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Anatomy of a dark network: the case of the Turkish Ergenekon terrorist organization

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Abstract

Dark networks refer to organizations that are covert and illegal in nature. Terrorist networks, organized crime groups, arms smugglers, and conspiracy organizations can all be classified as dark networks. This paper analyzes Turkey’s Ergenekon Terrorist Organization (ETO) which is a political conspiracy network that has played a significant role in the terrorist activities within the country in the last few decades. It has features of organized crime enterprises, terrorist organizations, and Gladio type clandestine armies, but it exceeds the scope of these three. This study examines the structure of the ETO using network analysis tools and court documents as the data source. Findings indicate that the network has a concentrated structure which consists of a core and periphery group of actors. The core group has a strong connectedness with each other while the density of the relationship gets lower in the periphery group. Peripheral actors are separated into subgroups which are necessary for operational purposes and also prevalent in the literature of dark networks. An efficiency-security tradeoff, which is also widely discussed in the literature, does not take place in the ETO network because the political and legal conditions of the country allow members of the network to act comfortably as opposed to being under the threat of counter-terrorism or law enforcement efforts.

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Notes

  1. At this context, terrorism could be defined as violent action or threat of violence for the purpose of pursuit, gaining, and exercising power for achieving political change (Hoffman 2006).

  2. We purposefully use ‘state’ rather than ‘government’. In Turkish ‘government’ refers to elected officials whereas ‘state’ refers the entire mechanism (mainly bureaucracy). Participants in Sancar and Umit’s (2007) study refer to mechanism not the elected officials

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Acknowledgements

Authors would like to thank to Zafar Hasanov for his contributions to the data collection process.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Public Administration, University of Central Florida, HPA II 238, Orlando, FL, 32816-1395, USA

    Fatih Demiroz & Naim Kapucu

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  1. Fatih Demiroz
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  2. Naim Kapucu
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Correspondence to Fatih Demiroz.

Appendix

Appendix

Appendix 1 Betweenness and degree centrality results for individual nodes
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Demiroz, F., Kapucu, N. Anatomy of a dark network: the case of the Turkish Ergenekon terrorist organization. Trends Organ Crim 15, 271–295 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12117-012-9151-7

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