Complexity and Social Movements: Multitudes at the Edge of Chaos ...

Ecologies of action 101
the necessarily collective work of deciphering their individual experiences of
globalisation and forging from them shared understandings that can become
the basis of recognisable needs and therefore political demands.
However, as we demonstrated in Chapter 3 there is a number of methodological
and theoretical difficulties associated with analysing subterranean
networks comprised of non-linear flows of people, resources, and ideas.
Recent ethnographic and anthropological work has taken these problems
seriously (Mueller 2003, Chesters and Welsh 2004, Osterweil 2004a,
Sullivan 2004) and what this work repeatedly demonstrates is that proximity
to specific groups or organisations alone is analytically insufficient. To
capture the dynamics of this movement(s), one must literally be adrift
within the network, engaging with movement actors in material and immaterial
spaces and sensitised to the emergence of qualities that are irreducible
to the sum of the parts of that network.
Equally the key to understanding the AGM is not to be found amongst
individual actors be they groups or organisations. Instead, we must focus
our attention upon the processes of interaction between actors, to the iterative
outcomes of reflexive framing and to the emergence of an ecology of
action within GCS that is actualised through the AGM. If we are to reveal
anything about how the AGM works, we must look to processes and to
form, for it is within this hidden architecture that something of the dynamic
strength of the AGM can be grasped. The AGM displays ‘small-world’
characteristics (Watts and Strogatz 1998); it consists of hubs and nodes that
are typified by a penumbra of ‘weak links’. In network analysis, this structure
demonstrably allows for rapid communication and is resilient to all but
the most focussed of attacks. It is also associated with generative processes
that lead to macro-level outcomes which are not always apparent to their
participants. These emergent properties are the outcome of complex adaptive
behaviour occurring through participative self-organisation from the
bottom-up. This organisational form and the behaviour that structures it
leads to the emergence of a collective intelligence that in turn drives forward
the same processes in feedback loops, leading not to entropy as one might
expect in a system of this type, but rather to substantial increases in agency
and potential.
The concept of emergence describes the unexpected macro outcomes
produced by reflexive actors engaged in complex patterns of interaction
and exchange, outcomes that are historically determinate and unknowable
in advance. Of interest is the apparent operation of these feedback loops
within the AGM. Here the emergent properties of acting in a decentralised,
participatory, and highly democratic manner are recognised at a collective
level as affording a strength, durability, and interconnectivity that would
otherwise be absent and this feedback reaffirms the praxis that gives rise to
the emergent properties. Recent work in this field has demonstrated
(Barabasi and Albert 1999) that emergent properties are ubiquitous in
complex systems, albeit they often go unrecognised. What appears to have