Disrupting Dark Networks

This book focuses on how social network analysis can be used to craft strategies to track, destabilize and disrupt covert, illegal networks.

Sean F. Everton (Author)

9781107606685, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 12 November 2012

490 pages, 278 b/w illus. 1 map 26 tables
22.6 x 15.2 x 3 cm, 0.61 kg

'Disrupting Dark Networks offers not only a critical and well-informed overview of social network theories and techniques, but also a critical reflection on counterinsurgency and counter-terrorism. It is certainly a valuable reference for scholars in the field.' Anita Lavorgna, Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books

Disrupting Dark Networks focuses on how social network analysis can be used to craft strategies to track, destabilize and disrupt covert and illegal networks. The book begins with an overview of the key terms and assumptions of social network analysis and various counterinsurgency strategies. The next several chapters introduce readers to algorithms and metrics commonly used by social network analysts. They provide worked examples from four different social network analysis software packages (UCINET, NetDraw, Pajek and ORA) using standard network data sets as well as data from an actual terrorist network that serves as a running example throughout the book. The book concludes by considering the ethics of and various ways that social network analysis can inform counterinsurgency strategizing. By contextualizing these methods in a larger counterinsurgency framework, this book offers scholars and analysts an array of approaches for disrupting dark networks.

Part I. Introduction: 1. Social network analysis: an introduction
2. Strategic options for disrupting dark networks
Part II. Social Network Analysis: Techniques: 3. Getting started with UCINET, NetDraw, Pajek, and ORA
4. Gathering, recording, and manipulating social networks
Part III. Social Network Analysis: Metrics: 5. Network topography
6. Cohesion and clustering
7. Centrality, power, and prestige
8. Brokers, bridges, and structural holes
9. Positions, roles, and blockmodels
Part IV. Social Network Analysis: Advances: 10. Dynamic analyses of dark networks
11. Statistical models for dark networks
Part V. Conclusion: 12. The promise and limits of social network analysis.

Subject Areas: Computer networking & communications [UT], Terrorism, armed struggle [JPWL], Sociology [JHB]