While authoritarian crackdowns and wars between nations grab headlines, the insidious presence of malevolent nonstate actors remains one of the most persistent and adaptive threats to the United States, our allies and partners, and international stability.
Around the world, in ungoverned spaces, open seas, dense urban areas and across borders, nonstate actors, including extremist groups, smuggling gangs, and transborder crime syndicates, are actively destabilizing societies and undermining governments.
Late last month, the Islamic State group claimed responsibility for an attack on an air force base in Niamey, in the West African country of Niger. Nonstate actors like the ones behind this attack exploit gaps in borders, evade security structures, subvert financial systems, and dodge governmental scrutiny. They benefit from human trafficking, import gangs to our cities, disrupt supply chains, and take explosive actions against nations.
The risks to the United States from nonstate actors are serious: We all remember the death and terror of 9/11 that al-Qaida brought to America. Nonstate actors are also profoundly corrosive to global stability.
They come in many forms, including terror groups, violent separatist movements, criminal networks, ideology-based militias, and hybrid organizations driven by belief, profit, or both. The lines, of course, are not clear: Some groups operate simultaneously as armed groups, political movements, and illicit businesses. Some actors function as proxy forces in conventional war, blurring the line between irregular warfare and state-on-state conflict. They obey no laws and respect no borders.
It’s also critical to differentiate between malevolent nonstate actors and legitimate civil society organizations. In authoritarian and nondemocratic spaces, some valuable civil society groups have been unjustly labeled as threats. These groups are vital to the health of emerging democracies and should be recognized and protected as assets to civic discourse.
Malevolent nonstate actors shouldn’t be seen as solely a counterterrorism problem, but the result of a snarl of intertwined factors: poor governance and security, lack of international cooperation to identify and eradicate groups, social dysfunction and a dearth of economic opportunity in home regions, or a lack of government redress for genuine concerns.
And while some groups have been born out of genuine inequality and historical disenfranchisement, they have turned to terror and crime instead of democratic means. Groups materialized from a complex issue set, and, unfortunately, solutions are just as complicated. Effective responses require a multiline approach. These threats should be addressed in the United States national security and defense strategies, and prioritized diplomatically with allies, partners, and adversaries.
This danger, of course, isn’t new. Infamous organizations, such as al-Qaida and the Islamic State group, were once frontline issues for the United States. These groups haven’t been eradicated. They continue to operate, even though news of their activities has fallen off the front pages in America.
Financially, these groups often exploit transborder weaknesses to carve illicit markets for narcotics, arms, and human trafficking for both income and influence.
Politically, these nonstate actors subvert and distort governance through intimidation of political leaders, coercion of political systems, interference in political processes including voting and kleptocratic behavior, stealing state resources for personal or group gain.
Socially, they weaponize propaganda to undermine confidence in governance and often focus on the indoctrination of youth and vulnerable populations, leveraging valid concerns to weaken public trust. These factors erode governance, destroy public trust, and traverse borders.
While the U.S. administration has prioritized actions against some nonstate actors, including military strikes against narcotraffickers, it is a mistake to solely relying on force, without legitimacy and accountability. These actions, taken in a vacuum, can lose allies, weaken partnerships, and cause societies to fracture internally.
Especially in today’s complex information ecosystem, when trusted sources are difficult to pinpoint, and news (and false information) travels at a click, communications operate largely outside state control, with information traveling person-to-person, accelerating outrage, reactions, and ultimately radicalization.
The United States should collaborate with allies and partners to empower capable states, share intelligence, and disrupt financing aggressively across borders, including through sanctions and targeting illicit networks. Working with like-minded countries and central governments in vulnerable countries, the United States must invest in economic prevention, focus efforts on counter-radicalization, and help support credible governance.
Critically, the United States cannot do this alone. It is vital that America strengthens international coordination, which has weakened just as these networks have globalized and metastasized. Nonstate actors are not a residual threat from the last war but could be a defining feature of the next one.
But ignoring the threat they pose is the strategic mistake they are counting on.
