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Germany, some of which are stockpiling weapons and explosives and posting death lists
on web sites.
“What we are seeing is a very worrying trend in the organization of far right groups with a view to committing
terrorism,” says Graeme Atkinson, European editor of the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight. “They are talking about
creating a ‘leaderless resistance’ of terrorist cells—and of ensuring the creation of liberated zones, with foreigners
driven out from rural areas and smaller towns” (Martin A. Lee, “Neo-Nazism: It’s Not Just in Germany’s Beer Halls
Anymore,” Los Angeles Times, December 31, 2000, p. M2).
By itself, a tenet like leaderless resistance is only a partial step toward having a
doctrine for netwar. What operational behavior may in fact be most effective for small,
dispersed, mobile forces that are joined in networks? The short answer is swarming (for
elaboration, see Arquilla and Ronfeldt, 1997, 2000). If the optimal organizational form
for netwar is the dispersed network, the corresponding doctrine must surely consist of
swarming. Swarming may well become the key mode of conflict in the information age.
But swarming doctrines and strategies have barely begun to emerge for the conduct of
terrorist, criminal, and social conflicts.
In this volume, the Zapatista and Seattle cases show swarming in action. Today, one of
the most sophisticated doctrines for social netwar comes from the Direct Action Network
(DAN), which arose from a coalition of activists dedicated to using nonviolent direct
action and civil disobedience to halt the WTO meeting in Seattle. Its approach to netwar
epitomizes swarming ideas. Participants are asked to organize, at their own choice, into
small (5–20 people) “affinity groups”—“self-sufficient, small, autonomous teams of
people who share certain principles, goals, interests, plans or other similarities that
enable them to work together well.” 33 Each group decides for itself what actions its
members will undertake, ranging from street theater to risking arrest. 34 Where groups
operate in proximity to each other, they are further organized into “clusters”—but there
may also be “flying groups” that move about according to where needed. Different
people in each group take up different functions (e.g., police liaison), but every effort is
made to make the point that no group has a single leader. All this is coordinated at
spokescouncil meetings where each group sends a representative and decisions are
reached through democratic consultation and consensus (in yet another approach to
leaderlessness).
This approach generated unusual flexibility, mobility, and resource sharing in the Battle
of Seattle. It is discussed at length in Chapter Seven, but here is another eyewitness
account:
In practice, this form of organization meant that groups could move and react with great flexibility during the
blockade. If a call went out for more people at a certain location, an affinity group could assess the numbers holding
the line where they were and choose whether or not to move. When faced with tear gas, pepper spray, rubber
bullets and horses, groups and individuals could assess their own ability to withstand the brutality. As a result,
blockade lines held in the face of incredible police violence. When one group of people was finally swept away by