Informal Networks, Terrorist Entrepreneurs, and an “Alliance Hub”: Reflecting on Cooperation between the Japanese Red Army and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – Special Operations Groups

This paper analyses cooperation between the Nihon Sekigun (Japanese Red Army; JRA), or Araba Sekigun (Arab Red Army), and The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine’s (PFLP) Special Operations Group (SOG) that was autonomous under the PFLP until being expelled in 1972. Using Moghadam’s (2017) terrorist cooperation typology as a theoretical framework, this paper examines PFLP-SOG-JRA cooperative activities between a terrorist entrepreneur, informal networks, and a terrorist organisation. PFLP-SOG-JRA activity denotes networked cooperation, or collaborations between a terrorist organisation and informal terrorist actors (i.e., informal networks or terrorist entrepreneurs; Moghadam, 2017, p. 97). This networked cooperation manifested mainly into variations of Moghadam’s (2017) second, third, and fourth variants (p. 103; see APPENDIX II). Terrorism cooperation hereafter describes “formal or informal collaborative arrangements between two or more actors who employ terrorist tactics in the pursuit of joint interests” (Moghadam, 2017, p. 8). Terrorism, albeit no definitional consensus existing, might be defined as “the deliberate creation and exploitation of fear through violence or the threat of violence in the pursuit of political change” by a “subnational group or nonstate entity” (Hoffman, 2006, p. 40; see also Ganor, 2002). This paper posits that pre-1974 JRA is a merger of informal networks while PFLP-SOG is its patron and a “network of networks” characteristically akin to post-9/11 al Qaeda.