Al-Qaeda's Innovative Improvisers: Learning in a Diffuse Transnational Network

Al-Qaeda is commonly described as a highly flexible and adaptable non-state network, making it difficult for states to combat. Although these features are associated with networks in theory, they are not inherent to networks in practice, and rely largely on organisational learning. A network that fails to learn is not likely to adapt successfully. This paper explores the learning implications of al-Qaeda's transnational network structure, focusing on decentralisation and reduced hierarchical control following the loss of its Afghanistan base. Drawing from organisational theory research, the paper uses an exploration–exploitation framework to offer hypotheses about how learning is evolving. It suggests a wider space for exploration, rendering a dispersed, decentralised al-Qaeda more innovative, balanced by a weakened ability to exploit resources and expertise. Networked al-Qaeda militants are described as ‘innovative improvisers’ with high creative potential but low professionalism. By delving into the mechanisms of learning, the paper builds knowledge of what specific circumstances affect al-Qaeda's purported agility as an actor. Further research is recommended on how states might respond to innovative improvisers. Such research should extend beyond popular proposals for ‘networked’ national security to innovation and learning in their own right.     

Writings on the margins: Welsh politics

Books reviewed in this article:
Andrews, L., Wales Says Yes
Davies, R., Devolution: A Process not an Event
Osmond, J., New Politics in Wales
Osmond, J. (ed.), The National Assembly Agenda
Taylor, B. and Thomson, K., Scotland and Wales: Nations Again?
Day, G. and Thomas, D. (eds), Contemporary Wales: An Annual Review of Economic and Social Research     

Carr, Mannheim, and a Post–positivist Science of International Relations

Recent work on Carr has looked beyond The Twenty Years' Crisis to the seeming anomaly of a political realist advocating regional integration in Western Europe, a welfare state at home, and a free hand for the USSR in Eastern Europe. Some have seen this anomaly, and Carr's successive appeasements of Germany and the USSR, as mere opportunism, but this paper finds a coherence in Carr's work deriving substantially from Mannheim. It was from Mannheim that Carr took not only the structure of The Twenty Years' Crisis , but also his characteristic post-positivist and interdisciplinary methodology, his belief in the policy role of the intellectual, his strong sense of the connectedness of foreign and domestic policy, his insistence on forms of international society that heavily discounted the sovereignty of small nations, and the besetting weaknesses of inadequately acknowledged historicism and elitism.