The Household Economics of Counterinsurgency

This study investigates how deployment of pro-government militias (PGMs) as counterinsurgents affects the risk of conflict recurrence. Militiamen derive material and non-material benefits from fighting in armed conflicts. Since these will likely have diminished after the conflict’s termination, militiamen develop a strong incentive to spoil post-conflict peace. Members of pro-government militias are particularly disadvantaged in post-conflict contexts compared to their role in the government’s counterinsurgency campaign. First, PGMs are usually not present in peace negotiations between rebels and governments. This reduces their commitment to peace agreements. Second, disarmament and reintegration programs tend to exclude PGMs, which lowers their expected and real benefits from peace. Third, PGMs might lose their advantage of pursuing personal interests while being protected by the government, as they become less essential during peacetimes. To empirically test whether conflicts with PGMs as counterinsurgents are more likely to break out again, we identify PGM counterinsurgent activities in conflict episodes between 1981 and 2007. We code whether the same PGM was active in a subsequent conflict between the same actors. Controlling for conflict types, which is associated with both the likelihood of deploying PGMs and the risk of conflict recurrence, we investigate our claims with propensity score matching, statistical simulation, and logistic regression models. The results support our expectation that conflicts in which pro-government militias were used as counterinsurgents are more likely to recur. Our study contributes to an improved understanding of the long-term consequences of employing PGMs as counterinsurgents and highlights the importance of considering non-state actors when crafting peace and evaluating the risk of renewed violence.

The Taliban’s victory in Afghanistan in 2021 has led to calls for a review of counterinsurgency strategy. One aspect of COIN strategy in Afghanistan was the use of militias in the anti-insurgent campaign the Taliban. As well as their use in Afghanistan, states have successfully countered insurgent violence through the deployment of, or cooperating with, pro-government militias elsewhere. Indeed, between 1981 and 2014, more than 504 militias were active across the world, 1 1 Sabine Carey, et al., ‘The Life, Death and Diversity of Pro-Government Militias: The Fully Revised Pro-Government Militias Database Version 2.0’, Research and Politics 9/1 (2022). of which many were identified as anti-insurgent non-state forces in counter-rebel campaigns. Taking Colombia and Philippines as two contemporary cases, this paper will explore the limited contributions of anti-insurgent militias (such as the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia and the Manila Crusaders for Peace and Democracy) in counterinsurgency campaigns. The paper will seek to identify the reasons why these armed groups produce contributions in countering armed rebels. These case studies are diverse and both have faced highly adaptable and unique rebel campaigns. Both highlight how the use of militias as counterinsurgency mechanisms can yield positive results. Using evidence from both case studies (government reports, primary archives etc.), I provide evidence of how militias can produce valuable results for a government’s anti-insurgent campaign.

This chapter focuses on the nature of terrorist financing in the Philippines. It provides a brief history of the conflict between the Moros and the Christians. The chapter identifies the terrorist groups and their origins. These groups include the Moro National Liberation Front, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, the New Peoples Army, and the Abu Sayyaf Group. The chapter examines the methods of Philippine terror funding into four categories: the sources by which they gain funds, the methods by which they move and store their funds, their expenditures, and the counter measures that the Philippine Government is using in an effort to combat terrorist financing. With the Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG) and New Peoples Army (NPA) already listed on the US terrorist organizations list, US forces were sent to train Philippine troops who were pursuing the Abu Sayyaf, and Arroyo obtained a $356 million package for counter-terrorism aid.

Our understanding of maids and their condition is confined within the current discourse of domestic labor exploitation and its general assumptions. This study presents an expansion of the discussion as experienced by residents of Sitio Sibol, Bohol including past experiences of NPA (New People’s Army) insurgency and counterinsurgency that partly played an instrumental role in shaping the maid’s experience. Informed by ethnographic research among former and current maids and their community in Sitio Sibol, this study problematizes how the changing context in the community affects the emergence and proliferation of local domestic work. It traces back the community’s history and analyzes both individual and collective experiences, attitudes, and practices as exercises of human creativity when faced with adversity and different conditions of injustice. The shared community life in the sitio established active and passive social networks; and changing political conditions shaped and illustrated the complex process of “pagpapa-maid” revealing realities of human costs usually unaccounted for.

This article examines how civilian defense militias shape violence during civil war. We define civilian defense forces as a sedentary and defensive form of pro-government militia that incumbents often use to harness the participation of civilians during a counterinsurgency campaign. We argue that civilian defense forces reduce the problem of insurgent identification. This leads to a reduction in state violence against civilians. However, we also claim that these actors undermine civilian support for insurgents, which leads to an increase in rebel violence against civilians and overall intensification of conflict. A statistical analysis of government and rebel violence against civilians from 1981 to 2005 and a qualitative assessment of a civilian defense force operating in Iraq from 2005 to 2009 offer strong support for our theoretical claims. These findings provide further insight into pro-government militias and their effects on violence. They also have wider ethical implications for the use of civilian collaborators during civil war.

Trends in American Counterinsurgency

Understanding how natural disasters impact ongoing civil wars is increasingly important as more extreme weather events are expected due to climate change. Existing literature suggests that there is substantial unexplained variation in the consequences of natural disasters for conflict. I present a theoretical model, which provides insights into how the pre-disaster spatial configuration of territorial control can moderate the impact of natural disasters on conflict dynamics. Investigating these insights empirically, I introduce a new measure of natural disasters based on precipitation data, which improves geographical precision and mitigates endogeneity concerns in existing literature. Using the ongoing civil war between the New People’s Army (NPA) and the Philippine government as a testing ground, results show that the impact of natural disasters on both shifts in territorial control and battle-related violence varies by the pre-disaster spatial configuration of territorial control.

Although the existing literature on Pro-Government Militias (PGMs) is rife with studies on various aspects of government-militia relations, not much is known about specific approaches that governments employ to ensure loyalty of their semi-formal proxies. Lessons from recent civil war in Sudan and other cases of PGMs turning their arms against their former patrons further enhance the importance of understanding which mechanisms (if any) incumbents deploy to prevent militias from “going rogue.” In this study, we examine three mechanisms employed by governments to guarantee loyalty of their militia allies. We emphasize the importance of personal, sectarian and other ideological fractionalization within rebel groups; deployment of extreme violence by PGMs against co-ethnic civilians; and formation of rival militias as the most effective PGM loyalty assurance tools available to the incumbents. We test these theoretical assumptions on the case study of the Second Chechen War to elucidate how each of these mechanisms was implemented in practice during the decades-long counterinsurgency campaign waged by Moscow.

Examining militia relationships with the government and civilian populations can help scholars and policymakers better assess differences in militia form, function, and behavior. In this article, we examine the Civilian Armed Forces Geographical Units (CAFGU), a pro-government militia in the Philippines, to better understand how militia participants view insurgents, politicians, state security forces, and civilians based on their experiences serving in the group. We argue that analyzing these beliefs is critical to understanding how militias influence civilian security and the risk of political violence in conflict-contested areas, as well as the trajectory of civil conflict in states like the Philippines that rely on militias to perform core security functions. We base the analysis on surveys and interviews with CAFGU members and civilians living in the Eastern Visayas, a region of active and ongoing conflict, where insurgents and other armed militants advance their aims through acts of violence and terrorism. In doing so, we contribute to a growing literature on the role that militias play in civil war, as well as the implications that follow when states choose to arm “civilians” to aid in counterinsurgency and conflict suppression.

The political stability and territorial integrity of the Philippines are threatened by a number of sub-national conflicts, including the worlds longest standing Communist insurgency, a separatist rebellion centred around the Muslim Moro community on the island of Mindanao, as well as terrorist groups with links to al Qaeda, pursuing a mixture of national and regional objectives. Some of these conflicts were drawn into the US ‘war on terror’ when the US State Department placed the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and its armed wing the New Peoples Army (NPA), as well as the Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG) and the Pentagon Gang (a criminal gang specialising in kidnap for ransom), on its list of ‘foreign terrorist organisations’after 11 September 2001. All of the groups and communities that are currently engaged in conflict with the Philippine government are able to exert considerable influence over the media agenda through violence but have struggled to influence media outputs to their advantage. This chapter assesses how the media has reported these conflicts since 2000, the extent to which the various groups and communities engaged in conflict with the government have been able to influence media outputs and the impacts that the media has had on these conflicts.

Much progress has been made In the rediscovery of traditional medicine and its potential for strengthen ing primary health care programmes. This is reflected In the non-governmental organizations' community-based health programmes (CBHP), which actively employ traditional medical practitioners and promote the utilization of traditional therapies. There is, however, room for further improving these efforts, particularly in terms of integrating tradi tional practitioners into the health programmes, without necessarily transforming them into ‘western’ paramedics. Workers in primary helath care in fact need to obtain a more comprehensive understanding of traditional medicine, linking cognitive aspects of health and illness to the traditional preventive and therapeutic medical practices. The policy of ‘promoting the positive, discouraging the negative and toler ating the neutral’ is easier said than done since labels such as ‘positive’, ‘negative’, and ‘neutral’ may be imposed with ethnocentric biases. An important component of CBHP today is an intensification of research and documentation on the traditional medical systems that exist in the Philippines. Such academic research, linked up with com munity programmes, could contribute to the further improvement of health programmes and projects.

: The paper is about the Philippine terrorism and insurgency problem. It answers the question: Is the current Philippine government counter terrorism strategy effective against the Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG)? If not, what can be done about it? As a background, the current national security threat groups such as the communist New Peoples' Army (NPA), the secessionist Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), to include other minor threat groups were examined along with the history of Filipino Muslims in southern Philippines. Using the analytical framework of Bard O'Neill, the ASG was analyzed as to its history, organization, logistics, tactics, and training. Variables affecting the operational environment such as terrain, climate, infrastructure, political culture, socio-economic conditions, domestic and external popular support, and the criminal justice and law enforcement system were likewise analyzed. The Philippine government's strategy of 'Holistic approach' is a two-pronged approach towards insurgency and terrorism. It is in the right direction, but its effectiveness cannot be gauged yet. The use of military force is necessary at this stage, but a multidimensional approach to get at the root causes of the terrorism must be done to reverse the unfavorable environment where terrorism thrives.

Following the defeat in Afghanistan there have been several discussions over the failure of western and western allied counter-insurgency strategies. These discussions often assume that winning a counter-insurgency is dependent on choosing the right strategy to win, and ideal type strategies are often sketched up to provide possible alternatives. However, in practice, counter-insurgency often becomes a process of arranging and organizing various goals, capacities, and organizational legacies. This article analyzes the counter insurgency in Mozambique and finds that it was formed by economic interests and organizational legacies, though it was not an entirely rational activity to win a war. On the ground practices have been the result of several approaches creating a dynamic counter-insurgency assemblage that transcends ideal type counter-insurgency strategies. The article suggests that this might be the cases for many counter insurgency campaigns.

There is an extensive literature on counterinsurgency strategy, its various campaigns as they were pursued in Afghanistan and the global war on terror that anchored the rationale behind them. But nearly all of this discourse has been steered by international experts and practitioners. The field lacks firsthand accounts and analysis from senior Afghan officials and military professionals. This account, which explores the Afghan government-led counterinsurgency campaign in Nangarhar province from February 2019 to July 2020, seeks to narrow that literature gap and to shed light on broader challenges and shortcomings facing the wider counterinsurgency campaign of United States intervention across Afghanistan for 20 years, which eventually ended up with recapturing of power by the Taliban in August 2021.

Why did U.S.-assisted counterinsurgency (COIN) efforts succeed in the Philippines in the 1950s yet falter in Vietnam a decade later? Why were counterinsurgents able to score a quick victory in Venezuela in the early 1960s but confronted by a long and bloody conflict in El Salvador in the 1970s and 1980s? In seeking to answer these questions, this article provides theoretical motivation for the oft-made claim that U.S. counterinsurgency strategy has been most effective in countries in which the local government engaged in meaningful political and economic reforms to address a population's grievances. What determines whether a government is likely to engage in a reform process? The article proposes that reform is a function of the economic structure of elite assets. When assets are immobile and highly concentrated in one sector, as in heavily agricultural societies like Vietnam or El Salvador, redistributive reforms will prove more difficult, and counterinsurgency efforts will struggle as a result. Conversely, in countries in which the structure of elite assets is more diversified, reforms will prove more feasible, making it easier to undermine an insurgency's popular appeal.