The Role of Sanctuary in an Insurgency

Current and future adversaries are able to create and sustain complex and adaptive networks of physical, social, virtual, and legal sanctuary from which they wage global campaigns. As long as insurgents can claim refuge for their ideologies and control the resources necessary to impose their objectives, terrorist organizations will remain a threat to international peace and prosperity. Sanctuary allows the insurgent to preserve and protect limited resources and provides protected access to additional resources. Traditionally, insurgencies relied upon the physical and social sanctuaries provided by geography and social conditions. Advances in technology and globalization provide insurgents with additional forms of refuge unavailable during the eighteenth century--virtual and legal. Individually these modern modes of sanctuary consist of a complex array of nodes and links. Collectively, they form a system of great structural and interactive complexity. Defeating, mitigating or containing sanctuary requires a holistic, qualitative, and systemic operational approach. SOD/CACD uses systemic framing to gain an appreciation of the entire insurgent system of sanctuary and to understand the behavior of the nodes and links across the entire spectrum of physical, social, virtual, and legal modes. Changing the way we think and act against these complex adaptive adversaries will enable us to mitigate their impact.