I find myself doing the exact same thing everyone else does, defaulting the argument to geography… that, right after making the point that politically hyperreal spatial inversions are in fact complex terrain. Right. Physical, human, and cognitive. Three dimensions. 3-D. That operate at macro AND micro scales. I know where I need to ultimately take the argument – sanctuary as a portable integrative bubble connecting corporeal being with location/environment and identity/cognition.

The more I think about it, the more it makes sense to think of politically hyperreal spatial inversions in terms of index cases. I’m not entirely comfortable with contagion arguments, but for the sake of this argument, let’s say there’s a contagion logic to terrorist sanctuaries. If it holds, then it makes sense to try to identify “location zero”, the index case, and see what we can learn from there.

The knee jerk response, of course, is that it was Afghanistan. But it wasn’t, at least not for the core group of foreign fighters who moved to Afghanistan (as opposed to Afghanistan’s native tribal and ethnic resistance fighters). Before AQ became trans-nationalist, its lead actors were extremists in their home states (not sure I can refer to them as nationalists, per se, although others have). So, if we’re looking at contagion as having a nationalist (alright, I concede, at least as an expedient referent this one time only) to transnationalist trajectory, then those original states (Egypt, Yemen/Saudi, Algeria, etc.) would be Index Cases. Or would Afghanistan still be the Index Case, for drawing them in? Makes a certain kind of sense, especially if I’m going to stick to the spatial inversion tag, although the history on this is deeper and thicker. The Index Case, at least in historical terms, has to be rooted in earlier pan-Islamic and poco developments.

That’s territory. What about ideological “contagion” (really not comfortable with it now, but I’ll let it ride, at least for this blurb)? The ideological roots have been explored plenty… actually, fire up the argumentation into enough tangents, and it feels like identifying Index Cases is just another way of identifying root causes. Or root locations, if the two are separable. Maybe root space. Will have to step back and think about the zero trope for while and come back to it when I’ve made more sense of it.

To follow up, does it even make sense to think of politically hyperreal spatial inversions – that’s my pomo longhand for extremist sanctuaries – in terms of zeros and index cases? This is going to take a bit of background research, but off the cuff, I’d only use it if the argument starts getting into issues of contagion – as in, how conflict spreads.

This is getting a bit stream-of-consciousness (SOC) again, so bear with me… but what I’m thinking of is a statement Rumsfeld once made at a joint press conference with the Norwegian Minister of Defence Kristin Krohn Devold in April 2002. She’s less the point of this SOC than is something Rumsfeld said in response to a query (CNN’s Barbara Star, I think) about Iran (remember, this is 2002). I’ve italicized the important bit.

Rumsfeld: Barbara?

Q: Well, my question could you review for us today your thinking about exactly how unhelpful you believe Iran is right now in the war on terrorism? In fact, do you now believe that al Qaeda has moved in and out of Iran, has operated in Iran? Do you believe that Iran in the current situation in Israel is continuing to back some of the unrest beyond this shipment of the arms you have spoken about? Just how unhelpful is Iran at the moment, in your mind?

Rumsfeld: There is no question but that Iran was involved with the Karine A shipment headed for the Palestinian Authority. There is no question but that al Qaeda have moved in and found sanctuary in Iran. And there is no question but that al Qaeda have moved into Iran and out of Iran to the south and dispersed to some other countries. To my knowledge, they are not operating out of Iran in the sense that they were out of Afghanistan, so there’s that distinction. But I can’t think of a thing I’ve said that anyone, by the wildest stretch of their imagination could characterize as “helpful”; they’re all harmful and contributing to the problems with respect to the global terrorists.

Q: Can I just follow up on two points? When you say they have found sanctuary in Iran, does that mean that you believe that al Qaeda is currently in Iran? And secondly, given what you have laid out, how do you begin to touch the problem inside Iran?

Rumsfeld: Maybe the word “sanctuary” was not a perfect word because I don’t think of it as a permanent sanctuary, I think of it as transit and — and — as opposed to operating out of the country. But it certainly would be helpful if they were more cooperative, and they have not been particularly. There are a couple of instances where they have characterized what they’re doing as being helpful, as I recall.

The Q & A went on a bit after that. I was struck by the thinking that linked sanctuary to notions of permanence and transience, with a slighter nod to associated functions. In Rumsfeld’s thinking, a sanctuary’s only really a sanctuary if it’s permanent and functions as a base for operations carried out elsewhere. The unspoken implication, though, is that permanence also implies a site of entrenchment, a foothold from which a group or organization or movement can grow and spread. It’s unspoken in this quote, but fairly implicit in everything else we know of neo-con thinking on Islam, the Middle East, and extremism linked to both.

Social Network Analysis lends itself to modelling social networks, as opposed to non-social networks (networks of non-social objects/entities). From this, we can atempt to predict outcomes in the event of node disruption, and apply that knowledge to real world social network tactics (“syntactics”).

The fluidity of networks, social or otherwise, is variable, and entirely relevant to their resilience (their ability to recover). It’s also contingent on type of network. A hierarchical social network, for example, might be considered much less fluid than distributed networks. Similarly with egocentric networks (networks in which some individuals play a more central role in influencing overall network structure) and sociocentric networks (in which culture, language, ethnicity, nationality, religion, and other collective social dynamics shap the structure of networks).

For these, do structural determinants mitigate or influence the fluidity of networks? What is the relationship between the fluidity of networks and the indigenous and exogenous factors that shape them?

A limitation arises with varying network requirements for and interactions with physical space. SNA deals with social connections and relationships, but network theory’s concern with spatial dynamics has generally been limited to one- or two-dimensional factors, ie. centrality measures (how “central” a social actor is in relation to other actors in the network), and how these play out in graphic representations of networks.

This is distinct from actual physical space; network visualiztion is a representation of data, a metaphor… possibly a frame. That said, social network scholarship has begun to explore the relationships between social actors and physical locations, at least in limited terms. Locative SNA factors in geospatial data to better understand social dynamics, for example – identifying the common spatial influences of members of social network – like residential and other forms of clustering – to better understand alternative pathways for transmission of social values.

Can SNA be reconciled with the evolutionary spatial requirements of networks that vary both in time and in place? Persistent militant movements and organizations aren’t static actors. Neither are their requirements for physical space. They change over time, shifting from terrorist tactics to paramilitary operations and back again, with all the variable requirements for operational security that these entail, and with all the variable spatial demands of smaller to larger units operating under varying degrees of secrecy. So when we refer to Taliban sanctuary in Waziristan, for example, or Al Qaida sanctuaries in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas or Northwest Fontier Province – or expeditionary AQ sanctuaries in Somalia, the Phillipines, Latin America – what do we really mean?

The Taliban, for example, are primarly Pashtun. Pashtun society, in which “every man is his own king”, is acephalous. This should suggest to us that there is therefore a direct ethnographic link between local culture and how networks embedded within it might look (in this, non-hierarchical). But one might expect that the social and functional structure of Pashtun Taliban operating in guerrilla units along the Durand Line will be distinct from that of a traditional Pashtun society of individuals. One might also expect that the operational structure of Pashtun Taliban in smaller, clandestine suicide IED cells in Kabul city will be distinct from both traditional Pashtun society and from Pashtun Taliban guerrila formations.

The logic is simple: larger units require greater amounts of coherent physical space in which to operate; smaller units require less physical space in which to operate; each carries distinct ethnographic weighting; each is influenced by whether operations are conducted in urban or rural space; each is influenced by whether their objectives are strategic, operational, or tactical in nature. How this complex terrain is organized and exploited – the concepts, structures, and practices of which it’s constituted – has a direct bearing on the nature of militant sanctuary. Battlespace regulatory regimes satisfy specific interests: a legal framework governs the conduct of war in one sense; technological platforms, allowing panoptic surveillance and targeting,  govern it in other ways.  This is system; sanctuary is a crack in it – a chaoplexic ellision. When we refer to militant or terrorist or guerrilla sanctuary,  we’re missing some very large patches of ground by not addressing the strategic, operational, and tactical logic of network sanctuaries.

Something I’ve been thinking about for a while: how to do spatially literate network analysis; how to think about the spatial cognition of networks as real world phenomena in physical environments; the interaction of social networks with their distributed physical contexts; dynamics, outcomes, consequences, implications.