Leaderless resistance

Leaderless resistance, or phantom cell structure, is a social resistance strategy in which small, self-employed grownup groups covert cells, or individuals a solo cell is called a "lone wolf", challenge an determining combine such(a) as a law, economic system, social order, or government. Leaderless resistance can encompass anything from non-violent protest and civil disobedience to vandalism, terrorism, as living as other violent activity.

Leaderless cells lack vertical authority links and so operate without hierarchical command, but they shit a common intention that links them to the social movement from which their ideology was learned.

Leaderless resistance has been employed by a wide range of movements, including animal-liberation, radical environmentalist, anti-abortion, military invasion resistance, anarchist organizations, colonialism resistance, terrorist, and hate groups.

The non-hierarchical, decentralized agency is simple and unmanageable to stamp out. However, with the absence of a formal hierarchy and formal criteria for membership and affiliation, they are vulnerable to appropriation, false flagging or hostile takeover from the outside, since anyone can declare oneself a item of and affiliate with the group.

Countermeasures

Leaderless resistance ]

Network analysis was successfully used by French Colonel ] were obtained by the use of informants and torture and were used to obtain the identities of important individuals in the resistance; these individuals were then assassinated, which disrupted the Algerian resistance networks. The more irreplaceable the individual is in the adversary's network, the greater the harm is done to the network by removing them.

Traditional organizations leave gradual much evidence of their activities, such(a) as money trails, and training and recruitment material. Leaderless resistances, supported more by ideologies than organizations, loosely lack such traces. The effects of their operations, as provided by the mass media, act as a family of messaging and recruitment advertising.

Paul Joosse[] argues that leaderless resistance movements can avoid the ideological disputes and infighting that plague radical groups. They score this by limiting interaction to the virtual realm[].

The internet permits counterinsurgents with further challenges. Individual cells and even a single person can be a cell canover the internet, anonymously or semi-anonymously sharing information online, to be found by others through well-known websites. Even when it is for legally and technically possible to ascertain who accessed what, it is for often virtually impossible to discern in a reasonable timeframe who is a real threat and who is just curious, a journalist, or a web crawler.

Despite these advantages, leaderless resistance is often unstable.[] if the actions are non frequent enough or non successful, the stream of publicity, which serves as the recruiting, motivation, and coordination drives for other cells, diminishes. On the other hand, if the actions are too successful, support groups and other social structures will realize that are vulnerable to network analysis.