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Complex Global Microstructures
The New Terrorist Societies

Karin Knorr Cetina

T

HE NEW terrorism, as the 9/11 Commission Report of the US
Congress and President terms it, is sophisticated, patient, disciplined
and lethal (Kean and Hamilton, 2004: xvi, 47ff.; see also Hall, 2004).
The 9/11 attack was a complex international operation that could not havebeen mounted by just anyone in any place. Such an operation required, theCommission states at the end of a long and detailed investigation, a logistics network able to manage the movement of operatives and money. It had
to find and transport resources, and it had to have reliable communication
between coordinators and operatives, a command structure, planning, theability to test plans, recruitment and training (Kean and Hamilton, 2004:
365–6). Such operations demand a sophisticated global counterterrorism
strategy – it will not suffice to simply launch a war (e.g. against Afghanistan)or to mobilize a nation in homeland defense. Countering terrorism will haveto become a truly global effort involving a coalition of governments, extending to remote regions of the world, engaging the global struggle of ideas, andtranslating short-term concerns into long-term internal and external commitments (2004: 363ff.). And yet what makes this formidable mobilizationnecessary is not an omnipotent evil empire, a massive multinational corporate structure or a military-industrial complex. The Commission speaks of
the active support of ‘thousands’ of young Muslims for bin Laden’s message,
not of millions (2004: 362). It also states that the group of conspirators thatbrought off the attacks was at the same time fragile, dependent on a few key
personalities, and occasionally left vulnerable by the marginal, unstablepeople often attracted to such causes (2004: 364).
How, then, are we to conceptualize sociologically this ‘hydra ofdestruction’ which is simultaneously no more than a marginal group ofconspirators that makes mistakes, whose tradecraft is not especially sophisticated and which lives from donations? The new terrorism would seem to■ Theory, Culture & Society 2005 (SAGE, London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi),

Vol. 22(5): 213–234
DOI: 10.1177/0263276405057200

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214 Theory, Culture & Society 22(5)be a major exemplifying case for complexity theory – for example, it exemplifies major disproportionalities between cause and effect, unpredictableoutcomes and self-organizing, emergent structures. Complexity is geared tojust such (seeming) contradictions as the disproportion between a fragile
group of plotters and the devastating global effects of their actions. Yet
complexity theory concepts only point us back to social science questions:what, for example, are the social morphologies of groups are that are capableof such asymmetry effects? In fact, complexity concepts may be most
relevant today as pointers to a changing landscape of such morphologies.
Modern, industrial society created ‘complex’ forms of organizations thatmanaged uncertainty and task fulfillment through interiorized systems ofcontrol and expertise. But complexity was institutional complexity; it meantsophisticated multi-level mechanisms of coordination, authority andcompensation that assured orderly functioning and performance. A global
society leans towards a different form of complexity; one emanating from
more microstructural arrangements and the rise of mechanisms of coordination akin to those found in interaction systems.
And it is as a microstructural arrangement that the new terrorism interests me here. The new global terrorism, I want to argue in this article, illustrates the emergence of global microstructures; of forms of connectivity andcoordination that combine global reach with microstructural mechanismsthat instantiate self-organizing principles and patterns. Global microstructures have been documented before in areas such as financial markets(Knorr Cetina, 2004; Knorr Cetina and Bruegger, 2002; MacKenzie, 2004).
I suggest that this concept can be useful in contexts other than global
markets, while also pointing out, however, that the terrorist microstructure
we confront has different constitutive elements. The basic intuition that
motivates the concept of a global microstructure is that genuinely global
forms, by which I mean fields of practice that link up and stretch across alltime zones (or have the potential to do so), need not imply further expansions of social institutional complexity. In fact, they may become feasible
only if they avoid complex institutional structures. Global financial markets
for example, where microstructures have been found, simply outrun thecapacity of such structures. These markets are too fast, and change tooquickly to be ‘contained’ by institutional orders.1 Global systems based on
microstructural principles do not exhibit institutional complexity but rather
the asymmetries, unpredictabilities and playfulness of complex (anddispersed) interaction patterns;2 a complexity that results, in John Urry’s
terms, from a situation where order is not the outcome of purified social
processes and is always intertwined with chaos (2003: 106, 17–38; see also
Hobart and Schiffman, 1998: 235–59; Thrift, 1999). More concretely, thesesystems manifest an observational and temporal dynamics that is fundamental to their connectivity, auto-affective principles of self-motivation,
forms of ‘outsourcing’, and principles of content that substitute for the principles and mechanisms of the modern, complex organization.
If the basic intuition given before is correct, microsociology – and the11_cetina_057200 (jk-t)

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methodology of qualitative research – provide significant resources for the
study of global systems. A further resource is provided by complexity
concepts: in Al Qaeda’s case, these can be usefully deployed to illuminate
and analyze the surprising power and success of its global microstructuralconfiguration.3 The analysis of global microstructures then helps to collectand assess empirical evidence for the architecture of the global structuralforms of a world society (see also Stichweh, 2000). It also suggests a theoryof microglobalization – the view that the texture of a global world becomesarticulated through microstructural patterns that develop in the shadow of(but liberated from) national and local institutional patterns. Microglobalization implies that the micro (in the sense of micro-principles of patterning) and the macro (in the sense of global scope and extension) should not
be seen as two levels of empirical reality that stand in contrast to one
another. Rather, the micro in the form indicated instantiates the macro;
micro-principles enable and implement macro-extension and macroeffects.4
What Are Global Microstructures?
I have conceptualized global microstructures as structures of connectivity
and integration that are global in scope but microsociological in character.
I now want to emphasize four characteristics of global microstructures: theyare ‘light’, institutionally speaking, as implied before; they appear to facilitate a certain non-Weberian effectiveness; they cannot simply be reduced
to networks; and they exhibit temporal complexity. Let us first consider
lightness. By ‘lightness’ I mean that the mechanisms and structures involved
suggest a reversal of the historical trend toward formal, rationalized (bureaucratic organizational) structures whose beginning appears to date back to
the medieval church (Lancaster, 2005). Thus while microstructures are onsome level organized or coordinated systems, the coordinating elements
involved are not of the kind we associate with formal authority, complex
hierarchies, rationalized procedure or deep institutional structures. In fact,
the mechanisms involved may be akin to the ones we find in face-to-facesituations, but at the same time they hold together arrangements at a
distance and distributed systems. A second characteristic of global
microstructures pertains to the relationship between institutional lightness
and the achievement of effects. Weber’s notion of rationalization was radicalin that it postulated a particular organizing structure composed of legitimate
authority, formal expertise and rational, instrumental procedure as an effective agent of modernization. The structure underlies not only the effectiveness of capitalist production economies, but also that of public service
sectors and nation state administrations. Postmodern consumer society also
owes its success to a significant degree, it is plausibly argued, to thepresence and proper functioning of such rationalized systems (e.g. Ritzer,
1994, 2002). While global microstructures do not correspond to Weberian
ideals of highly rationalized systems they appear nonetheless effective.
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216 Theory, Culture & Society 22(5)systematic and reflexive use of systems of amplification and augmentation.
Such strategies seek and exploit the potential for disproportionalities
between input and output or effort and effect, and they can overcome disproportionalities between actors who pursue conflicting goals (see Cohen and
Stewart, 1994; Urry, 2003: 7). Disproportionality effects can be distilled, forexample, from the use of technology, from scientific and other innovations,and from ‘media’ of various kinds used as amplifying and multiplying
systems. Global microstructures may also derive disproportionality benefits
from decoupling internal operations from support structures that provide forthe conditions under which operations can remain light; ‘outsourcings’ of
this kind also point away from the inclusive notion of an internally rationalized system. Finally, lightness may emerge in response to de- or underregulation, which create the space for an adaptive and adaptableself-organization.
A third characteristic of global microstructures is that they are notsimply networks, though they may comprise a variety of relational arrangements. Networks are sparse social structures (e.g. Fligstein, 1996: 657;
White, 1992: 65–6); they essentially consist of channels or ‘pipes’ (Podolny,2001) through which information and resources flow between nodes.5 Whatflows through the channels carries much of the burden of explaining
outcomes, as does participants’ selection of network channels over othermeans of distribution or coordination. But more is going on in global social
forms than transfers between actors.6 For example, it would seem to be difficult to understand Al Qaeda without taking into account the spiritual influence of Islamist religious representations, or its family structure andself-reproducing mechanisms. The term ‘microstructure’ is intended to point
to the richness and diversity of elements and practices that layer global
social forms. It is also intended to suggest that relational connectivity may
not be enough to effectively organize complex systems. Thus while all
elements may play a role in organizing or integrating a microstructure, I
want to specifically point to scopic media (see below) as mechanisms of
coordination on a global scale. Scopic media enable flow architectures thatare not territorially bound, but the specific character of these architecturesvaries greatly across microstructured systems. For example, global institutional currency markets, which can also be seen as global microstructures
and which are entirely electronic markets, include a level of intersubjectivity that derives from the character of these markets as reflexively observedby participants in temporal continuity, synchronicity and immediacy. These
markets are communities of time, but in a different sense than the terroristgroups for which disconnections and ‘structural holes’ are a characteristicof operative practice. Though global microstructures tend to be flat rather
than hierarchically organized systems, they are at the same time highly
textured systems. The specific textures re-specify and may in fact contradict assumptions about network structures (e.g. Knorr Cetina, 2003).
The time aspects just mentioned point to a fourth characteristic ofglobal microstructures that I would like to emphasize here. There is more

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than one temporal dimension that is of interest, but I want to specificallynote the relevance of what Luhmann once called the ‘temporalization ofcomplexity’ (1978) for understanding these systems. The notion can be illustrated if we consider systems (say Al Qaeda) in relation to their environment (that of the societies in which Al Qaeda operates) and in relation totheir components. One of the ideas here is that temporally unstablecomponents increase the complexity and thereby the stability of the larger
system, since non-enduring components change in response to the irritations of an (always more) complex environment and help the larger systemcope with external factors.7 In other words, it is non-entrenched, ‘nervous’,
degenerating elements that recreate themselves differently over time thatcarry the system forward. Another way to put it is that continual disintegration creates the space for successor-elements and this increases thecomplexity and the chances of survival of the overall system (Luhmann,
1984: 76–81; Zeleny, 1981: 4–17). Note that this notion is in contrast to
network notions that see strong and expanding rates of relatedness between
units whose identity is unproblematically assumed as a guarantee ofsuccess.8 The contrasting assumption here is that the temporalization ofelements leads to a continual change of patterns of relatedness, and this isa causal factor in the successful reproduction of the system. These concepts
refer back to the notion that autopoietic systems are emergent and do nothave (stable) ‘foundations’ (compare Urry’s metaphor of a hologram for an
emergent system, 2003: 51). A second idea that illustrates what temporalcomplexity might mean is that spatially distributed configurations can bemade more complex when they become part of a temporal stream. To givean example from the area of financial markets, spatially dispersed knowledge about prices and dispersed interests in trading have become integrated, since the 1980s, into a temporal stream of activities made possible
by electronic information and dealing systems that connected participants
across locations and time zones (Knorr Cetina, 2003). This development
eliminated arbitrage as a form of transaction that exploits differences of
information across space; but it can also be argued that the transformationof a spatial into a temporal system increased the liquidity and innovativeness of market transactions. Thus it is the sequentialization of the market,
its transformation into a global (rather than nationally or culturally differentiated) flow structure, which arguably contributed to the enormous growth,
power and reproduction of financial markets.9 Al Qaeda, it appears, also
treats its units and components as temporal elements, and it has succeededin creating a complex global stream that appears more successful thanlocally and nationally operating terrorist groups.
In the following, I will pursue some of these concepts in relation to Al
Qaeda. I first discuss transcendent time as a structure of parallel living, andthen turn to the scopic systems through which the terrorist project becomes
assembled and channeled as a network-transcendent enterprise. This will
also allow me to illustrate some of the amplification effects that render theterrorist project effective. The section ‘Cells and Disporas’ extends the11_cetina_057200 (jk-t)

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218 Theory, Culture & Society 22(5)argument by focusing on Al Qaeda’s dual organization in terms of cells anddiasporas. It relates the temporal complexity I associate with its cell structure back to transcendent time. These elements will also help to articulate
the disproportionality effects and emergent features with which the new
terrorism is associated.
Transcendent Time: A Structure of Parallel Living
I now want to focus directly on Al Qaeda, starting with the religious andsymbolic dimension of the new terrorism, which provides the existential
underpinning for, it would seem, all its activities. While the Muslim belief
system of Al Qaeda clearly has many aspects, I want to discuss it in termsof the lived time that potentially connects the members of the group. Thismay help in understanding the character of Al Qaeda terrorism as a parallelworld disjoined from the world of the host societies in which Al Qaeda
volunteers live. A useful approach in this regard is to go back to early Christian communities and the way they lived time, according to Heidegger(2004; see also Ciborra, 2004: 23ff.; Guignon, 2000). Heidegger reconstructs the temporality of these communities from St Paul’s letter to the
Thessalonians. According to St Paul, at the beginning of primal Christianspirituality lies the Annunciation as an experience that shapes religious lifeat the time and is, for the individual and the community, a moment of transformation. St Paul refers to the ‘having become’ that characterizes Christians after the Annunciation. We can also draw on Kirkegaard here, forwhom such ‘moments’, which can be extended, suggest the beginning of an
unconditional commitment that comes to define one’s world and that redifferentiates the content of one’s past and future (Dreyfus, 1993: 321). In early
Christian religiosity there is also the prospect of the ‘second coming’ andthe burning question when this event will happen. St Paul addresses thequestion by indicating how one should live the situation of waiting: it is nota matter of simply awaiting this future occurrence but instead of ‘runningforward’ towards it by living every moment in a distinctive way. In this‘living-forward’ one is resolute in assuming a context shaped by having
become a Christian in order to be prepared for the Event which is alreadyhappening. Life becomes simplified in a certain manner as it is ‘brought
into the simplicity of its fate’ and pulled back from ‘the endless multiplicity of possibilities which offer themselves’ (Guignon, 2000: 88–9). As thelater Heidegger states, the world ‘does not become another in its content,
nor does the circle of others get exchanged for a new one’. Rather the transformation pertains to the ‘form’ of everyday activity, leaving the content of
the world unchanged (Dreyfus, 1993: 321ff.). Thus, those who ‘have become’will still go about the business of everyday life and attend to what isdemanded of them. But they will do so in a different mode; what haschanged, in a term borrowed from Williams (1977: ch. 9), is a structure offeeling, and the living of time.
I want to propose that such a ‘futural’ mode of living based on a ‘having
become’ can also be seen to characterize the new religious terrorism. Like

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the early Christians confronting an eschatological promise, many membersof Al Qaeda would seem to similarly ground their life in ‘moments’ of transformation. They also appear to be pulled into living-forward toward the end
a parallel life that has been delivered over to a new temporality and commitment, while they are at the same time participating in the business ofordinary life. In the terrorist case, the new temporality appears to actively
confront, if not embrace, the possibility of personal death – as a transitional
occurrence en route to a promised and visually pictured personal paradise.
But it also runs forward toward an imagined and ecstatic success of jihadas ‘holy war’ beyond personal death and toward the future of the community
in whose history one’s own death is enmeshed. These more collective ideas
run counter to the Heideggerian concept of time as individual being-towarddeath. Thus, the lived time of terrorism appears ‘transcendent’ in regard to
personal life, and it transcends ordinary time by ‘shadowing’ it with a second
future that embeds everyday activities within a new meaning structure.
The assumption of a second transcendent temporal structure of terrorism is important in the following respects. First, it grounds modes of affectivity that appear to have served Al Qaeda in the past: two characteristic
aspects of these activities have been patience and preparedness: the patience
to wait for the right situation to strike while at the same time resolutely
preparing for specific attacks, and the patience to call off projects andaccept setbacks while simultaneously reorganizing and living-forward
toward the goal of an Islamic state. The members of Al Qaeda are not improvisers who act on the spur of the moment or in response to fleeting circumstances. But neither are they given to the strict schedules and modes ofcontrol that characterize rationalized systems of planning. As analysts havenoted, Al Qaeda has shown a surprising degree of patience, sometimes
giving itself years of meticulous preparation without any indication of hurryor deadline pressure (Kean and Hamilton, 2004: ch. 5.2). At the same time,
participants have undergone extensive preparatory training, often for
concrete tasks (e.g. Gunaratna, 2003: 10–12); in other words, they resolutely
assumed the context of becoming a fighter for a cause in order to be preparedfor demands when they call. Patience and preparedness also serve, one
assumes, Islamic faith as a continually accomplished and emerging form,
as something that must be repeated and renewed through prayer and that
continually discloses itself further through sermons and discussion. Moregenerally speaking, to live a time outside regular time – while continuallytapping into the latter and taking one’s cues from it – may help account for
the robust capacity of Al Qaeda to regenerate itself, on which many authors
have commented (e.g. Gunaratna, 2003: 72).
Second, this sort of temporality would also appear to bind together anotherwise dispersed and diverse community whose members derive
endurance, tension and lived significance from the act of giving themselves
over to transcendent time. Al Qaeda membership cuts across national,
cultural and language boundaries, and it includes and liaises with different
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220 Theory, Culture & Society 22(5)the need for Muslims of different orientations to unite in the fight against
Americans and ‘the degradation and disbelief which have spread in Muslim
lands’.10 Temporal coordination alleviates the problem of constructing unityfrom diversity and the problem of ‘other minds’, that is, of closely coordinating and shaping individuals’ thinking. It suggests that a level of intersubjectivity may develop among participants who live different daily lives
and have experienced various cultural upbringings and national situations.
For this argument to be plausible one needs to consider that transcendent
time involves more than time reconstructed in terms of a new beginning andend; it also implies time-structuring – a temporality punctuated by events
which include widely communicated historical experiences and references(such as the Afghan war against Russia or the abolition of the Caliphate in
1924, see later), successful terrorist attacks, public summons ( fatwas),sermons and television appearances (e.g. bin Laden’s appearance before the
US election of November 2004). Thus transcendent time would appear to
be structured in terms of a historical sequence to which participants areoriented and which contextualizes individual time and effort. The sequence
provides not only for a collective memory of the group, it also situates thecollective project that is continually reinstantiated, extended and reshaped
as events are incorporated into the historical sequence. Time, here, may
have to be thought of as a ‘punctuated flow’ (punctuated by a sequence ofoccurrences) into which individual participants are absorbed and feel integrated, a flow that runs on in the shadow of everyday time and the temporalorders of host cultures.
One implication of the temporal coordination postulated is that globality becomes possible as spatial mechanisms of coordination based on
geographic closeness, routine face-to-face contacts, national politicalknowledge and the like lose their importance. Another implication is that– as a form of coordination – the temporality postulated fulfills some of thefunctions Weber associated with rational authority structures. In otherwords, the theoretical argument here is that time-structuring affords a formof coordination that can take the place of institutional control and social
authority structures. We have thus taken a first step towards articulating the
new terrorism as a microstructure that operates on a global scale. In thelanguage of complex systems, temporal coordination of the kind postulated
foreshadows temporal complexity, a notion I will return to at a later stage.
Scopic Media and the Information Societies of the New
Terrorism
In this section, I want to introduce scopic media as a mechanism that points
away from relational connectivity, thus indicating that global microstructures are more than simply networks. My starting point is that the punctuated flow I postulated can only emerge and have integrative effects if therelevant events are widely transmitted. Here we need to consider a further
element of the new terrorism, the role of teletechnologies as the components
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becomes assembled and channeled. I emphasize here the role of technologies in enabling and shaping the new terrorism. Its technological conditionsof production lie not with the equipment of attack, which is often pre-modern(recall the knives the 9/11 terrorists used on the planes), but with the useof equipment of communication and mediation that enable global coordination. The term ‘-scope’, derived from the Greek ‘scopein’, to see, whencombined with a qualifying notion, means an instrument for seeing or
observing, as in ‘periscope’. Social scientists tend to think in terms of mechanisms of coordination, which is what the network notion stands for; anetwork is an arrangement of nodes tied together by relationships which
serve as conduits of communication, resources and other coordinating
instances that hold the arrangement together by passing between the nodes.
But we should also think in terms of reflexive mechanisms of observationand projection, which the relational vocabulary does not capture. Like anarray of crystals acting as lenses that collect light, focusing it on one point,
such mechanisms collect and focus activities, interests and events, andproject them in identical fashion to dispersed audiences. An ordinary
observer who monitors events is an instrument for seeing. When such an
ordinary observer constructs a textual or visual rendering of the observed
and televises it to an audience, the audience may start to react to the featuresof the reflected, presented reality rather than to the embodied, pre-reflexive occurrences. The scopic system acts as a centering and mediating device
through which things become assembled and from which they are projected
forward. In Al Qaeda’s case, the reflexive mechanisms of encapsulation andprojection are teletechnologies (see Clough, 2000: 3), such as television
channels, the web, videotapes and audiotapes, and their producers. These
media provide sensorily rich records and projection planes for the transmission of images, speeches, commentary and events. The technical systems
are ‘apresentational’ (the term is derived from Schutz and Luckmann, 1973,
who spell it appresentation) in the sense of ‘bringing near’ to receivers
distant situations that are out of reach for ordinary lifeworlds. They are also
a-representational, by which I mean that the content of the televised items
should not be primarily decoded in a representational idiom. Though therepresentational truth of these items may well be invoked, the contents tend
to be media productions by television stations and by authors such as
religious leaders aiming at a range of performative effects. Raised to a levelof analytic abstraction, the teletechnological media and media contents
correspond to a scopic system that fills transcendent time with collective
content, structures time in terms of events, and gives concreteness andsubstance to the temporal coordination I have postulated. Many of thebroadcast events are also intentionally moral and performative in the senseof ‘calling’ the audience to particular forms of actions. These calls, exemplified by bin Laden’s declaration of war against the Americans of February
1998, or his and Ayman al-Zawahiri’s ‘messages’ of warning and threat in2002, are not of the same order as the exchanges that coordinate concreteplans of action. But they may well have coordinating force on another level:

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222 Theory, Culture & Society 22(5)that of reiterating and extending the transcendent project to which theaudience is committed, that of renewing an affective community, and thatof creating for this community a background world that grounds their activities and experiences.
Thus, if the scopic mechanism I have postulated transcends network
connectivity by being a mirroring device, it also transcends it by being acontextualizing mechanism. A scopic system presents identical images andmessages to a diverse audience – the content either travels to this audiencein the form of audio- and video-cassettes, or it travels to it through broadcasting channels. One assumes that the images and messages have a binding
effect on prepared participants, as these select and interpret the content
within the framework of already existing commitments to a transcendent
project. One also assumes that for those ‘having become’ and regularly
drawing on scopic presentations, the sequences of occurrences begin toconstitute something of a referential world – a thick context that situates
individual activities, provides frameworks of interpretation for further
events, and is a venue for the renewal of emotional dedication. When scopic
systems are systematically used they have ‘world-making’ (Goodman, 1978)
effects.
The world involved is informational rather than ‘natural’ or ‘material’.
This is implied by the notion of scopic systems and the mediated characterof the communities they create. In communicating distant occurrences in
identical fashion to distributed, diasporic audiences, scopic systems are
information systems – and Al Qaeda is part of the contemporary informationsociety in that it uses its means and mechanisms. The informational makeup of this world is also apparent in its processual character. Most of ourworld notions imply that the world is a place (however extended) or perhaps
a totality of objects (e.g. the physical universe) ‘wherein’ we live, and ‘in’
which factual (e.g. globalization) and symbolic processes can be said to takeplace. The defining characteristic of this sort of world is that it is given or
presupposed. In its presupposed nature, it cannot be made intelligible by
the things that happen ‘in’ the world; the world has a distinctive structureof its own that differs from the things that happen in it. This backgroundstructure is seen to be material, social (it is interpreted) and territorial. In
comparison, the parallel world of Al Qaeda appears to be fluid, processualand aterritorial. It is neither presupposed nor given, but constructed-ingoing-along. As the flow of events into which Al Qaeda members are plugged
is continuously reiterated, updated and extended, the various temporal andother coordinates of this world are continuously articulated and changed as
operational goals are adopted, religious commentary and messages are interpreted, new decrees are issued, and the activities of various ‘enemies’ areobserved and decoded. The very accoutrements of this non-institutional
timeworld change as new events take place and become food for imagined
new scenarios and works. If the image I used in the section ‘Transcendent
Time’, of Al Qaeda ‘running-forward’ towards the future by living every
moment in a distinctive way is plausible, then it implies that Al Qaeda’s

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world is dynamic and quickly changing rather than static and in a state ofequilibrium. This dynamism has a correlate in the mobility of participants.
We know from various records and descriptions that Al Qaeda members
themselves, and their camps, cells and other bases, are extremely mobile.
Participants travel, move and change identity frequently. Cells are equallymobile, and the membership, leadership and operational structure of thegroup also change. Some of the mobility of participants is motivated by theneed to maintain secrecy and to avoid, or respond to, capture; but mobility
also resides in the recruitment process which brings potential recruits fromglobal locations to training sites and then channels them to new locations;and it is part of the planning of attacks that are executed in global locations.
The mobility of Al Qaeda surely is a strategic element in its success; but it
also points to the ‘placeless’ character of the Al Qaeda microstructure, its
floating, scape-like (Appadurai, 1996: ch. 2) form and the readiness ofparticipants to interlock with any territory for specific purposes but tobecome part of none.
Al Qaeda’s mobility supports the notion that it is time dimensions
rather than spatial coordinates that span and link up this lifeworld. But it
also points to another aspect of the dynamism of this world, which is the
incentive-offering and affective character of information transmitted byscopic systems. Al Qaeda members inhabit a visually and discursively
constructed domain of fragmented and partial information contents pertaining to the religious, the political and to movement.11 But they also inhabit
a more viscerally constructed word. Al Qaeda members are not passive
worshippers of particular fundamentalist religious ideas; as a group, Al
Qaeda is engaged in terrorist activities. Its members are driven, by mediatedexperiences and their continual interpretations and iterations, to live aparticular purpose associated with transcendent time. Much of thecommunication the Al Qaeda leadership and other relevant persons provide
is broadly spiritual in accordance with the religious and symbolic underpinning of the group. But it is also at the same time incentivizing politicaland practical communication that defines goals and enemies, calls sympathizers to action, instructs them in concrete behavior, specifies grievances,and threatens and warns the counterparties in the engagement. According
to a quantitative analysis by Seidensticker (2004: 29ff.), nearly 90 percentof the 1570 words of the four pages of instructions for the 9/11 attack foundin a travel bag of Muhammed Atta’s that had not been transferred to his
flight to Los Angeles were religious in character. But they were at the sametime instructions in how to conquer fear, remain patient, go to the airport,
pass through safety doors, sit in one’s passenger-seat, slit a victim’s throat(kill some victims with knives), take bounty and prepare for the afterlife inparadise. Bin Laden’s fatwas (Islamic decrees) of 1996, 1997 and 1998, as
well as his more than a handful of videos and interviews of 2001 and his
recent declarations on the occasion of the 2004 election in the United States,
are all incentivizing communications in whose service religious contents are
invoked. More generally speaking, the information transmitted between

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224 Theory, Culture & Society 22(5)Al Qaeda participants is not only cognitive or symbolic in nature, but has
strong sensory and motivating components. This leads us back to scopic
mechanisms, which transmit content in potentially rousing fashion to
distributed diasporic audiences. The media chosen – television broadcasts
and video- and audio-cassettes – have different affordances than the satellite and regular mobile phone and email channels also used by Al Qaeda
members. The latter provide for direct bilateral communications andresponses; in other words, they are relational media used as interactive
channels, the channels of a network form of coordination. Scopic systems,on the other hand, not only provide for a more reflexive form of coordination – their content reflects and maps local occurrences onto a global field– but produce visual and sensory projections. Benedict Anderson famously
pointed to the role of newspapers and novels as the means through which
readers continually reassure themselves of the existence of millions of others
that constitute the imagined community of the nation – the effect occurs
even though readers do not have ‘the slightest notion’ of the identity of theseothers (1983: 39ff.). When teletechnologies rather than written media
transmit information, and the context is terrorism, the images transmitted
may be of blood and destruction, of revenge and moral outrage, and ofmartyrs and ‘heroic life’. These spectacles of gory bodies and physicalexpression appeal strongly to emotions. Barthes, in discussing photographs(1980: 88–9), argues that it is not the shock value and traumatic content ofsuch images, but details that occasionally break out of their flatness andarrest the viewer, throwing him or her into a state of ambivalence and oscillation between certainties. Such details (which Barthes calls the ‘punctum’in contrast to the field of flatness of the image) may cause anxieties, provoke
intense discussions and may therefore have high radicalizing potential(Srivatsan, 2000: 46–7). What this suggests is that the sensory and visualmode of presentation may help to create not so much imagined communities, bound together by symbols of belonging, as affective communities thatare willing to engage in specific actions that recreate the disturbed
emotional order. At the very least, we can perhaps assume that the scopic
presentations can be seen as a re-incentivizing device for the teleoaffective system of the terrorist project.
Two things should be emphasized in concluding this section. The firstis that the grammar of attraction of these scopic presentations appears to
draw on established practices of disseminating and circulating religious
performances and devotional content in the Muslim world (sermons andteachings, devotional poems, commemorative songs, etc.). Anthropologists
and others have documented the use of electronic forms of disseminating
religious discourse that shapes Islamic public spheres (e.g. Eikelman andAnderson, 1999).12 The recordings appear to serve as performative techniques dedicated to creating pious dispositions in participating subjects.
They may ‘rouse in the soul an overwhelming desire to invoke blessings andsalutations’ upon the prophet (Kabbani, 2002: 69; see also Hirschkind,2001). Muslims may interact with these recordings by listening to them

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repeatedly during regular events or routine activities (e.g. while driving acar), and they use them to prepare for special celebratory and commemorative occasions (Eisenlohr, 2005). The second point is that the practices ofelectronic recording and transmission appear to play a particular role indiasporic communities; they are said to help overcome a sense of remoteness from the homeland or from centers of Islamic authority among membersof these communities. As indicated in the next section, diasporas play aparticular role in the new terrorism, and Al Qaeda members themselves leada diasporic life. It is plain that these techniques of religious transmission
and of iterative listening and viewing can be invested with new qualities
when they are employed by terrorist groups and their sympathizers. To givean example, Speyer (2002: 33–4) reports such a use in her work on religious
conflicts in Indonesia: the production of CDs (here specifically video CDs[VCDs]) of scenes of violence by Christian and Muslim partisans, but circulated only by the latter – in line, one assumes, with existing traditions ofreligious transmission. The VCDs, which are shared and copied widely, arewatched over and over again and, according to Speyer, have few pretensions
to accompanying narration apart from ‘the insistent, repetitive narrative of
victimization resurrected on and out of body parts’. Speyer also commentson the ‘the surplus of misinformation and suspicion circulating like wildfire’among the groups; enmity, in this case, becomes codified through collective
gossip and imagery as a form of imprecision and obfuscated information.
Underlying such uses is the mass appeal of the VCD genre – from favorite
songs to favorite scenes of violence – in the Muslim part of this region of
the world; they are mass produced, sold in markets and on streets, transnationally popular and said to be ‘quite homogenous’ when they represent
conflicts across regions: ‘Ambon’s VCDs look much like Kashmir’s, Bosnia’s,
and video representations of Palestine shown in Malaysia and elsewhere’(2002: 33–4).
Cells and Diasporas
So far I have introduced two major elements of the global microstructure of
Al Qaeda – transcendent time as a structure of orientation constitutiveof parallel living, and scopic systems that deliver the ‘mediated presence’ ofremote participants and update interpretations and events. The two elements
enable a floating global microstructure to emerge and fuel its dynamics. I
now want to address a third element, the organizational form of Al Qaeda.
Central to the discussion will be the distinction between its cells and areligiously defined Arab diaspora on which Al Qaeda relies for external
support. Several theoretical arguments can be linked to this organization.
One is that the organizing principles invoked are microstructural; they
involve trust, the analogy of family relationships and a cellular organization.
The second line of arguments refers once again to complexity concepts. The
dual organization accounts for some of Al Qaeda’s disproportional effects; itoffers an argument for how lightness of structure can be combined withenhanced effectiveness with the help of methods of amplification and11_cetina_057200 (jk-t)

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226 Theory, Culture & Society 22(5)augmentation. We shall also see, in this section, that lightness of structureamounts to more than a lack of formal, rationalized institutional structures. It
implies a transition to a temporal complexity of a kind where system stability
depends on and arises from the fluidity and instability of component units.
Consider first the roles of amplification and augmentation in relation
to Al Qaeda’s organization. In the last section, I cited scopic media as aconstitutive feature of the global microstructure of terrorism. Yet some of
the most important of these media are not managed or ‘owned’ by Al Qaeda
but are independent agents (e.g. television channels) that broadcast to awide and predominantly non-terrorist audience. The television channel Al
Jazeera records and broadcasts terrorist messages and images, and it
produces, in the eyes of some observers, inflammatory programs whose
coverage has disturbed not only Washington but also Arab governments. Yet
it clearly also caters to the broad concerns of non-terrorist clientele (itreaches an audience of 30 million to 50 million), it prides itself on being
independent and impartial, and it is subsidized by and operates out of Qatar,
the American-friendly state and US ally in the Persian Gulf. Terrorist
microstructures incorporate and use some teletechnological media, but theyalso draw on outside systems that are independent of their communities.
The issue this raises is the ‘dual’ organization of Al Qaeda: some functions
are interiorized within its framework of organization, while others are‘outsourced’ to external agents and units not controlled by the Al Qaeda
leadership and not directly engaged in its projects. These external
components may not live transcendent time, that is, partake in Al Qaeda’s
parallel mode of living. They are nonetheless implicated in its projects,
which they enable and support. In fact, Al Qaeda’s ‘lightness’ of structure
can at least partially be explained by the externalization of some crucialcomponents. Al Qaeda practices a form of ‘opportunism’: it delegates tasks
to outside agents, and it takes advantage of outside agents’ willing or unintentional promotion of its cause. For example, it takes advantage of mediachannels that broker communications and meanings to a wide audience ofspectators, it outsources much of the recruitment process to sales-agents,
the radical religious leaders who propagate relevant interpretations of Islamand head religious schools, and it has externalized much of its financing to
independent NGOs, Islamic charity organizations, specific churches and thelike (for detailed overviews, see Gunaratna, 2003: ch. 3; Kean and
Hamilton, 2004: xviii).13
Al Qaeda is thus an exclusive rather than an inclusive organization,much like the global microstructures of financial markets described elsewhere (Knorr Cetina and Bruegger, 2002). But it depends on, and draws on,what I will call here, following Ho (2004), a ‘diaspora’ of Islamic agencies
and people. Ho describes the long existence of a diaspora of Arabs from
Hadramawt, Yemen, across the Indian Ocean, and its confrontations with
the British Empire from the 16th century onward. A diaspora, in thisparlance, is not understood as a homogeneous group that spreads out acrossterritories but is a composite; for example, the Hadrami, in their movement

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throughout the Indian Ocean settled anywhere, intermarried with the local
population, and their offspring assimilated or developed a mixed, creole
identity. But there was also a process of homogenization, though not one
based on political ideas. The Hadrami movement did not lead to a newempire – as did the movement of the British to the United States. Rather,the Hadrami diaspora took the form of a religious mission. Its greatest
success may have been the establishment of the Ottoman universal caliphate– but this was abolished by a Turkish parliament in 1924, following colonialconfrontations (Ho, 2004: 214–16). Bin Laden is thought to have referredback to the abolition of this Muslim caliphate in his video response to thebombing of Afghanistan on 9 October 2001, where he recalled events some
80 years before that had humiliated Muslims. He said:
What America tasted today is something of what we have tasted for decades.
For eighty-some years, our community has tasted this humiliation and tasted
this degradation . . . no one heard and no one answered. . . . But when thesword came after eighty years to America, hypocrisy appeared and raised its
head.

Ho extends his model to the current situation, arguing that bin Laden is amember of the Hadrami diaspora, the geography of his operations from East
Africa to the Philippines is an old theater of Arab diasporic mobility andoperations, and these geographical parallels mean that, for viewers in Southand Southeast Asia, the events unfolding on the television screen have deep
historical resonances (2004: 234ff.).
The notion of diaspora, then, recaptures the idea of a religious commitment introduced in the beginning, but it gives it breadth and historicaldepth: it draws attention to a long-standing and persistent confrontation
between a religiously defined Arabic diaspora and various Western empires(first the Portuguese, then the British, the Dutch, and now the US). It also
draws attention to historical calls for jihad with the express purpose ofmobilizing Muslims against these powers, starting with a book from 1570
entitled Gift of the Jihad Warriors in Matters Regarding the Portuguese thatgave the then anti-imperial struggle a legal basis.14 To be sure, the diaspora
can no longer be regarded as limited to the Indian Ocean. America is nota colonial power, though it may come close to one in the diasporic imagination. Potential historical continuities of the sort implied are accomplishedrather than simply given; bin Laden’s video response exemplified the invocation and recreation of a historical experience for specific purposes. The
Islamic, or even the Hadrami, diaspora is not a ‘community’ or ‘system’ buta changing multitude, with only loosely overlapping religious beliefs. The
point I want to make by bringing up these historical references is not thatthe present confrontation echoes past ones precisely, or that it is in fact
identical with them. It is rather that Al Qaeda’s global reach and microstructural effectiveness is easier to understand if we not only assume the existence of ‘sympathizers’, but a historically anchored movement of Islamic

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228 Theory, Culture & Society 22(5)people – with overlapping religious beliefs and a tradition of confrontation
with non-Islamic powers – of whom a portion remains connected to the Araband Islamic world. Awareness of the historical continuities and specificcharacteristics of such a diaspora may account for Al Qaeda’s success in its
global support and recruitment efforts. The dual organization I postulated
captures the role of this diaspora in providing Al Qaeda with an externalbelt of potential capital – financial, social, cultural and political capital.
According to estimates by the CIA, Al Qaeda can draw on the support ofsome 6 million to 7 million Muslims worldwide, of which 120,000 are
believed to be potential recruits for its violent projects (cited in Gunaratna,
2003: 95). In complexity terms, Al Qaeda’s ‘few thousand’ active members
are augmented by millions of supporters that are linked to it by a diasporichistory and imagination. In this sense, Al Qaeda can maintain its lightnessof structure, while at the same time mustering disproportional effectivenesswith regard to selected outcomes.
If the existence of a historical diaspora provides a belt of potential
resources, what is inside the belt? In other words, how are we to think of
the other leg on which Al Qaeda stands, the second component of its dualorganization? The consensual answer (for which I draw here on the summary
account by Gunaratna, 2003: ch. 3) is that Al Qaeda is organized in termsof a cellular structure. Cells are units of two to 15 members placed in various
settings to prepare for certain tasks, or they emerge in a certain place as
recruits living in a particular area become committed to Al Qaeda. For
example, of the four cells that prepared the 9/11 attacks, one emerged in
Muhammad Atta’s location of study, Hamburg, where he had originally gone
to study architecture and urban planning, and completed a thesis in 1999
at the Hamburg Technical University. He was recruited to become an Al
Qaeda member around 1995, underwent training in Afghanistan in 1996–7,
and then recruited two more Arabs studying in Germany. The other cells
were established independently of each other in the United Arabic Emirates
and Malaysia as launch-pads from which to enter the United States. Several
other defining characteristics of this cellular structure can be indicated. The
first is that cells are independent and self-contained. Gunaratna (2003: 97)
recounts that Al Qaeda’s structure remains close to that of Egyptian terrorist groups, whose cells were called anguds, which is Arabic for a bunch of
grapes. If a grape is plucked from a grapevine, its disappearance does notaffect the others. Thus cells appear to have independent bank accounts, andtheir members may only know of their own role in a project and not of thatof other cells. A second characteristic, continuous with the first, is that cells
are productive units. For example, cells or their members may come up with
their own proposals for terrorist attacks, find ways of assembling the necessary materials and knowledge, carry out relevant research, and even takecharge of financing part of the preparatory work and of their own expenses.
Third, cells are mobile in regard to location and flexible in regard to membership. New members may join teams, previous members may transfer to otherlocations, teams may disband and cells may relocate. Though the cell nodes

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are regional, regional nodes do not have a fixed abode. For example, after
Al Qaeda relocated from Sudan to Afghanistan in 1996, its European andNorth American bureau moved to Turkey and Yemen, and the Turkish
bureau moved again to Spain after the arrest of a key figure in Europe in
1998.15 Fourth, the system of communication that links cells to leaders
appears fractal and mutational – an apparent advantage when it comes topreventing transparency and leaks. There were some cell members among
those involved in the 9/11 attacks who communicated directly with leadersin Afghanistan, but most cells appear to have been coordinated through‘agent-handlers’ who lived near the target location or in the ‘hostile zone’ ofEurope and America – and they reported only to them. This also implies
that cell structure is decentralized and without formal hierarchy or systemof governance. What substitutes for a formal hierarchy is a family structurein which ‘older brothers’ may play a greater role than the others. ‘Family’
frequently stands for nationality. Fifteen of the hijackers of the 9/11 attacks
were from Al Qaeda’s ‘Saudi family’, which, perhaps in continuity with Ho’s
account of the Hadrami diaspora, appears to play a dominant role in Al
Qaeda. Families function regionally, but individuals from different national‘families’ may also be ‘handpicked’ and cross-posted outside their regions(2004: 98).
Al Qaeda’s family organization responds to problems posed by culturaland linguistic barriers in a global organization; Anderson’s imaginedcommunities are put to specific uses here (1983). It is worth mentioning thathigh-energy physicists, in conducting their large-scale experiments staffedby participants from many regions of the world, also frequently team people
up according to national origin. But the metaphor of ‘family’, like themetaphor of brotherhood ingrained in Islam, also appeals to trust and sentiment and suggests the constitution of community, at least potentially. In
other words, cells and families, and the modes of diasporic assistance andaffiliation they assume, invoke microstructural principles of connectivity
and integration. However, I also want to emphasize temporal complexity
here. The characteristics of the cell structure I have outlined, in particular
the mobility, flexibility and mutability of cells with regard to membershipand location, as well as their relative autonomy and planned disintegration,
all point to the temporal nature of cells. Cells are not durable units butchanging implementations of short-term projects sequentially replaced by
new projects – they are units that their creators plan from the outset toabolish, abandon and recreate as non-identical units at a different location.
Paradoxically, perhaps, it is this instability and nervous irritability of thecomponents of a system associated, in the first section, ‘What Are Global
Microstructures?’, with a complexity based on time that serves the stability
and successful continuation of the whole group. For Luhmann (1978, 1984:
ch. 4), ‘temporalized’ complexity, as he calls it, was simply a way to theorize
process in systems theory. According to his reasoning, all social systems
display temporalized complexity in the sense that their most elementarycomponents, actions, are temporally limited events rather than stable,

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230 Theory, Culture & Society 22(5)enduring structures. But this is a formal definition that does not allow us tocapture and assess the disproportionality effects that some systems muster
while others do not. In other words, it is useful to re-enter the question andask which systems turn toward temporal complexity on what level, andwhich do not. The bureaucratically organized intelligence agencies andmilitary machines that have been mobilized to fight Al Qaeda rely on elaborate interiorized systems of rules, authority and control that offer some
legitimacy and transparency of procedure. What they do not offer is Al
Qaeda’s lightness of being – manifest here in its sequentially recreated modeof functioning and non-identical cellular structure.
Conclusion: Temporal Complexity and Transcendent TimeTime-based complexity, one should emphasize, is continuous with thefluidity concepts writers on complexity and others have discussed (e.g.
Abbott, 2001; Bauman, 2000; de Laet and Mol, 2000; Urry, 2000). Yet thedistinction added here between the flexibility and fluidity of the component
level of a system and its overall stability is an important one to make; it
provides a particular angle on emergence, implies sequential learning on a
microstructural level and refers us back to transcendent time – as a binding
mechanism on a global level. A second distinction emphasized previously
in this article, and illustrated with respect to financial markets, needs to bebrought back into the picture here: that between a spatial arrangement
where stability resides in fixed categories and traditions distantiated fromone another, and temporal processing that integrates things into a global
stream. The natural history approach, according to Foucault and others, wasa spatial arrangement of knowledge. Molecular biology (or an experimental
system within it) appears today to be a strongly globally integrated streamof processings superimposed on any remaining spatial logic (see Jokisch,
1996: 184–94). Al Qaeda distinguishes itself from all other terrorist groups
that are nationally based by the appearance it gives of having become sucha global stream. Transcendent time, as described in the first section ‘What
Are Global Microstructures?’, lies at the heart of this stream. Sustained andextended by the scopic transmission of media content, it provides for a levelof bindingness and integration of the terrorist project beyond the coordination of operational performance and mission planning. Beyond the level, thatis, of the ever-decaying, ever-regenerated cellular structure. Both levels
involve temporal coordinates, but they are of a different reach and involve
different decay parameters.
Global microstructures are the densities that emerge from the conjunction of these temporal coordinates and other elements. The notion provided
a second resource for the analysis of Al Qaeda. It suggests the relevance ofprinciples of integration and task coordination that point beyond the interiorized systems of rationality and control of the modern organization, andthat also challenge ‘networkness’ as the sole alternative to such structures.
Microstructures appear light, dense and, on more than one level, temporal.
One suggestion here is that global forms may in fact be feasible only in11_cetina_057200 (jk-t)

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relation to such structures. More would have to be said of course to illuminate the terrorist microstructure of Al Qaeda and its heavyweight counterpart, the anti-terrorist machine. Genuine empirical research by social
scientists is still sorely missing in this area. When addressing these systems,
one needs to piece together materials from secondary evidence and public
sources. It is nonetheless plausible that the new terrorism in particular canserve as a major exemplifying case for complexity concepts as instantiatedin global microstructures. We have nowhere else to turn, one might say,when it comes to learning to understand the elusive nature of the new terrorism and its lethal outcomes.
Notes
1. The new terrorism involves different mechanisms, but it also has so far consistently outrun the capacity of state intelligence agencies and their ‘vast, lumbering
bureaucracies’ (Silberman and Robb, 2005) to counter its threat or even track andidentify its challenges.
2. I use a phenomenological notion of interaction here. I take my lead fromdiscussions of intersubjectivity (see Knorr Cetina and Bruegger, 2002), but I draw
also on the observation of global communities of practice in high-energy physics thatturn to content as a principle of coordination (Knorr Cetina, 1999: chs 7 and 8).
3. Though I can only investigate the new global terrorism in this article indirectly,
on the basis of data and reports derived from the work of police and security organizations, it is worth noting that these materials result from investigations akin to
ethnographic research.
4. I do not use the notion ‘micro’ here to point to the local or to localizing patterns.
Rather, I use it to point to principles of connectivity and association akin to, andperhaps fundamental to, interaction orders.
5. The network interconnections can be inspected for their structural patterns andinfluence on outcomes. Networks matter since what flows through the channels
affects outcomes; for example, connections provide information benefits for thosein contact. The restriction of flows to networks also matters – networks may provide
added advantages to those included in, and added disadvantages to those excluded
from, network distributions of resources.
6. Consider how much of Al Qaeda one can explain by simply doing a network
analysis of known participants, as has been attempted (e.g. Sageman, 2004).
7. One illustration here is the transition, in physics, from the idea of elementary
particles as simple spot-like, non-reducible elements to the transitory, decaying
subatomic processes of today. In today’s physics, it is the non-identity, fluidity andspeed of transformation of the basic units of matter that is of interest (see also
Jokisch, 1996: 195–8).
8. See Kelly (1998: 23, cited in Urry, 2003: 52). Actor-network theory provides anexample of an approach that postulates such an effect.
9. Similarly, Foucault and Lepenies argue that pre-modern, spatial arrangements
and categories of knowledge were replaced by temporal, historical notions as knowledge became ‘historical’ at the turn of the 19th century, a move that transformed
the speed of knowledge production and the growth of knowledge (cited in Jokisch,
1996: 184–94).

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232 Theory, Culture & Society 22(5)10. Al Qaeda recruitment video cited in Gunaratna (2003: 72).
11. Also relevant here is that the key to the notion of information is not truth in
the sense of a correspondence with an independent reality as testified by science,but news, or difference. Things disclose themselves as information in so far as theydiffer from and are new compared to earlier material. In other words, the notion
information points to the fact that Al Qaeda is not engaged in validating beliefs but
rather in performing terrorist activities for which information about the changing
nature of circumstances and events is a crucial input.
11. With thanks to Patrick Eisenlohr, who summarizes some of this in his 2005
article.
12. In economic terms, we might say that Al Qaeda works with and relies on externalities, or that it acts as a principal that recruits and relies on external agents toact for itself vis-a-vis a third party.
13. See bin Laden: ‘No Security for America before Security for Palestine’ (9 Oct.
2001, cited in Ho, 2004: 234, n40).
14. The story is cited in detail in Ho (2004: 222).
15. Some of these movements and the travels of Al Qaeda members are recounted
in great detail in Gunaratna (2003: ch. 3).
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Karin Knorr Cetina is Professor of Sociology at the University ofConstance, Germany, and Visiting Professor of Sociology and Anthropology
at the University of Chicago. She is a former member of the Institute forAdvanced Study, Princeton, and was President of the Society for Social
Studies of Science. She has published numerous papers and books onscience, including The Manufacture of Knowledge (Oxford, 1981), translated
into several languages, and the award-winning Epistemic Cultures: How the
Sciences Make Knowledge (Cambridge, 1999). She has also published onsocial theory (e.g. Advances in Social Theory and Methodology: Toward an
Integration of Micro- and Macrosociologies, with Aaron Cicourel, London,
1981, and ‘Sociality with Objects: Social Relations in Postsocial Knowledge
Societies’, Theory, Culture & Society 14). She is currently working on a bookon the Global Microstructures of Financial Markets.