British Counterinsurgency Research Articles

Military Loyalty in Britain’s Withdrawal from Aden, 1960–1967

This article argues an understanding of the British withdrawal from Aden in 1967 requires greater attention to be paid to the loyalty of the local security forces who were supposed to help repress the insurgency in south Arabia, and then secure a friendly state when Britain left. The Federal Regular Army (FRA), the most important formation, proved to be consistently unreliable through behaviours ranging from the attempted murder of British personnel, to desertion and political activism. However, disbanding the FRA might have made matters even worse, so British officers sought to manipulate its loyalty through various mechanisms, including pay rises, ignoring disloyal incidents and directing propaganda at the soldiers. These endeavours succeeded in holding off a mutiny until June 1967, but only by creating a force which became infiltrated by the insurgent movements and lacked the capacity to play any meaningful role in defending the federation. This analysis suggests studies on British counter-insurgency should investigate further the role of local allies in strategy and operations.

Small Wars of the Great Powers: Charles Edward Callwell and the Russian Empire in Comparative Perspective

In this article the author focuses on the semantic and substantive aspects of the colonial conflict analysis model presented in the work of the British Army Major General Charles Edward Collwell, “Small Wars: Their Principles and Practices”, which became the most notable British treatise on the subject at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A distinctive feature of the work is the comparative approach to the analysis of the British colonial wars fought in the Victorian era. It is established that the Russian case (the annexation of Central Asia and the pacification of the North Caucasus) is a golden thread running through all sections of the work, serving, along with similar examples from French, Spanish, and US history, as a kind of tuning fork for the universal principles of successful small warfare that Callwell laid out in his work. The aim of the paper is to form a more substantive account of the significance of comparative colonialism for British military thinking and the place of the Russian experience in its evolution. The study has shown that “Small Wars” reflected a course towards the normalisation of the Russian Empire within a professional discourse. In addition, the historiography focuses on Callwell's selective approach to the choice of factual material and its place in the evolution of British counterinsurgency. In this article, the author focuses on identifying the reasons for differences in the forms and ways of systematizing the experience of small wars in the colonial and frontier policies of both the Russian and British empires. Particular attention is paid to the circumstances that led to the gradual loss of Callwell's work to its former importance on the eve and after the Great War.

A Historical Overview of Boer Guerrilla and British Counterinsurgency Operations During the Anglo-Boer War, 1899-1902

ABSTRACT The year 1901 saw an upsurge in Boer guerrilla and concomitant British counterinsurgency operations during the Anglo-Boer (South African) War of 1899 to 1902 – especially in the wake of the failed Middelburg peace negotiations. One hundred and twenty years later, it is appropriate that these events should be revisited. The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of the Boer guerrilla and British counterinsurgency operations, including events in the Cape Colony, where the conflict had grave implications for the local white, brown and black inhabitants, who were caught up between the British and Boer forces, and where in certain areas of the war zone, a civil war was fought. The reactions and views of Lord Kitchener, the British Commander-in-Chief, receive particular attention, as he tried to bring the war to a close as soon as possible, and in the process laying waste to large areas of the war zone, thanks to the scorched-earth policy implemented by the British Army in South Africa.

Operation Intradon in the Musandam,1970-1971: what this counterinsurgency operation says about British military operations in the Arabian Gulf

ABSTRACT This article examines Operation Intradon, a covert British counter-insurgency operation in the northern Omani enclave of Musandam. The operation, which ran from December 1970 to March 1971, was driven by the political aim of forcing the Sultan of Oman to take administrative control of this ungoverned enclave. This would then provide protection to the Strait of Hormuz oil route and remove a threat to the process of federating British protected states into what became the United Arab Emirates. We conclude by identifying what the operation says about how British military operations were crafted in Britain’s informal empire in the Gulf.

The City Makers of Nairobi: An African Urban History

The City Makers of Nairobi: An African Urban History

Psychiatric casualties and the British counter-insurgency in Malaya

ABSTRACT The psychiatric cost of Britain’s post-war counter-insurgency campaigns have gone largely un-investigated. Focusing on the Malayan Emergency, this article will show that counter-insurgency operations were sufficiently intense to produce what were conceptualised as cases of mild psychoneurosis. These conditions were managed using convalescence and simple psychotherapy. Managing these conditions in this way risked leaving more serious conditions untreated and meant recorded cases of psychoneurosis were kept artificially low. That the stresses of the counter-insurgency in Malaya were reproduced elsewhere suggests there was a wider psychiatric cost of Britain’s post-war period of decolonisation.

Emergency politics and the middlebrow novel: A comparative analysis of Han Suyin’s … and the Rain my Drink and Mary McMinnies’s The Flying Fox

ABSTRACT In July 1956, Han Suyin’s novel of the Malayan Emergency was published in London and Singapore. … and the Rain my Drink is a fictional account of the communist insurgency and the British counter-insurgency campaign. What is often overlooked is that earlier that year the British author Mary McMinnies had published her “Emergency” novel The Flying Fox, which covers much of the same political ground as Han’s. This article views Han’s and McMinnies’s work as exemplars of middlebrow fiction. To narrate the end of empire, both texts employ literary devices associated with the middlebrow, alongside exotic imagery familiar from an earlier imperial tradition. Han’s narrative choices acquire, however, distinctive meanings in the Malayan context, associating the exotic with Malaya’s multi-ethnic political landscape, and the domestic tropes of the middlebrow with societal tensions and a newfound Asian confidence, whilst also revealing Asian sensitivities and imported western values.

Camp follower or counterinsurgent? Lady Templer and the forgotten wives

ABSTRACT British counterinsurgency thinking today remains strongly influenced by the Malaya Emergency (1948–1960) but little-known is the extensive women’s outreach program, pioneered by Lady Templer, involving the Women’s Institute and British Red Cross. Through discourse analysis of archival records, this article identifies four discourses characterizing British women’s participation, used, at the time, to make acceptable their presence whilst distancing them from the counterinsurgency campaign. By exploring how women’s presence has been negotiated and marginalized, I will reveal the blurred boundaries of counterinsurgency, questioning how the role of the counterinsurgent is constructed and sustained over time and for what purpose.

British Torture, Then and Now: The Role of the Judges

AbstractThis article is concerned with the return of torture and other related abusive conduct to the British counter‐insurgency arsenal following the initiation of military engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 2000s. It focuses primarily on how judges have engaged with the challenges that this torture and abusive conduct have posed, both in their capacity as judges proper and also as appointees to a range of inquiries that have been initiated in the wake of these actions. The article contrasts the post‐2001 work of judges with that during an earlier episode when such state abuse was also evident, Northern Ireland in the 1970s. Arguing that the judiciary has been drawn into the fray much more heavily than in the 1970s and across a great range of platforms, the article analyses this judicial involvement and posits explanations for it against the backdrop of a changing UK politico‐legal culture.

‘Lessons learned’ during the Interbellum: ‘Irish war’ and British counterinsurgency

ABSTRACT Historians generally view the Irish War of Independence as the first and largely unsuccessful experience for the British army in conducting modern counterinsurgency. This article argues that during the Interbellum the ‘Irish war’ became a starting point for the military thought about this type of conflict, although this did not become fully consolidated in the army’s thinking. Some important aspects of the British forces’ conduct in the ‘Irish war’ remained undervalued, not least because of the only official analysis of this conflict, ‘The Record of the Rebellion in Ireland’, was classified for a long time. It strongly challenges traditional and revisionist understanding of this conflict and its implications on the British way of counterinsurgency during the Interbellum. These contradictions between documentary evidence from archives and established methods of historical thinking, as well as correlations of archival material with our understanding of modern counterinsurgencies, will be contrasted and analysed in this article.

Colonial violence and its ‘Small Wars’: fighting the Kuki ‘guerillas’ during the Great War in Northeast India, 1917–1919

ABSTRACTThis paper concerns the lesser known British counterinsurgency (COIN) operations in Northeast frontier of India during the First World War. Officially known as the ‘Kuki Operations’, it was considered as part of the Great War. Carried out in isolation from press and public, and shelved in colonial archives, the event remained invisible until today. Yet, it registers a critical case of colonial COIN doctrine where the ‘moral effect’ doctrine was employed without being questioned. It unleashed enormous amount of organized violence, ranging from shoot at sight to indiscriminate burning of villages, wholesale destruction of property and livestock, prevention of cultivation and rebuilding of villages, forced mass displacement in jungles or in ‘concentration camps’, and collective punishment (communal penal labour and payment of compensation) after the war. This paper argues that the theory of ‘minimum force’ and the practicability of the ‘moral effect’ doctrine as applied by the Empire, sit oddly with each other at the frontier, where violence was seen both as a natural and moral orders. Violence as an ‘imperatively necessary’ method to bring order in a disorderly frontier, in the opinion of colonial state, informs and registers Northeast India as geography of violence.

The revisionist historiography of Britain’s decolonisation conflicts and political science theses of civilian victimisation in counterinsurgency

ABSTRACTRecent historical research exposed the myth of self-restraint as the distinctive feature of British counterinsurgency during decolonisation. This article shows that the revisionist historiography of British counterinsurgency has important, but unnoticed, implications for political scientists. Specifically, historical scholarship challenges the predictions and causal mechanisms of the main social scientific theses of civilian victimisation in counterinsurgency. Using revisionist historians’ works as a source of data, I test those theses against Britain’s decolonisation conflicts. I find that they do not pass the test convincingly. I conclude that political scientists should be more willing to explore the theoretical implications of new historical evidence on counterinsurgency campaigns.

Savage Warfare: Violence and the Rule of Colonial Difference in Early British Counterinsurgency

Savage Warfare: Violence and the Rule of Colonial Difference in Early British Counterinsurgency

Book Review: Fighting EOKA: The British Counter-Insurgency Campaign on Cyprus, 1955–1959. David French

Book Review: <i>Fighting EOKA: The British Counter-Insurgency Campaign on Cyprus, 1955–1959</i>. David French

‘Detainees Are Always One’s Achilles Heel’: The Struggle over the Scrutiny of Detention and Interrogation in Aden, 1963–1967

Colonial officials often complained about outside meddling in their campaign to defeat the insurgency in the South Arabian Federation from 1963 to 1967. This article focuses on relations between the High Commission in Aden, Whitehall departments, Amnesty International, and the International Committee of the Red Cross, asking how far these two external organizations managed to uncover detention and interrogation practices, and how officials in Aden responded to the scrutiny. Four main arguments are proposed. Firstly, detention and interrogation in Aden are contextualized within British counter-insurgency as a whole. Secondly, the push for outside interference in detention and interrogation immediately generated animosity between Whitehall and the High Commission. Thirdly, once ICRC visits were forced on Aden, officials learned to live with them. Inspections consistently found abuse centred around the interrogation facility. Finally, external pressures imposed procedural reforms on the detention and interrogation regime, but failed to stop abuses.

Fighting EOKA: The British Counter-Insurgency Campaign on Cyprus, 1955–1959, by David French

Fighting EOKA: The British Counter-Insurgency Campaign on Cyprus, 1955–1959, by David French

British counterinsurgency in Brunei and Sarawak, 1962–1963: developing best practices in the shadow of Malaya

This paper uses recently-released material from the ‘migrated archives’ to provide an original counterinsurgency analysis of the TNKU revolt in Brunei and Sarawak from December 1962 to May 1963. It argues that, despite a failure to act upon intelligence predicting the outbreak of insurgency, Britain developed a highly effective counterinsurgency organisation. These records also indicate that decision-makers drew inspiration from the Malayan Emergency to inform success in Brunei. Although Malaya has been challenged as a counterinsurgency paradigm, the Brunei operations show the utility of striking a balance between inappropriately copying from past campaigns and developing best practices applicable to the unique environment of Borneo. In turn, the evolution of effective operational practices in Brunei informed their successful application to the subsequent Indonesian Confrontation.

The pitfalls of learning from historical experience: the British Army’s debate on useful lessons for the war in Afghanistan

ABSTRACTWhy do armies often fail to transmit and coherently apply lessons from their past? Using the concept of ‘layered organizational culture’, this article formulates a pioneering theoretical argument to explain how military organizations learn from their historical experience. Analysing empirical material from internal debates within the British Army, the article observes an inherent incompatibility between lessons gleaned from, on the one hand, the Anglo-Afghan Wars and, on the other hand, British counterinsurgency campaigns after 1945. This is less a result of actual differences in the external context but of changing organizational ‘filters’: different layers of military organizational culture result in different ways of selecting and transmitting relevant lessons from warfare experience. Older and newer cultural layers can interact and thus contribute to incoherent strategy-making in the present. This argument is illustrated by reviewing the layering process within the British Army since the 19th century. The article shows a shift from emphasizing the specificity of local contexts towards the application of universal principles. This has contemporary relevance: co-exisiting yet incompatible historical lessons contributed to significant incoherence in operational strategy during the initial months of the British deployment in Afghanistan in 2006.

Book Review: Confronting the Colonies: British Intelligence and Counterinsurgency by Rory Cormac

Book Review: <i>Confronting the Colonies: British Intelligence and Counterinsurgency</i> by Rory Cormac

Northern Ireland and minimum force: the refutation of a concept?

The debate over whether there exists a British counter-insurgency tradition of minimum force is one that has been thoroughly discussed. Is there anything left to say? This study suggests there is further insight to be attained if one explicitly evaluates the concept of minimum force in relation to the conduct of the security forces in the years of the Northern Ireland conflict. Through an examination of three key periods in the conflict, it will be shown that while there was invariably an awareness of the need to act with restraint among senior officers at the strategic level, this was often difficult to apply at the tactical level in the heat of confrontation. The argument demonstrates that the British Army, and other instruments of the state, rarely acted in a manner that could be described as ‘minimal’. Instead, it was the broader liberal values of the British state that explains largely the degrees of restraint exhibited by the government and security forces.