Терроризм как социально-психологическое явление. Практикум на английском языке

Chapter 2

SOCIO-PSYCHOLOGICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE TERRORIST ORGANIZATION AND THE TERRORIST PERSONALITY AS THE ACTORS OF TERRORIST ACTIVITIES

Unit 4. Terrorist organizations functioning features. Terrorism as a form of intergroup communication

The aim: to consider the peculiarities of the functioning of terrorist organizations, to study terrorism as a form of intergroup communication.

Competence acquired by the student as a result of mastering the topic of practical training or part of them: readiness to act in non-standard situations, to have social and ethical responsibility for the decisions made (GK-2).

Timeliness of the unit: The international terrorist organizations represent a particular danger for individual countries and also for the international legal order and international relations in general. The criminal activity of international terrorist organizations scattered across the territories of various states, in conditions of globalization, increasing freedom of movement, intensive migration and communication processes is difficult to track. Neither a terrorist group nor a terrorist organization can be compelled to abandon terrorism, as this would mean for them the loss of the meaning of existence.

Theoretical part

Terrorist groups, as a rule, being the initial organizational structure, under certain conditions develop into terrorist organizations. This can be clearly seen in the history of the development of the revolutionary movement in Russia. The defeat of the weakly structured agitation and propagandistic inflammatory movement, known as “walking to the people,” led to the creation of more structured organizations: first, “Earth and Will,” and then to the “Narodnaya Volya” terrorist organization.

Organizational terror (not “organized”, namely, “organizational”) is terror carried out by a specialized organization that, in its organizational and structural structure, is completely oriented toward the commission of terrorist acts.

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A terrorist organization is an organization created for the purpose of carrying out terrorist activities or recognizing the possibility of using terrorism in its activities. The organization is considered terrorist if at least one of its structural units carries out terrorist activities with the knowledge, at least one of the governing bodies of the organization. In the period of their greatest activity, terrorist organizations, sometimes referred to as “terrorism corporations”, are not isolated groups of conspirators, as it was in the past, but complex structures with internal division of labor, workshops, warehouses, printing houses, laboratories, hospitals, secret apartments and etc. They actively introduce their agents into various parts of the state apparatus, industrial and financial corporations.

By the complexity of organizational and structural construction, organizational structures can be divided into complex organizational structures and simple organizations. Until the early 1970s, a complex structure prevailed, representing a hierarchical (linear-hierarchical) or classical form of building terrorist organizations with a clear centralized conspiracy control system: headquarters-district-region-district-operational cells consisting of usually five to seven people. With the failure of one of the members of this chain, it was easy to destroy the entire organization. In complex associations, the organizational core is being formed, that is, a group of persons who assumed the functions of the organizers and leaders of the association. In order for the organization to unite a significantly larger number of people, a program is being developed, in which its goals and objectives are formed. Within the organization there is a distribution of functions between different members or different groups. Organization, in turn, influences the nature of terrorist activity and specifics of the socio-psychological phenomena occurring in the organization.

The structure of all complex terrorist organizations is similar and consists of three areas:

1)active members who form the core of organizations, take decisions, act, select effective means of carrying out destructive terrorist actions;

2)supporters (accomplices), creating a network of deeply conspiratorized cells of the organization and engaged in the preparation of terrorist acts. They are engaged in the technical and other support of active members, their personal security issues, provide caches, food, etc.;

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3) a sympathetic population whose degree of participation may vary, be inconsistent or partial. The sympathizers serve as a potential source of recruitment and / or provision of support services.

The financiers of organizations that give money for terrorist activities stand apart from this public and have huge profits on this, without going into the essence of specific terrorist acts. Moreover, many of them are part of the elite of the society of states subjected to terrorist attacks.

The core of a terrorist organization, in turn, consists of several links. The ideology of organization is the first, the highest step in the hierarchy of organization. At the second level are administrators, representatives of the think tank, developers and leaders of terrorist operations. At the third stage – specialists (mainly with a good knowledge of psychology and psychotechnology), recruiting, special processing and psychological training of the perpetrators of terrorist acts. The fourth stage is occupied by terrorist groups directly carrying out terrorist activities. The executors of terrorist acts are, as a rule, suicidal-motivated terrorists.

With regard to Russia, the subjects of terrorist activities on the territory of the Chechen Republic can be classified according to the hierarchical level they occupy in the past. The leadership of terrorist entities was carried out by persons who were in the leading positions in the state of the Russian Federation. They were at the highest level. In particular, there is evidence that the terrorist attack in Budennovsk was approved by D. Dudaev, and the terrorist acts in the city of Prokhladny and Nalchik were committed with the knowledge of A. Maskhadov. He also in January 2001 issued an order to destroy the heads of administrations of all districts of Chechnya. Former vice-president of the Chechen Republic, A. Arsanov, as part of the group, repeatedly seized hostages in order to obtain ransom for their release. Sh. Basayev after the terrorist act in Budennovsk was appointed A. Maskhadov for the post of first vice-pre- mier of the government of Ichkeria.

Then came field commanders of illegal armed formations. They formed the second, average level, carrying out organizational, control and intermediary functions. At this level, among the field commanders, along with local citizens (the brothers Akhmadovs, Baraevs, Garayevs, etc.), foreigners met, such as the Jordanian Khattab, a professional terrorist with the broadest connections in the Arab world, Wahhabi.

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At the third, lower, performing level, together with the indigenous population, foreign mercenaries took an active part, including Arabs and people from the Baltic countries, Ukraine, as well as Russian citizens of different nationalities. For example, those who committed a bus explosion in Nalchik and attempted an attack in the city of Cool, the Vorokov brothers were Kabardians, and Gochiyaev and Saitakov were Karachais. The fighter of the 569th regiment of the “army of General Dudayev” Kozroev – Ingush, as part of a terrorist group, participated in an attack using firearms and grenade launchers on a police patrol in the Prigorodny district of the Republic of North Ossetia-Alania.

The complex structure was replaced by a different type of construction – simple, which has many names: the axial structure, the star, the bunch of grapes. Simple structures are an organization whose members are united by some idea. In the latter case, the “generator” of the idea is outside the organization, that is, its members are guided by other people’s ideas.

Such a terrorist organization does not have a rigidly fixed internal structure, there is no clear distribution of functions among the various members. With such an organization, the member of the operational cell knows only its leader, and he knows one or two members of the structure of a higher level. Exit to a higher level is also limited, which allows to save the organization in case of failure of one or several of its links. However, strict centralization makes these organizations sufficiently vulnerable, which forced them in a number of regions to move to a more efficient management system.

A variety of simple terrorist organizations are the network forms of their construction. The theorist and practitioner of network anti-system structures – scientist H. K. Marigella, who gave an interpretation of the segmented network war in the 60s of the twentieth century. He called for the creation of autonomous groups connected with each other and centered not so much organizationally as ideologically, and warned of the danger of excessive centralization and hierarchization of the organizational structure. With a networked form of construction, effective, strategic coordination of a multitude of semi-fully autonomous units of organizations is provided not through centralized control, but through strategic-ideological goals formulated in the most general form.

Therefore, large Islamic extremist groups in the Middle East began to form terrorist associations of a new type. Thus, Al-Qaeda and other

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organizations began to abandon the centralized management and control and move on to network forms of building organizations, giving their structural units the right to act on their own plans, guided by the basic ideology of global terror, which allows for greater conspiracy and effectiveness. In their structures there are quite independent elements – autonomous functional cells. One of the distinguishing features of the network structure of terrorist organizations is their financial and political independence, the ability to function in the absence of support from various states. Members of such an organization often only know one connected person or contact each other via the Internet. The results of studies of other social networks (such as networks of experience and knowledge sharing, Internet communities) suggest that even if there is no personal contact between members of a terrorist organization, they retain a very strong group identity. If the membership of such an organization changes or if one of its members falls out, the network does not lose its effectiveness.

The network construction of the organization of terrorists is perfectly adapted to infiltration of its members into government bodies and management, the incorporation of criminal associations with business structures, it has greater resistance to regeneration by including all new nodes, if they solve similar problems. Such an organization is a small and more mobile, hardly vulnerable network, rather than a centralized organization. Autonomous cells of the cellular system do not need a formal team to carry out the attack, because they consider themselves in a state of constant holy war, “jihad” in a hostile territory. Each cell independently prepares and carries out a terrorist act and finances its existence. In addition, the availability of modern technology allows small terrorist organizations to act autonomously, efficiently and at the right time to coordinate their actions.

With the development of informatization, the network forms of the organization have received a new impetus for their development. It is the increased opportunities for information exchange (speed, reliability, availability) that are the decisive factor ensuring the reliability of management in network structures, which are now fashionable to be defined as “network-rhizomes” – without common goals, decision-making centers, coordinated executive mechanisms, possessing exclusively horizontal and short-term relationships (a kind of analog of the classical thermodynamic system “gas in a vessel” with Brownian motion of molecules and uniform pressure on the walls).

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TERRORISM AS A SOCIO-PSYCHOLOGICAL PHENOMENON

In many aspects, building a network organization is similar to building a segmented multi-centered, ideologically integrated network (the so-called SPIN structure – a segmented, polycentric, politically integrated network), or a honeycomb consisting of several groups with different leaders or different orientations that combine or interact to solve common problems. In this case, the organization as such does not formally exist, as there is no name, established membership, branches, charismatic leader, etc.

The problem with the identification of such structures (for the most part Middle Eastern origin) is, as a rule, also in the fact that European thinking operates with categories of “formal organization”, whereas the eastern mentality is built on the notion of “informal trust”. In simple terrorist structures, the link between like-minded people is based on the principle of “Islamic solidarity”, terrorist acts are planned and conducted by a temporary small group of people who do not know each other in advance, do not belong to any of the known Islamic extremist organizations and are not in sight security agencies.

In practice, there are all three options for building terrorist organizations: hierarchical, network, and cellular. At the same time, the organizational construction of “commonwealths” of terrorist organizations or organizations that have several cells (structures) capable of independently carrying out terrorist actions, more often takes a network or cellular form, and the cells themselves are mostly built in a hierarchical system. At the level of “independence” (independence), the elements of the structure are influenced by national traditions, which, for example, occurs in the Arab world. A typical example of the transition from centralized management to a network structure can be the transformation of the structure of the Taliban movement, which, after strikes by the United States, could regroup by the end of 2005 and deploy a wide network of “sleeping” cells in the southern and eastern parts of the country. It should be noted that the opposition of “hierarchies” to “networks” is not a rigid dichotomy: most terrorist organizations remain mixed, that is, they are hybrids of network and hierarchical elements, horizontal and vertical links.

Despite a certain “structural shift” from the rigid hierarchical organizational model to the network character of terrorist associations, the following are typical for a terrorist organization:

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a)the existence of a program in which the main activities, goals and objectives of the organization are formed, terror is proclaimed as the main means of achieving its goals;

b)a clear organizational and functional structure: the presence of an organizational core, whose duties include the leadership of a terrorist organization; hierarchical subordination within a terrorist organization; the creation of specialized structural units (groups) within the terrorist organization; system of organizational relations between various structural divisions of the organization; implementation of activities for the planning and organization of terrorist acts;

c)internal organization of selection and criminal training of personnel;

d)ensuring their own security, strict conspiracy;

e)established channels of financing and material and technical supply;

e)communication with other terrorist organizations and criminal

structures, etc.

Terrorist activities of an organizational nature are associated with constant danger; the preparation of terrorist operations is long. As a rule, the activities of terrorist organizations are ideologically justified, subordinated to the developed doctrine and included in the political process. The construction, or what is called the structural organizational forms of terrorist organizations, along with radical ideology, is their most important characteristic, as well as one of the main strategic resources and comparative advantages in asymmetric confrontation with the state. A terrorist organization is a society that opposes society with its own system of government, forms and methods of self-defense, with its subculture, and, most likely, a counterculture. Everything is interconnected in the terrorist system, and it is this very system that makes it necessary to create this subculture. Subculture is a special social phenomenon in which certain individuals try to self-define and self-realize in certain autonomy from the society or the people around them.

Names speak a lot about the ideological foundations: the words “red”, “proletarian”, “army”, “liberation”, “revolution” and their derivatives are most often found in the ultra-left; at the ultra-right – “militia”, “national”, “Aryan”, “order”, etc. At present, Islam has become the main source of inspiration among Islamic activists (“Islamic”, “jihad” – holy war, “Hezbollah” – the party of God, etc.). Terrorist organizations choose their names when creating, and at the same time set memorial dates – alternatives to

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official holidays, symbols of the existing regime (for example, the bicentenary of the French Revolution) or historical personalities such as Joan of Arc and Clovis.

In the subculture, represented in the form of a terrorist community, there is always strict control over each of its members. Such a subculture can be considered as a link between a criminal and an unapproachable world. Particularly relevant in this regard is the problem of involving unauthorized persons in terrorist activities.

Modern leaders and ideologists of terrorist organizations spend the lion’s share of resources and efforts to spread and popularize their ideology - rightly believing that there will be no shortage of volunteers. The nucleus of the majority of terrorist organizations was, and continues to be, mainly middle-class people, relatively educated “raznochintsy” – people not of noble birth, intellectuals, etc. (although the representatives of the lower social strata may be concrete executors of terrorist acts).

Those who wish to join the organization more than required – it is rather a question of the possibility of its active participants and organizers to choose from a large and almost inexhaustible “pool” of volunteers. Establishing contacts among those categories of the population that terrorist organizations consider a priori as being of interest, recruiters who are rarely in an illegal position, or the terrorist operatives themselves involve new recruits in terrorist activities, and those who commit increasingly serious terrorist acts must prove their devotion to the organization and motivation.

Like politics, terrorism, according to some experts, is a profession. It is obtained through various types of training. One “student”, intending to fight with what he considered unfair, learns to make bombs and explosives in technical manuals and textbooks of chemistry and trains in deserted places. The other – for the same reasons goes to serve in paratrooper or airborne troops. This preparation is a constant mixture of evidence of trust and technical training (training in reliability), in which there are many “initiation rituals”. The more a terrorist provides evidence of his professional competence, the higher position he begins to occupy in the hierarchy of his organization.

The training of terrorists has much in common with the training of soldiers of the army special forces. However, the military or intelligence of its essence is almost always added to the ideological or religious treatment. In practice, the training of terrorists is the rule.

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In order to successfully conduct the operation and stay alive, terrorists must use proven knowledge and professionally respond to emergence of danger or unforeseen situations, which in most cases is excluded for “amateurs”.

Terrorism is an expensive violent way of criminal activity. It cannot be used practically without impressive financing, attraction of mercenaries, executors of terrorist actions, their training, weapons, transportation, etc. Today, terrorism counteracts national law enforcement structures at the expense of assistance from extremist and nationalist organizations, and in some cases even from states.

Monetary appropriations are used: to pay cash benefits to militants, to purchase weapons, ammunition, explosive devices, equipment; organization of bases and terrorist camps; training of persons of terrorist activity, conspiracy; bribery of officials of those territories where terrorist groups are being deployed, and terrorist acts are being prepared; acquisition of communication facilities; the reconnaissance of the objects of a terrorist attack; involvement in terrorist organizations of new persons.

Thus, an important area in the matter of antiterrorist activity is the identification of link channels between domestic terrorist organizations with international terrorism, financing channels, armaments and human resources.

Terrorist organizations tend to have political, organizational, material and financial interactions. Otherwise, how would emissaries of international terrorist organizations, instructors, preachers and militants from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Albania and other countries appear in the territory of the same Chechnya, Dagestan or the Russian Volga region? They help each other not only with weapons and information, but sometimes, manifesting an original international solidarity, carry out terrorist acts for each other.

The very fact of cooperation between the various terrorist organizations shows a great similarity between them. Apparently, class, religious, targeted differences between terrorists are not as important as the common, which unites them today in a terrorist international - a kind of global octopus acting as a single unit and spreading its poisoned tentacles to all states and regions.

Summing up, let’s say that modern terrorism is almost always organized; it is an element of systemic terrorist activity. This is a complex and

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expensive way of violence, not so much individual groups of terrorists as the system of such formations with a complex infrastructure servicing them, including providing combat and psychological training for terrorists, financing their activities, illegal border crossing, supplying weapons, ammunition, information “maintenance” etc. Terrorist organizations are firmly welded together by a common ideology, regardless of its masking color.

Issues for discussion

1.Terrorist activity and its types.

2.Terrorist organization.

3.Elements of a terrorist organization: planning, preparing, financing, inciting, and organizing an illegal armed formation, recruiting, arming, training, participating in the activities of an armed illegal formation.

4.Information aiding or “intellectual aiding”.

5.Propaganda of the ideas of terrorism.

6.Dissemination of materials or information calling for terrorist activities

7.Terror, fear, horror.

Methodological recommendations

1.Form a group of participants, trying to ensure the heterogeneity of its composition.

2.Think about all aspects of the problem, avoiding template, typical solutions. Try to use not only critical thinking, but also imagination, not hesitating to express even “absurd” ideas.

3.During the “brainstorming session”, students are asked to answer the following questions: How is the structure of complex terrorist organizations represented? How do the large-scale Islamic terrorist groups in the Middle East form a new type of terrorist organization?

4.All participants should be provided with an equal opportunity to express their ideas; relations between them should be based on the principles of tolerance and mutual respect. The teacher, as necessary, should ask leading questions that will allow to give a new direction to the participants’ thoughts and prevent the repetition of similar ideas.

5.The procedure of brainstorming is not considered effective without subsequent examination of ideas. Experts group similar ideas and formu-

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