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Theory, Culture & Society
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Complex Global Microstructures

The New Terrorist Societies

Karin Knorr Cetina

University of Constance, Germany

The new terrorism is a major exemplifying case for complexity theory – for example, it exemplifies major disproportionalities between cause and effect, unpredictable outcomes, and self-organizing, emergent structures. It also illustrates, I argue in this article, the emergence of global microstructures: of forms of connectivity and coordination that combine global reach with microstructural mechanisms that instantiate self-organizing principles and patterns. Global systems based on microstructural principles do not exhibit institutional complexity but rather the asymmetries, unpredictabilities and playfulness of complex (and dispersed) interaction patterns. The analysis of complex global microstructures helps to collect and assess empirical evidence for the architecture of the global structural forms of a world society. It also suggests a theory of microglobalization – the view that the texture of a global world becomes articulated through microstructural patterns that develop in the shadow of (but liberated from) national and local institutional patterns.

Key Words: Al Qaeda • disproportionality effects • global microstructures • globalization

Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 22, No. 5, 213-234 (2005)
DOI: 10.1177/0263276405057200
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