myAIPMCOVID-19: a challenge or opportunity for terrorist groups?
Abdul Basit | Journal of Policing, Intelligence and Counter Terrorism
The Covid-19 contagion has emerged amid a rapidly changing geopolitical environment and technological transformations. These developments have created new opportunities and challenges for terrorist groups. Whereas terrorist groups are struggling to launch conventional attacks during the lockdown, they have a captive young audience on the internet to recruit and radicalise. Similarly, though travel restrictions have limited terrorists’ mobility, they are using the time to develop new skills. This article examines the opportunities and challenges for terrorists to provide an assessment of the evolving strategic landscape. The persistence of religious terrorism, despite the weakening of Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, alongside the emergence of the far-right terrorism in the West, renders the existing terrorist landscape complex and chronic. While the internet and social media revolutionised terrorist recruitment and radicalisation, emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, drone technology and 3D-printing can potentially change the face of future terrorist violence.
Introduction
The Covid-19 pandemic has occurred during a time of rapid geopolitical and technological transformation in which power is shifting from West to East. Arguably, these developments herald the end of the 9/11 era marked by the global war on terror (Rhodes, 2020). The post-9/11 world, notwithstanding the war on terror, is more susceptible to terrorism than the pre-9/11 world. For instance, the West and the U.S. which have remained relatively immune from terrorist attacks, are now grappling with increased terrorist violence, both by jihadists and the far-right (The Soufan Centre, 2019). 1
This article will examine the evolution of terrorism and the forms it is likely to adopt in the emerging era of great power competition. To understand the future of terrorism, the global terrorist landscape has to be situated at the intersection of an evolving world order and emerging technologies, both of which are being expedited by Covid-19. The short and long-term impact of Covid-19 on terrorism will vary between conflict and non-conflict zones. Within conflict zones, there impact will be different between cities where governments have imposed lockdowns, and remote areas where governance is weak and terrorists have territorial control (UNSC, 2020, p. 5). Terrorist acts have recently increased in conflict-zones and decreased in non-conflict zones. In the future, the terrorism and other forms of political violence are likely to increase due to the expected economic recession, growing employment insecurities, and governance challenges (Ibid).
There is currently a debate among terrorism scholars and practitioners on whether the evolving world order, emerging technologies and Covid-19 will provide opportunities or challenges for terrorists. Bloom, Pantucci and Wither have warned not to ignore the terrorist threat as new risks emerge (Bloom, 2020; Pantucci, 2020; Wither, 2020). Contrarily, Neumann and Rhodes consider the pandemic a challenge for terrorists as they have been unable to conduct conventional attacks and draw attention to their causes (Neumann, 2020; Rhodes, 2020). Others see the evolving situation both as a challenge and an opportunity (Ackerman & Peterson, 2020; Avis, 2020, p. 8; United Nations Security Council Counter-Terrorism Committee Executive Directorate, 2020). This article will expand on this last stream of terrorism research by synthesising the competing arguments to provide a nuanced analysis of the evolution of terrorism.
No research exists about the impact of past pandemics on terrorism. The Spanish Flu pandemic (1918-1920) was indeed followed by a spate of anarchist bombings in the U.S. orchestrated to oppose World War I (Ackerman & Peterson, 2020, pp. 59–60). However, it is difficult to link these bombings to the pandemic. Presumably, even if the Spanish Flu and Covid-19 can be compared, the global political environment of the two eras is entirely different, and the post-crisis outcomes of the two predicaments may not be identical.
However, if pandemics are considered a form of natural disaster, then there is a body of research on the evolution of terrorism in post-disaster contexts. Bauman, Paul, and Ayalew (2006) identified mixed results from the impact of natural disasters on terrorism. For instance, following the 2004 South East Asian tsunami, the Free Ache Movement and the Indonesian government signed a memorandum of understanding to resolve the thirty-year-old conflict in Ache. Simultaneously, the LTTE conflict in Sri Lanka worsened in the wake of the tsunami (Avis, 2020, p. 8).
Using available open-source information, observable patterns and current operational and ideological reactions of various terrorist groups to the pandemic, some trends can be identified. The ways that shifting geopolitical power and emerging technologies intersect with existing patterns of extremism will form the basis of any future terrorist landscape. This article first discusses the opportunities for terrorist groups created by the pandemic. The second section outlines the challenges. The final section discusses trends that will underpin the future terrorist landscape.
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COVID-19: a challenge or opportunity for terrorist groups? Abdul Basit, Journal of Policing, Intelligence and Counter Terrorism, 2020