idea that Chaos Theory, because it describes with some accuracy, certain processes in social activities such a markets or politics, can be used to predict those markets, conveniently ignoring the fact that the theory specifically excludes prediction as a valid application of the argument.

Garfinkel gets aerated about Leaderless Resistance as if it is an ideologically based, leadership cadre driven activity, a strategy that "people can adopt" to get their agenda carried out. Doesn't work like that. By definition, any group that attempts to "use this strategy" is a self-defined leadership organisation and incompetent to be involved in the strategy.

The whole point is that leaderless groups arise from a common understanding of a common articulation of a problem or agenda. That common articulation is, by definition, commonly engineered in public. It is very difficult to have a hidden agenda in a leaderless group because, by its nature, the outcomes have to be publicly negotiated and achieve consensus. As soon as the components start to disagree about aims, objectives or strategies, the group begins to decay, unlike leader-based groups which can use various strongarm tactics to enforce compliance, leaderless groups may not even know who belongs, let alone be able to enforce anything.

While Al Qaeda may be a valid instance of this phenomenon, I suspect there are two Al Qaeda's; one tied together by Bin Laden's money, and the other, a idea propagated by shared feelings of frustration, anger, powerlessness or humiliation and to which many can "sign up" without ever having to pay their dues.

A similar, although less successful example is the Global Cities dialogue, where membership is not only voluntary, but participation is initiative based. Those cities that identify themselves as part of the dialogue and then act in accordance with its agreed principles are part of the dialogue, otherwise not.

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