Community and Counterinsurgency

Abstract

A guerrilla war is an intimate affair, fought not merely with weapons but fought in the minds of the men who live in the villages and in the hills, fought by the spirit and policy of those who run the local government.- W. W. Rostow1Over the past decade, community development, a program design that inverts standard foreign aid models by putting the poor in charge of shaping and implementing development projects, has reemerged as a central mechanism for the delivery of aid in conflict zones.2 Although hard figures are limited, a few data points indicate that community development's overall growth has been rapid: from 1989 to 2003, the share of World Bank projects with a community development component rose from 2 to 25 percent of the total portfolio; by 2007, more than 9 percent of World Bank spending went to community interventions.3 Community development programs are among the largest and most significant aid interventions in a number of conflictaffected countries and subregions, including Afghanistan, southern Thailand, the Philippines, western Colombia, Indonesia, Timor-Leste, Uganda, Nepal, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.The rapid rise of community development has been in part driven by its operational simplicity and robustness. Aid practitioners argue that by channeling assistance directly to the grassroots, community-level interventions can launch quickly, scale rapidly and flexibly, remain functional under insecure, unstable conditions, and deliver benefits that are better configured to local needs.4 But community development's rise has been driven by a deeper set of ambitions for aid: to mobilize the poor to control their own development and demand better governance, and to transform government to make it more relevant and responsive. The goal of community development, in short, is to build a new social contract between citizen and state.The proposition I advance in this essay is that the mechanisms community development uses to reconstruct the social contract also act to embed state institutions within the grassroots. Community development functions, in effect, as an instrument for state-building. In nonconflict areas, the downward flow of resources and upward flow of participation enabled by community development represent a mechanism for citizens to receive more and better government. In conflict areas, the systems that enable this reciprocal flow can closely parallel civil counterinsurgency operations.The point is not that community interventions are cloaked counterinsurgency projects - I argue that the two practices undertake fundamentally different forms of legitimation-but that community development's operations mirror the state-building elements of civil counterinsurgency. From the perspective of both insurgent groups and governments combating insurrections, community development may not be a politically inert poverty reduction technology but an intervention that supports the reach of the state, particularly in contexts where the state and insurgents are competing at the grassroots by providing governance and public services. Development practitioners must factor these local understandings of their projects, and the potential responses by insurgents and counterinsurgents alike, into their own strategies and program designs.Development from the Bottom UpPioneered in the 1950s, community development offered a vision of social transformation that diverged from the various iterations of modernization theory that dominated foreign aid for much of the twentieth century. While modernization theory envisioned development as a teleological process of engineered social change, piloted by technocrats and delivered through large-scale interventions and injections of capital and expertise, community development attempted to spur economic transformation by leveraging the knowledge and participation of the rural poor and providing smallscale projects - irrigation systems, agricultural extension services, rural credit systems - carefully tailored to local needs. …