Leaderless resistance, or phantom cell structure, is a
social resistance strategy
Strategy (from Greek στρατηγία ''stratēgia'', "troop leadership; office of general, command, generalship") is a general plan to achieve one or more long-term or overall goals under conditions of uncertainty. In the sense of the " a ...
in which small, independent groups (
covert cells), or individuals (a solo cell is called a "
lone wolf"), challenge an established institution such as a law, economic system, social order, or government. Leaderless resistance can encompass anything from
non-violent
Nonviolence is the personal practice of not causing harm to others under any condition. It may come from the belief that hurting people, animals and/or the environment is unnecessary to achieve an outcome and it may refer to a general philosoph ...
protest and
civil disobedience
Civil disobedience is the active and professed refusal of a citizenship, citizen to obey certain laws, demands, orders, or commands of a government (or any other authority). By some definitions, civil disobedience has to be nonviolent to be cal ...
to
vandalism
Vandalism is the action involving deliberate destruction of or damage to public or private property.
The term includes property damage, such as graffiti and defacement directed towards any property without permission of the owner. The t ...
,
terrorism
Terrorism, in its broadest sense, is the use of violence against non-combatants to achieve political or ideological aims. The term is used in this regard primarily to refer to intentional violence during peacetime or in the context of war aga ...
, and other violent activity.
Leaderless cells lack vertical command links and so operate without hierarchical command,
but they have a common goal that links them to the social movement from which their ideology was learned.
Leaderless resistance has been employed by
animal rights
Animal rights is the philosophy according to which many or all Animal consciousness, sentient animals have Moral patienthood, moral worth independent of their Utilitarianism, utility to humans, and that their most basic interests—such as ...
,
radical environmentalist,
anti-abortion
Anti-abortion movements, also self-styled as pro-life movements, are involved in the abortion debate advocating against the practice of abortion and its Abortion by country, legality. Many anti-abortion movements began as countermovements in r ...
,
insurgent
An insurgency is a violent, armed rebellion by small, lightly armed bands who practice guerrilla warfare against a larger authority. The key descriptive feature of insurgency is its asymmetric nature: small irregular forces face a large, well ...
,
anarchist
Anarchism is a political philosophy and Political movement, movement that seeks to abolish all institutions that perpetuate authority, coercion, or Social hierarchy, hierarchy, primarily targeting the state (polity), state and capitalism. A ...
,
anti-colonial
Decolonization is the undoing of colonialism, the latter being the process whereby imperial nations establish and dominate foreign territories, often overseas. The meanings and applications of the term are disputed. Some scholars of decolon ...
, and
terrorist
Terrorism, in its broadest sense, is the use of violence against non-combatants to achieve political or ideological aims. The term is used in this regard primarily to refer to intentional violence during peacetime or in the context of war aga ...
movements. It is a strategy used by
hate group
A hate group is a social group that advocates and practices hatred, hostility, or violence towards members of a race, ethnicity, nation, religion, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, or any other designated sector of society.
Acc ...
s as well.
General characteristics
A covert cell may be a lone individual or a small group. The basic characteristic of the structure is that there is no explicit communication between cells that are acting toward shared goals. Members of one cell usually have little or no information about who else is agitating on behalf of their cause.
Leaderless movements may have a symbolic figurehead.
This can be a public figure, a
multiple-use name, or an inspirational author, who picks generic targets and objectives, but does not actually manage or execute plans.
Media
Media may refer to:
Communication
* Means of communication, tools and channels used to deliver information or data
** Advertising media, various media, content, buying and placement for advertising
** Interactive media, media that is inter ...
, in this case, often create a
positive feedback loop
Positive feedback (exacerbating feedback, self-reinforcing feedback) is a process that occurs in a feedback loop where the outcome of a process reinforces the inciting process to build momentum. As such, these forces can exacerbate the effects ...
: by publishing declarations of a movement's role model, this instills motivation, ideas, and assumed sympathy in the minds of potential agitators who in turn lend further authority to the figurehead.
While this may loosely resemble a vertical command structure, it is notably unidirectional: a titular leader makes pronouncements, and activists may respond, but there is no formal contact between the two levels of organization.
As a result, leaderless resistance cells are resistant to
informant
An informant (also called an informer or, as a slang term, a "snitch", "rat", "canary", "stool pigeon", "stoolie", "tout" or "grass", among other terms) is a person who provides privileged information, or (usually damaging) information inten ...
s and
traitor
Treason is the crime of attacking a state (polity), state authority to which one owes allegiance. This typically includes acts such as participating in a war against one's native country, attempting to Coup d'état, overthrow its government, spy ...
s. As there is neither a center that may be destroyed, nor links between the cells that may be infiltrated, it is more difficult for established authorities to arrest the development of a leaderless resistance movement than it is with movements that adopt more conventional hierarchies.
Given of leaderless resistance, and the fact that it is often strategically adopted in the face of a power imbalance, it has much in common with
guerrilla warfare
Guerrilla warfare is a form of unconventional warfare in which small groups of irregular military, such as rebels, partisans, paramilitary personnel or armed civilians, which may include recruited children, use ambushes, sabotage, terrori ...
. The latter strategy, however, usually retains some form of organized, bidirectional leadership and is often more than the individualized actions of leaderless cells. In some cases, a largely leaderless movement may evolve into a coherent
insurgency
An insurgency is a violent, armed rebellion by small, lightly armed bands who practice guerrilla warfare against a larger authority. The key descriptive feature of insurgency is its asymmetric warfare, asymmetric nature: small irregular forces ...
or guerrilla movement, as with the
Yugoslav partisans
The Yugoslav Partisans,Serbo-Croatian, Macedonian language, Macedonian, and Slovene language, Slovene: , officially the National Liberation Army and Partisan Detachments of Yugoslavia sh-Latn-Cyrl, Narodnooslobodilačka vojska i partizanski odr ...
of
World War II
World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...
.
Leaderless resistance often involves resistance by violent means, but it is not limited to them. Non-violent groups can use the same structure to author, print, and distribute
samizdat
Samizdat (, , ) was a form of dissident activity across the Eastern Bloc in which individuals reproduced censored and underground makeshift publications, often by hand, and passed the documents from reader to reader. The practice of manual rep ...
literature, to create self-propagating
boycotts
A boycott is an act of nonviolent resistance, nonviolent, voluntary abstention from a product, person, organisation, or country as an expression of protest. It is usually for Morality, moral, society, social, politics, political, or Environmenta ...
against political opponents via the internet, to maintain an alternative
electronic currency outside of the reach of taxing governments and transaction-logging banks, and so forth.
History
The concept of leaderless resistance was developed by Col.
Ulius Louis Amoss, a former
U.S. intelligence officer, in the early 1950s.
An
anti-communist
Anti-communism is political and ideological opposition to communist beliefs, groups, and individuals. Organized anti-communism developed after the 1917 October Revolution in Russia, and it reached global dimensions during the Cold War, when th ...
, Amoss saw leaderless resistance as a way to prevent the penetration and destruction of CIA-supported resistance cells in Eastern European countries under Soviet control.
The concept was revived and popularized in an essay published by the anti-government
Ku Klux Klan
The Ku Klux Klan (), commonly shortened to KKK or Klan, is an American Protestant-led Christian terrorism, Christian extremist, white supremacist, Right-wing terrorism, far-right hate group. It was founded in 1865 during Reconstruction era, ...
member
Louis Beam in 1983, again in 1992, and was read as a keynote message at the 1992 gathering
Rocky Mountain Rendezvous of
right-wing extremists.
Beam advocated leaderless resistance as a technique for
white nationalists
White is the lightest color and is achromatic (having no chroma). It is the color of objects such as snow, chalk, and milk, and is the opposite of black. White objects fully (or almost fully) reflect and scatter all the visible wav ...
to continue the struggle against the
U.S. government, despite an overwhelming imbalance in power and resources.
Beam argued that conventional
hierarchical
A hierarchy (from Greek: , from , 'president of sacred rites') is an arrangement of items (objects, names, values, categories, etc.) that are represented as being "above", "below", or "at the same level as" one another. Hierarchy is an importan ...
pyramidal organizations are extremely dangerous for their participants, when employed in a resistance movement against government, because of the ease of disclosing the
chain of command
A command hierarchy is a group of people who carry out orders based on others' authority within the group.
Military chain of command
In a military context, the chain of command is the line of authority and responsibility along which orders ...
. A less dangerous approach would be to convince like-minded individuals to form independent cells without close communication between each other but generally operating in the same direction.
More contemporary examples of social movements such as
the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) in France,
Extinction Rebellion
Extinction Rebellion (abbreviated as XR) is a UK-founded global environmental movement, with the stated aim of using nonviolent civil disobedience to compel government action to avoid tipping points in the climate system, biodiversity loss, and ...
, or the
#MeToo movement seem to have spontaneously arisen as leaderless movements, perhaps due to the prevalence of social media that bring together individuals with common grievances even in the absence of organized leadership.
In practice
Animal liberation
The first recorded
direct action
Direct action is a term for economic and political behavior in which participants use agency—for example economic or physical power—to achieve their goals. The aim of direct action is to either obstruct a certain practice (such as a governm ...
for
animal liberation which progressed (after a considerable delay) into a movement of leaderless resistance was by the original "Band of Mercy" in 1824 whose goal was to thwart
fox hunters.
Inspired by this group and after seeing a pregnant deer driven into the village by fox hunters to be killed, John Prestige decided to actively oppose this sport and formed the
Hunt Saboteurs Association
The Hunt Saboteurs Association (HSA) is a United Kingdom organisation that uses hunt sabotage as a means of direct action to stop fox hunting. It was founded in 1963, with its first sabotage event occurring at the South Devon Foxhounds on 26 ...
in 1964. Within a year, a leaderless model of hunt-sabotage groups was formed across the United Kingdom.
[
A new Band of Mercy was then formed in 1972. It used direct action to liberate animals and cause economic sabotage against those thought to be abusing animals. ]Ronnie Lee
Ronnie Lee (born 1951) is a British animal rights activist. He is known primarily for being the Press Officer for the UK Animal Liberation Front (ALF) in 1976. He also founded the magazine '' Arkangel'' in 1989. and others changed the name of the movement to the Animal Liberation Front
The Animal Liberation Front (ALF) is a Far-left politics, far-left international, Leaderless resistance, leaderless, decentralized movement that emerged in Britain in the 1970s, evolving from the Bands of Mercy. It operates without a formal lead ...
(ALF) in 1976 and adopted a leaderless resistance model focusing broadly on animal liberation.
Earth First!
Earth First! is a radical environmentalism, radical Environmental movement, environmental advocacy group that originated in the Southwestern United States. It was founded in 1980 by Dave Foreman, Mike Roselle, Howie Wolke, Bart Koehler, and Ron K ...
and the environmental movement
The environmental movement (sometimes referred to as the ecology movement) is a social movement that aims to protect the natural world from harmful environmental practices in order to create sustainable living. In its recognition of humanity a ...
in the 1980s also adopted the leaderless resistance model. An animal liberation movement advocating violence emerged with the name Animal Rights Militia (ARM) in 1982. Letter bombs were sent to the then British Prime Minister
The prime minister of the United Kingdom is the head of government of the United Kingdom. The prime minister advises the sovereign on the exercise of much of the royal prerogative, chairs the Cabinet, and selects its ministers. Modern pri ...
, Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher (; 13 October 19258 April 2013), was a British stateswoman who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990 and Leader of the Conservative Party (UK), Leader of th ...
. Two years later the name Hunt Retribution Squad (HRS) was also used.
The Earth Liberation Front
The Earth Liberation Front (ELF), also known as "Elves" or "The Elves", is the collective name for Wiktionary:autonomy, autonomous individuals or covert cells who, according to the ELF Press Office, use "economic sabotage and guerrilla warfare to ...
(ELF) formed in 1992, breaking from Earth First! when that organization decided to focus on public direct action, instead of the ecotage
Ecotage ( ) is sabotage carried out for environmental reasons.
Cases
All damage figures below are in United States dollars. Some well-known acts of ecotage have included:
*Circa 1969 to 1985 – ecological activist James F. Phillips, opera ...
that the ELF participated in. A violent
Violence is characterized as the use of physical force by humans to cause harm to other living beings, or property, such as pain, injury, disablement, death, damage and destruction. The World Health Organization (WHO) defines violence a ...
group called the Justice Department
A justice ministry, ministry of justice, or department of justice, is a ministry or other government agency in charge of the administration of justice. The ministry or department is often headed by a minister of justice (minister for justice in a ...
was established in 1993, and in 1994 to hunters such as Prince Charles
Charles III (Charles Philip Arthur George; born 14 November 1948) is King of the United Kingdom and the 14 other Commonwealth realms.
Charles was born at Buckingham Palace during the reign of his maternal grandfather, King George VI, and ...
and to animal research
Animal testing, also known as animal experimentation, animal research, and ''in vivo'' testing, is the use of animals, as model organisms, in experiments that seek answers to scientific and medical questions. This approach can be contrasted ...
ers.
In 1999 the leaderless resistance strategy was employed by animal liberation organisations like Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC), which was formed from the Consort beagles campaign and Save the Hill Grove Cats to close down Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS). Despite claiming successes leaderless animal liberation and environmental movements generally lack the broad popular support that often occurs in strictly political or military conflicts. The Revolutionary Cells--Animal Liberation Brigade (RCALB) appeared in 2003 and sent pipe bombs to Chiron Corporation and used incendiary device
Incendiary weapons, incendiary devices, incendiary munitions, or incendiary bombs are weapons designed to start fires. They may destroy structures or sensitive equipment using fire, and sometimes operate as anti-personnel weapon, anti-personnel ...
s against other targets.
Within a few years of the victories claimed by the SHAC, other campaigns against animal testing laboratories emerged. At the same time, SPEAK Campaigns and the more radical ALF militants, Oxford Arson Squad began their campaigns towards the same goal: to end Oxford University
The University of Oxford is a collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the second-oldest continuously operating u ...
's animal research.
In April 2009, the Militant Forces Against Huntingdon Life Sciences (MFAH) became active. With the ALF, they began targeting HLS customer and financial Directors, as well as company property. Since then, groups have reported over a dozen actions in Europe, including painting homes, burning cars, and grave desecration. Militants, however, oppose , instead believing in any necessary action to prevent suffering at HLS's laboratories.
Radical Islamists
Leaderless resistance is also often well-suited to terrorist objectives. The Islamist organization Al-Qaeda
, image = Flag of Jihad.svg
, caption = Jihadist flag, Flag used by various al-Qaeda factions
, founder = Osama bin Laden{{Assassinated, Killing of Osama bin Laden
, leaders = {{Plainlist,
* Osama bin Lad ...
uses a typical figurehead/leaderless cell structure. The organization itself may be pyramidal, but sympathizers who act on its pronouncements often do so spontaneously and independently.
Given the small, clandestine character of terrorist cells, it is easy to assume they necessarily constitute leaderless resistance models. When there is bidirectional communication with external leadership, however, the label is inappropriate. The men who executed the bombings of the London Underground
The London Underground (also known simply as the Underground or as the Tube) is a rapid transit system serving Greater London and some parts of the adjacent home counties of Buckinghamshire, Essex and Hertfordshire in England.
The Undergro ...
on July 7, 2005 constituted a leaderless resistance cell in that they purportedly acted out of sympathy for Islamic fundamentalism
Islamic fundamentalism has been defined as a revivalist and reform movement of Muslims who aim to return to the founding scriptures of Islam. The term has been used interchangeably with similar terms such as Islamism, Islamic revivalism, Qut ...
but under their own auspices. The hijackers involved in the September 11 attacks
The September 11 attacks, also known as 9/11, were four coordinated Islamist terrorist suicide attacks by al-Qaeda against the United States in 2001. Nineteen terrorists hijacked four commercial airliners, crashing the first two into ...
, by contrast, allegedly received training, direction, and funding from Al-Qaeda, and are not properly designated a leaderless cell.
Neo-Nazis and White nationalists
The concept of leaderless resistance remains important to far-right thinking in the United States, as a proposed response to perceived federal government over-reach at the expense of individual rights. Simson Garfinkel, however, found in his research that for the most part the far right seldom used this tactic. Timothy McVeigh
Timothy James McVeigh (April 23, 1968 – June 11, 2001) was an American domestic terrorist who masterminded and perpetrated the Oklahoma City bombing on April 19, 1995. The bombing itself killed 167 people (including 19 children), injured ...
is one example in the United States. McVeigh worked in a small cell which based its attack on motivations widespread among far-right anti-government groups and the militia movement.
Leaderless resistance has been advocated by white supremacist groups such as White Aryan Resistance
White Aryan Resistance (WAR) is a white supremacist and neo-Nazi organization in the United States which was founded and formerly led by former Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon Tom Metzger. It was based in Warsaw, Indiana, and it was also incorpora ...
(WAR) and the British neo-Nazi Combat 18 (C18). The modern Ku Klux Klan
The Ku Klux Klan (), commonly shortened to KKK or Klan, is an American Protestant-led Christian terrorism, Christian extremist, white supremacist, Right-wing terrorism, far-right hate group. It was founded in 1865 during Reconstruction era, ...
is also credited with having developed a leaderless resistance model. Troy Southgate also advocated forms of leaderless resistance during his time as a leading activist in the National Revolutionary Faction and a pioneer of National-Anarchism. James Mason
James Neville Mason (; 15 May 190927 July 1984) was an English actor. He achieved considerable success in British cinema before becoming a star in Hollywood. He was nominated for three Academy Awards, three Golden Globes (winning once) and two ...
a former American Nazi Party
The American Nazi Party (ANP) is an American neo-Nazi Political parties in the United States, political party founded by George Lincoln Rockwell in 1959. In Rockwell's time, it was headquartered in Arlington, Virginia. It was renamed the Natio ...
member and neo-Nazi was a proponent of the idea of "leaderless resistance" as detailed in ''SIEGE'' a collection of writings from the defunct National Socialist Liberation Front (NSLF) which advocated violence against political opponents, Jews and non-whites of which he deemed to be the supposedly Jewish controlled entity he referred to as "The System" which has since been embraced by the terrorist group Atomwaffen Division
The Atomwaffen Division (''Atomwaffen'' meaning "atomic weapons" in GermanModern standard German prefers ''Kernwaffen'' () for the concept.), also known as the National Socialist Resistance Front, was an international far-right extremist and ...
(AWD) in the modern day.
Stormfront, Aryan Nations
Aryan Nations is a North American antisemitic, neo-Nazi and white supremacist hate group that was originally based in Kootenai County, Idaho, about miles (4.4 km) north of the city of Hayden Lake. Richard Girnt Butler founded Aryan N ...
, and Hammerskin Nation (HSN) link to Beam's ''Leaderless Resistance''. These groups promote lone wolf actions. Stormfront, while regretting the loss of life, explains how Benjamin Nathaniel Smith's 1999 killing spree was compelled by circumstances. The World Church of the Creator (WCOTC) gave a mixed message, calling Smith "a selfless man who gave his life in the resistance to Jewish/mud tyranny," but noting "the Church does not condone his acts."[
Examples of modern-day leaderless resistance/lone-wolf terrorism include:
*1999 Los Angeles Jewish Community Center shooting
*1999 murders of Gary Matson and Winfield Mowder
*2008 Knoxville Unitarian Universalist church shooting
*2009 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum shooting
*]2011 Norway attacks
The 2011 Norway attacks, also called 22 July () or 22/7 in Norway, were two domestic terrorism, domestic terrorist attacks by far-right politics, far-right extremist Anders Behring Breivik against the politics of Norway, government, the civil ...
*2012 Wisconsin Sikh temple shooting
*2014 Overland Park Jewish Community Center shooting
Two Overland Park shootings occurred on April 13, 2014, at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Kansas City and Village Shalom, a Jewish retirement community, both located in Overland Park, Kansas in the United States. A total of three people w ...
*2015 Charleston church shooting
An Anti-Black racism, anti-black mass shooting and hate crime occurred on June 17, 2015, in Charleston, South Carolina. Nine people were killed, and one was injured, during a Bible study (Christianity), Bible study at Emanuel African Methodist ...
* 2015 Lafayette shooting
*2016 Murder of Jo Cox
On 16 June 2016, Jo Cox, a British Labour Party politician and Member of Parliament (United Kingdom), Member of Parliament (MP) for Batley and Spen, died after being shot and stabbed multiple times in Birstall, West Yorkshire. In November 2016, ...
*2017 Quebec City mosque shooting
*2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting
*2019 Christchurch mosque shootings
*2019 Escondido mosque fire and Poway synagogue shooting
* 2019 El Paso shooting
* 2022 Buffalo shooting
*2022 Colorado Springs nightclub shooting
Radical environmentalism
Leaderless resistance emerged in the environmental movement in 1976 when John Hanna and others as the Environmental Life Force (ELF) (also known now as the ''original ELF'') used explosive and incendiary device
Incendiary weapons, incendiary devices, incendiary munitions, or incendiary bombs are weapons designed to start fires. They may destroy structures or sensitive equipment using fire, and sometimes operate as anti-personnel weapon, anti-personnel ...
s. The group conducted armed actions in northern California
California () is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States that lies on the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. It borders Oregon to the north, Nevada and Arizona to the east, and shares Mexico–United States border, an ...
and Oregon
Oregon ( , ) is a U.S. state, state in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. It is a part of the Western U.S., with the Columbia River delineating much of Oregon's northern boundary with Washington (state), Washington, while t ...
, later disbanding in 1978 following Hanna's arrest for placing incendiary devices on seven crop-dusters at the Salinas, California
Salinas (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Salt pan (geology), Salt Flats") is a city in the U.S. state of California and the county seat of Monterey County, California, Monterey County. With a population of 163,542 in the 2020 Census, Salinas is ...
airport on May Day
May Day is a European festival of ancient origins marking the beginning of summer, usually celebrated on 1 May, around halfway between the Northern Hemisphere's March equinox, spring equinox and midsummer June solstice, solstice. Festivities ma ...
, 1977. A decade and a half later this form of guerrilla warfare
Guerrilla warfare is a form of unconventional warfare in which small groups of irregular military, such as rebels, partisans, paramilitary personnel or armed civilians, which may include recruited children, use ambushes, sabotage, terrori ...
resurfaced using the same acronym
An acronym is a type of abbreviation consisting of a phrase whose only pronounced elements are the initial letters or initial sounds of words inside that phrase. Acronyms are often spelled with the initial Letter (alphabet), letter of each wor ...
.
In 1980 Earth First!
Earth First! is a radical environmentalism, radical Environmental movement, environmental advocacy group that originated in the Southwestern United States. It was founded in 1980 by Dave Foreman, Mike Roselle, Howie Wolke, Bart Koehler, and Ron K ...
was founded by Dave Foreman and others to confront environmental destruction, primarily of the American West. Inspired by the Edward Abbey
Edward Paul Abbey (January 29, 1927 – March 14, 1989) was an American author and essayist noted for his advocacy of environmental issues, criticism of public land policies, and anarchist political views. His best-known works include the nov ...
novel '' The Monkey Wrench Gang'', Earth First! made use of such techniques as treesitting and treespiking to stop logging
Logging is the process of cutting, processing, and moving trees to a location for transport. It may include skidder, skidding, on-site processing, and loading of trees or trunk (botany), logs onto logging truck, trucks[mining
Mining is the Resource extraction, extraction of valuable geological materials and minerals from the surface of the Earth. Mining is required to obtain most materials that cannot be grown through agriculture, agricultural processes, or feasib ...]
, road
A road is a thoroughfare used primarily for movement of traffic. Roads differ from streets, whose primary use is local access. They also differ from stroads, which combine the features of streets and roads. Most modern roads are paved.
Th ...
construction, suburb
A suburb (more broadly suburban area) is an area within a metropolitan area. They are oftentimes where most of a metropolitan areas jobs are located with some being predominantly residential. They can either be denser or less densely populated ...
an development, and energy companies.
The organization was committed to nonviolent ecotage
Ecotage ( ) is sabotage carried out for environmental reasons.
Cases
All damage figures below are in United States dollars. Some well-known acts of ecotage have included:
*Circa 1969 to 1985 – ecological activist James F. Phillips, opera ...
techniques from the group's inception. Others split from the movement in the 1990s, including the Earth Liberation Front
The Earth Liberation Front (ELF), also known as "Elves" or "The Elves", is the collective name for Wiktionary:autonomy, autonomous individuals or covert cells who, according to the ELF Press Office, use "economic sabotage and guerrilla warfare to ...
(ELF) in 1992, which named itself after the Animal Liberation Front
The Animal Liberation Front (ALF) is a Far-left politics, far-left international, Leaderless resistance, leaderless, decentralized movement that emerged in Britain in the 1970s, evolving from the Bands of Mercy. It operates without a formal lead ...
(ALF) which had formed in the 1970s. Three years later in Canada
Canada is a country in North America. Its Provinces and territories of Canada, ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, making it the world's List of coun ...
, inspired by the ELF in Europe
Europe is a continent located entirely in the Northern Hemisphere and mostly in the Eastern Hemisphere. It is bordered by the Arctic Ocean to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the west, the Mediterranean Sea to the south, and Asia to the east ...
, the first ''Earth Liberation'' direct action
Direct action is a term for economic and political behavior in which participants use agency—for example economic or physical power—to achieve their goals. The aim of direct action is to either obstruct a certain practice (such as a governm ...
occurred, but this time as the Earth Liberation Army (ELA), a similar movement who use ecotage and monkeywrenching as a tool.
A series of actions earned ELF the label of eco-terrorism, eco-terrorists, including the burning of a ski resort in Vail, Colorado in 1998, and the burning of an SUV dealership in Oregon
Oregon ( , ) is a U.S. state, state in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. It is a part of the Western U.S., with the Columbia River delineating much of Oregon's northern boundary with Washington (state), Washington, while t ...
in 1999. In the same year the ELA made headlines by setting fire to the Vail Resorts in Washington, D.C., causing $12 million in damages. The defendants in that case were later charged in the FBI's "Operation Backfire (FBI), Operation Backfire" with other crimes; this was later named by environmentalists as the Green Scare, alluding to the Red Scare periods of fear over communist infiltration of U.S.[Eco-Terror Indictments: "Operation Backfire" Nets 11]
, FBI, January 20th 2006.
Following the September 11, 2001 attacks several laws were passed increasing the penalty for ecoterrorism, and the U.S. Congress held hearings on the activity of groups such as the ELF. To date no one has been killed as a result of an ELF or ALF action, and both groups forbid harming human or non-human life.[Bron Taylor, 1998. Religion, Violence and Radical Environmentalism: From Earth First! to the Unabomber to the Earth Liberation Front, Terrorism and Political Violence 10(4):1-42 ]
In 2005 the FBI announced that the ELF was America's greatest domestic terrorist threat, responsible for over 1,200 "criminal incidents" amounting to tens of millions of dollars in damage to property.[Steven Best, Best, Steven and Best & Nocella. ''Igniting a Revolution: Voices in Defense of the Earth'', Lantern Books, 2006, p. 47.] The United States Department of Homeland Security confirmed this with regards to both the ALF and ELF.[FBI, ATF address domestic terrorism]
''CNN'', May 19th 2005.
Movements/organizations
*Camp for Climate Action
*Earth First!
Earth First! is a radical environmentalism, radical Environmental movement, environmental advocacy group that originated in the Southwestern United States. It was founded in 1980 by Dave Foreman, Mike Roselle, Howie Wolke, Bart Koehler, and Ron K ...
* Earth Liberation Army (ELA)
*Earth Liberation Front
The Earth Liberation Front (ELF), also known as "Elves" or "The Elves", is the collective name for Wiktionary:autonomy, autonomous individuals or covert cells who, according to the ELF Press Office, use "economic sabotage and guerrilla warfare to ...
(ELF)
* Environmental Life Force
*Plane Stupid
*Antifa (United States), Antifa
Anti-abortion militancy
Anti-abortion Militant (word), militants Army of God (USA), The Army of God use leaderless resistance as their organizing principle. As of 2009, The Army of God's webpage hosts a reprint of an article entitled "Leaderless Resistance" from a publication called ''The Seditionist.''
Countermeasures
Network analysis in classical setting
Leaderless resistance social networks are potentially vulnerable to social network analysis and its derivative, link analysis. Link analysis of social networks is the fundamental reason for the ongoing legislative push in the U.S. and the European Union for mandatory Telecommunications data retention, retention of telecommunication traffic data and for limiting access to Anonymity, anonymous Prepaid mobile phone, prepaid Mobile phone, cellphones, as the stored data contain important network analysis clues.
Network analysis was successfully used by French Colonel Yves Godard (French officer), Yves Godard to break the Nationalism and resistance in Algeria, Algerian resistance between 1955 and 1957 and force them to cease their bombing campaigns. The Algerian conflict may be better described as guerrilla in nature rather than leaderless resistance (see ''Modern Warfare'' by Col. Roger Trinquier), and this illustrates the weakness of cell-structured insurgents when compared to leaderless ones. were obtained by the use of informant
An informant (also called an informer or, as a slang term, a "snitch", "rat", "canary", "stool pigeon", "stoolie", "tout" or "grass", among other terms) is a person who provides privileged information, or (usually damaging) information inten ...
s and torture and were used to obtain the identities of important individuals in the resistance; these individuals were then assassination, assassinated, which disrupted the Algerian resistance networks. The more irreplaceable the individual is in the adversary's network, the greater the damage is done to the network by removing them.
Advantages of leaderless resistance
Traditional organizations leave behind much evidence of their activities, such as money trails, and training and recruitment material. Leaderless resistances, supported more by ideology, ideologies than organizations, generally lack such traces. The effects of their operations, as reported by the mass media, act as a sort of messaging and recruitment advertising.
argues that leaderless resistance movements can avoid the ideological disputes and infighting that plague radical groups. They do this by .
The internet provides counter-insurgents with further challenges. Individual cells (and even a single person can be a cell) can communicate over the internet, anonymously or semi-anonymously sharing information online, to be found by others through well-known websites. Even when it is legally and technically possible to ascertain who accessed what, it is often practically impossible to discern in a reasonable time frame 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 not frequent enough or not 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 form that are vulnerable to network analysis.
In fiction
*The 1970 novel ''A Piece of Resistance'', re-published in the US in 2004 under the title ''Never Surrender'' by Clive Egleton depicts resistance to a Soviet occupation of England.
*The 1996 novel ''Unintended Consequences (novel), Unintended Consequences'' by John Ross (author), John Ross portrays a successful rebellion by the American heartland after decades of bullying by faraway Washington.
See also
* Anti-pedophile activism
* Asymmetric warfare
* Clandestine cell system
* Individualist anarchism
* Insurrectionary anarchism
* Lone wolf (terrorism)
* James C. Scott
* Social peer-to-peer processes
* ''The Starfish and the Spider''
* Shaheen Bagh Protests
References
Further reading
The Leaderless Revolution: How Ordinary People Will Take Power and Change Politics In the 21st Century
by Carne Ross (2011)
External links
An Introduction To Terrorist Organisational Structures
Networks and Netwars
- PDF book by RAND Corporation.
- the original essay
* Simson Garfinkel
"Leaderless resistance today"
{{DEFAULTSORT:Leaderless Resistance
Activism by type
Guerrilla warfare
Secret societies
Social movements
Terrorism tactics