From the Editors
In recent years, increasing attention has been paid to how violent non-state actors are using artificial intelligence (AI) to achieve their goals and how AI is being utilized for counterterrorism. Far less attention has been paid, however, to how AI itself—as a “whole-of-society transformative technology”—could change the landscape of political violence in much more fundamental ways. In our cover article this month, Yannick Veilleux-Lepage argues that “AI is reordering labor markets, institutional authority, and the relational worlds in which people live, generating preconditions for political violence independently of whether violent actors adopt the technology themselves.” Using a framework he developed centered on three grievance domains—economic order, state and institutional power, and social and personal fabric—Veilleux-Lepage “considers how violence arising from these grievances may materialize, including through targets and actor types that lie largely outside current counterterrorism monitoring.”
Our interview is with Greg Hinds, former Director of Counter Terrorism at Interpol, who discussed the responsibility of effectively bringing together the capabilities of various security agencies and developing partnerships among those entities. “It’s the information sharing which is key to this,” he observes, “making sure that all the information that’s available is in the right hands so that the right people can make the right decisions at the right time based on their ability to do their jobs.”
Earlier this year, the world witnessed the collapse of the detention system holding tens of thousands of Islamic State affiliates and their families in northeast Syria. Devorah Margolin writes that “the collapse of indefinite detention risks feeding into Islamic State narratives that emphasize endurance, liberation, and the strategic importance of detention sites. Prisons have played a central role in the group’s evolution—serving as sites of recruitment, networking, and operational consolidation. The sudden dispersal of these populations, without a framework for accountability or monitoring, complicates efforts to track residual networks and the ability to assess the group’s capacity to regenerate.”
Finally, Alexandre Rodde, David Mcilhatton, John Cuddihy, and Shannen Benton consider how security lessons from the Paris Olympics could be applied to the upcoming FIFA World Cup competition and other future major events. “Paris,” they write, “demonstrated the value of intelligence-led counterterrorism, integrated multi-agency coordination, critical infrastructure protection, cybersecurity readiness, counter-drone capabilities, visible deterrence, and effective public communication.”
Don Rassler and Kristina Hummel, Editors-in-Chief
