3 - Strategic Planning

Summary

Taking the UN’s Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy as its focus, Chapter 3 discusses strategic planning, a managerial technology of composition and arrangement. It shows how the UN organizes and manages a swarm of counter-terrorism efforts by nation-states, UN specialized agencies, and other security actors. Strategic frameworks, the chapter explains, generate a shared aesthetic that lends integrity to a profuse swarm of ever-increasing ‘thematic’ aspects of terrorism (financing, radicalization, violent extremism, critical infrastructure, and so on) and cascades of fine-grained technical guidance about how best to ‘operationalize’ counter-terrorism. One way frameworks lend a sense of order to this swarm of initiatives is by organizing different themes into discrete, tessellating modular work-packages, and the chapter shows how these are related to ‘quasi-legislative’ Security Council resolutions. The chapter describes a second way that frameworks lend a sense of order to the cascades of technical guidance by using matrices of best practices. These open out UN resolutions into Mandelbrot-like sets of micro-prescriptions generated by specialized agencies like the International Civil Aviation Organization, whose work on biometric travel documents this chapter explores.