Counterinsurgency Strategy Research Articles

The Bodies of The Condemned: The Return of the Body as the Object of State Power

This paper provides a historical analysis of the genealogy of American policing and attempts to explain the return of state power to individual bodies. It argues that this return was informed by French counterinsurgency strategies in Algeria. Through engagement with Foucault's analysis of power and surveillance practices, it aims to shed light on and help us better understand and combat police brutality today.

When two elephants fight: insurgency, counter-insurgency and environmental sufferings in northeastern Nigeria

ABSTRACT The consequences of Boko Haram insurgency on the Nigerian state has enjoyed robust interrogation. However, most of the studies have concentrated on human and material losses to the neglect of the environment. Yet, the activities of the insurgents as well as the counterinsurgency strategies of the Nigerian armed forces, have negatively affected the environment. This study interrogates the impacts of the insurgency on the environment, using cases such as soil and water contamination, mining of landscapes, indiscriminate killings, and the destruction of habitats, farmlands and cultural landscapes as empirical evidence. The study concludes that activities of the militants and the military have had debilitating effects on the physical environment in northeastern Nigeria.

Rekonstruksi Otonomi Khusus Papua melalui Model Strategi Penta Helix Counterinsurgency (COIN)

The issues of Papua (Both Papua and West Papua Provinces) have been reached by international communities even though the government regulation; Law of the Republic of Indonesia Number 21, Year 2001, concerning Special Autonomy for Papua Province becoming a central issue as a problem solving to make a special treat for people in Papua internally. Whereas, the regulation is expected to make people in Papua develop political, economic, and cultural also resolving the insurgency problems among them. The arrangements of social and political, economy and budget are as a special treatment, only develop economy and infrastructure but it does not solve the conflicts until today. In this case, the Counterinsurgency (COIN) strategic model needs to be implemented following the appropriateness of national policy and the condition in Papua. This research used a content analysis method to reveal the causes of an un-optimal policy in solving the insurgency. Based on the four elements of COIN, only two elements exist; community and state elements. While the international community element and private sectors do not appear on the special autonomy legislation for Papua. As a reason, the COIN model appropriates with the condition of the people that include some elements; government, local community, the non-state, international community, and private sectors. Comparing to the United States of America (USA) model where the community is not included in the COIN element since the community as an object. On the other hand, it is different from China where military and political parties as important elements since the government decisions are supported by military force to solve the insurgency problem. This research found that civil and military cooperation in the model of COIN Papua after special autonomy is reflected by the existence of Local Government Leaders Communication Forum of Papua to face all situations that happened in Papua, both in security and emergency. Active coordination among governors, local legislators, Adat communities (customary), police, and army for COIN strategy needs special coordination to global communities openly that affect opinions on the people and private sector interests in Papua.

Effect of Counterterrorism on Public Space Performance: A Syntactical Analysis of Al-Kadhimiya City

This paper investigates the impact of counterinsurgency strategies on the efficiency and performance of public spaces within the context of Al-Kadhimiya city. The methodological approach relied on space syntax-Depthmap X to perform a syntactical comparative analysis of two morphological phases for the years 2003 and 2007 of the case study. These two phases represent the spatial accessibility before and after the application of various counterterrorism strategies. The syntactical analysis encompassed the values of integration, connectivity, choice, and control within the spatial system in order to analyse the networking attributes of public spaces. The analysis results indicated that the counterterrorism strategies have reduced the spatial networking and accessibility of public spaces within Al-Kadhimiya city.

SOCIO-ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IN CRISES RAVAGED AREAS: A STUDY ON THE ADVERSE EFFECTS OF HUMANITARIAN SUPPORT BY NON-GOVERNMENTAL ORGANISATIONS IN MAIDUGURI, NIGERIA

The insurgent group known as Boko Haram have carried out targeted assassinations, shootings and bombings, which led to deaths, destructions and displacements of Millions in north-eastern Nigeria. These crippled the region’s economic, cultural and social status, which attracted various forms of humanitarian supports from philanthropists, governments and non-governmental organisations (NGOs). It is against this backdrop that this paper examines the adverse effects of humanitarian supports by NGOs on socioeconomic development in Maiduguri, Nigeria. The study adopted qualitative approach using FGD in generating data from beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries of humanitarian support in selected communities of Maiduguri. The study revealed government reluctances and over-reliance of people on the support provided by the NGOs. The standard of living has ascended because of the operations of NGOs. Supports provided by NGOs have further distorted the community’s social cohesion as it created various forms of domestic violence and conflict between displaced persons and host communities. In addition, it has increased social vice such as sexual exploitation and abuse in an effort to get provisions/employment. There are further continuous accusations that NGOs are supporting Boko Haram group with food and logistics. The study concluded that the operations of NGOs would contribute in prolonging the physical and social insecurity in crises ravaged areas if not adequately regulated/monitored. Thus, recommended that NGOs do more capacity building programmes than emergency relief supports. Governments should regulate the operations of NGOs by introducing strict policies that will force them to be transparent and accountable, and operate in line with counter-insurgency strategies.

Ecological narratives of forced resettlement in Cold War Malaya

ABSTRACTThis article examines the forced resettlement of more than 500,000 ethnic rural Chinese during the Malayan Emergency that lasted from 1948 until 1960. The phrase “winning the hearts and minds of the people” encapsulates the British narrative of economic uplift and development, evident from the naming of sites that rural Chinese were moved to as “New Villages.” This justification of Cold War counterinsurgency strategy through development is apparent in the British pamphlet, “The Story of Permatang Tinggi New Village,” which casts rural Chinese as a primitive people without history, transformed into productive and loyal citizens after resettlement. Yet, oral histories and cultural productions by resettled villagers challenge this, as seen in the essays and poetry of villager Wong Yoon Wah. Whereas the British presented rural Chinese as rootless squatters, Wong portrayed another world in which the longstanding Nanyang connection to the ecology of the tropics manifest in fish who live in ponds beside tin mines, and bats whose night time flights of pollination are upset by the chaos of the Emergency. His writings counteract “hearts and minds” by reclaiming the rural jungle in which they worked and lived as homelands lost to British resettlement.

Counterinsurgents’ use of force and “armed orders” in Naga Northeast India

ABSTRACT Recent works have highlighted deeply political variations in Indian counterinsurgency across space and time, leading to the emergence of a diversity of “armed orders” ranging from outright clashes to openly cooperative state-insurgent relationships. However, we know little about how variations in counterinsurgency strategy, particularly in the levels of force employed, shape the functioning of these armed orders. Drawing on original case study evidence from the Naga insurgency, this article builds on existing works on state-insurgent orders by developing a typology of variations in the use of force, accounting for counterinsurgents’ use of force to undermine, modify and uphold a patchwork of complex and fragile state-insurgent orders across space and time in India’s Naga conflict. In doing so, it contributes to debates on the use of force in counterinsurgency and the study of order in conflict in India’s Northeast.

Combining regression and mixed-integer programming to model counterinsurgency

Counterinsurgencies are a type of violent struggle between state and non-state actors in which one group attempts to gain or maintain influence over a certain portion of the population. When an insurgency (i.e., non-state actor) challenges a host nation (i.e., state actor), often an external counterinsurgent force intervenes. While researchers have categorized insurgencies with social science techniques and United States Army doctrine has established possible counterinsurgency strategies, little research prescribes host nation and counterinsurgent force strength. To this end, we develop a mixed-integer program to provide an estimate of the number of forces required to maximize the probability of a favorable resolution to the counterinsurgent and host nation countries, while minimizing unfavorable resolutions and the number of counterinsurgent deaths. This program integrates: (i) a multivariate piecewise-linear regression model to estimate the number of counterinsurgent deaths each year and (ii) a logistic regression model to estimate the probability of four types of conflict resolution over a 15-year time horizon. Constraints in the model characterize: (i) upper and lower limits on the number of counterinsurgent and host nation forces and their annual rates of increase and decrease, (ii) the characteristics of the type of counterinsurgency, (iii) an estimation of the number of counterinsurgent deaths, and (iv) an estimation of the probability of one of four resolutions. We use Somalia as a case study to estimate how counterinsurgent strategies affect the probability of obtaining each conflict resolution. We conclude that a strategy focusing on building and empowering a stable host nation force provides the highest probability of achieving a positive resolution to the counterinsurgency. Senior leaders can use this information to guide strategic decisions within a counterinsurgency.

Peace for our time? Examining the effect of power-sharing on postwar rebellions

Does power-sharing promote peace? Relying on credible commitment theory, past research has predominantly focused on one aspect of this question – namely, whether power-sharing prevents the recurrence of battle violence between agreement signatories. However, this disregards a phenomenon that plagues postwar countries across the globe: battle violence perpetrated by armed groups outside of the negotiated settlement against the postwar order. To explain this violence, I argue that we have to focus on how power-sharing redistributes power and access to resources across elites in a postwar country. By determining who gets what, when, and how, power-sharing determines the state’s counterinsurgency capabilities and thus shapes incentives and constrains for extra-agreement battle violence. Personalized power-sharing, for instance, gives elites privileged access to state resources, facilitates effective counterinsurgency strategies, and thus decreases extra-agreement violence. In contrast, structural power-sharing limits elites’ access to resources and their ability to prevent armed challenges resulting in higher levels of violence. To empirically test these propositions, I combine data from the Power-Sharing Event Dataset (PSED) with the UCDP Georeferenced Event Dataset (GED) for peace agreements in Africa and Asia signed between 1989 and 2006. I analyze these data using count models, matching procedures, and correlated random effects models. The empirical results support my expectation that personalized power-sharing is associated with fewer extra-agreement battle-deaths while structural arrangements facilitate postwar rebellions. This study contributes to an improved understanding of power-sharing as a conflict resolution tool and highlights its divergent effects on actors inside and outside of peace agreements.

“In the Wider View”: The Geostrategic Determinants of Counterinsurgency Strategy and Adaptation, Evidence from the Arab and Jewish Rebellions in the Palestine Mandate

Expeditionary counterinsurgents often have trouble adapting to meet insurgent challenges, resulting in the adoption and retention of ineffective strategies. Whereas explanations often focus on military preferences and cultures, this paper argues civilian policymakers ultimately select counterinsurgency strategy from the recommendations of their advisors, and these strategies will reflect policymakers’ preferences. The goals and instruments of a counterinsurgency campaign are significantly shaped and constrained by policymakers’ foreign policy objectives and the geostrategic pressures they perceive. Strategy changes when geostrategic shifts render existing strategies liabilities for new foreign policy objectives; otherwise, existing strategies, consistent with existing goals, are likely to persist. A most similar comparison of British responses to two insurgencies in the Palestine Mandate, the Arab Rebellion (1936–39), demonstrating successful strategic adaptation, and the Jewish Rebellion (1945–47), demonstrating the failure to change ineffective strategy, reveal the role played by geostrategic pressures stemming from the onset and aftermath of World War II.

How do civilians assign blame and praise amidst civil conflict?

ABSTRACT Understanding the process by which civilians ascribe blame, praise, and intentionality to governments in conflict is key to formulating a successful counterinsurgency strategy. We conducted survey experiments with Palestinian civilians to examine perceived intentionality of Israeli forces for the outcomes of riot control methods with various consequences. We extend a psychological theory, the side-effect effect, to examine how individuals evaluate actors within conflict. Consistent with expectations, civilians assign more responsibility to state actors with regards to negative (versus positive) outcomes of an action. Additionally, we find a moderator: individuals exposed to violence assign even more responsibility for negative outcomes.

The Household Economics of Counterinsurgency

ABSTRACT State security forces have been locked in an ongoing struggle with the Communist Party of the Philippines – New People’s Army (NPA) for nearly fifty years. Over the course of the conflict, thousands of civilians across generations have taken up arms and participated in the counterinsurgency campaign. Citizen Armed Force Geographical Units (CAFGU) and other pro-government militias have played a key auxiliary role in combatting the insurgency and providing community security. This article draws on survey and interview data collected from CAFGU participants to examine the factors that influence decisions to join, as well as their implications for sustained participation and counterinsurgency strategy. Existing research on joining armed groups recognizes how environmental conditions, group processes, and individual motives interact to help explain participation. We shift our focus to the realm of the household and highlight how considerations related to that site affect participation. Our findings suggest that the need to avoid economic disaster and ensure a secure subsistence can have a notable influence on decisions to enlist and individual experiences as CAFGU. These effects, in turn, have implications for how the Philippine government carries out its counterinsurgency.

States simply do not care: The failure of international securitisation of drug control in Afghanistan

The link between the world drug problem and securitisation has been predominantly established to argue that an existential threat discourse reinforces the international prohibitionist regime and makes it harder for alternative policy models to arise. This analysis is problematic for three main reasons. Firstly, it overestimates the current strength of the international drug control regime as a normative and regulatory system that prescribes state behaviour. Secondly, the current international regime does not inhibit policy reforms. While the international treaty system proves resistant to change, it is at the national and local levels where new drug policies arise. Moreover, these are generally not the draconian or emergency measures that successful securitisation would predict. Thirdly, the analysis so far misinterprets criminalisation or militarisation as evidence of securitisation. As the case of Afghanistan shows, securitisation attempts, such as those linking the Taliban and the illicit opium economy, may have reinforced the militarisation of drug control in Afghanistan, but did not elevate the illicit drug economy as an external threat or a top priority. While there have been short-lived spikes of attention and provincial level campaigns to eradicate poppy cultivation, these have never translated into a sustained structural effort to combat illicit drugs in Afghanistan. Even the latest push for militarisation, the US-led campaign of airstrikes on drug processing laboratories since November 2017, represents more a shift in counter-insurgency strategy than successful securitisation. While Afghanistan’s illicit drug economy has been politicised for several reasons, states are not convinced that this economy somehow represents an existential threat to their survival.

Democratic Security Policy in Colombia: Approaches to an enemy-centric counterinsurgency model

Abstract: The purpose of this document is to reflect upon the Democratic Security Policy (PSD by its abbreviation in Spanish) that took place in Colombia under the presidency of Alvaro Uribe Velez, between 2002 and 2010. To this end, in the fight against the guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC by its abbreviation in Spanish) and the National Liberation Army (ELN by its abbreviation in Spanish), the PSD is understood, in these terms, not so much as a population-centric counterinsurgency strategy, but on the contrary, as a predominantly enemy-centric model. It is also theoretically presented as a hybrid model between the scheme of compulsion and accommodation proposed by Hazelton (2011, 2013, 2017), and the authoritarian model that Zukhov (2012), or Byman (2016) approach, among others. In this regard, the work draws on data from the database on the internal armed conflict expressly facilitated by the Vice-Presidency of the Republic, and by a set of in-depth interviews with the main actors involved in the conflict during the time of the study, from the Government, as well as from the Military Forces, the guerrillas and the paramilitaries.

A maláj kommunista gerillák leverése. A felkelés elleni műveletek (Counter-Insurgency Strategies – COIN) iskolapéldája

By defeating the communist insurrection in Malaya that occurred between 1957-60, the British have demonstrated the effectiveness of counter-insurgency tactics and strategies. In my paper, I’ll attempt to illustrate how the British have managed to deal with an anti-governmental rebellion with the use of propaganda, and the media in general. I will also show the potential efficiency of civilian-military cooperation, with which this whole strategy could be executed.

If At First You Don't Succeed: Explaining the Puzzle of Unchanging Russian Counterinsurgency Doctrine

What explains the persistence of Russia’s counterinsurgency doctrine of indiscriminate violence and collective punishment over time? Perhaps more interestingly, why has Russia not changed its counterinsurgency doctrine in the face of multiple failures, especially after its failures in Afghanistan and the first Chechen war? Few scholars have taken on the persistence of Russian civilian victimization over time and despite failures as a dependent variable. This paper distills and tests hypotheses from the literature on military organizational learning to understand Russia's unchanging brute-force counterinsurgency strategy. It finds that the Russian military’s continued use of harsh tactics against the population during its counterinsurgency campaigns is not explained by theories that emphasize military organizational bias, but rather better explained by civilian leaders’ failure to pressure the military to change its strategy—although why the civilian leaders did so remains an avenue for future study.

Useful Knowledge: Snouck Hurgronje and Islamic Insurgency in Aceh

Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje (1858-1936), a Dutch scholar of Islam, served as a “military anthropologist” during the Aceh war in the Dutch East Indies. The Acehnese fighters viewed their anti-colonial struggle against the Dutch as a jihad, construing themselves religious martyrs fighting “infidel invaders,” and carrying out suicide attacks with a machete or dagger. To combat this insurgency Snouck Hurgronje, one of the first Westerners to visit Mecca and author of many books on Islam, developed the so-called “Aceh method,” which became the basis of modern Dutch counterinsurgency strategy. This article addresses the question: what can we learn from the life and times of Snouck Hurgronje?

Policing the war on drugs and the transformation of urban space in Manila

This article explores policing and urban ordering in the Philippine war on drugs. With an empirical point of departure in ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Bagong Silang, a poor urban area on the outskirts of Metro Manila, the article highlights the perspective of the state police in an area that has been heavily exposed to the drug war and can be considered as one of its hot spots. It is examined how inspirations from counter-insurgency strategies are implemented in policing the war on drugs and discussed how this form of policing is negotiated and what implications it produces on the ground. In doing so, the article asks, ‘how have counter-insurgency policing strategies transformed urban space and the possibility of life in the poorer sections of Manila’? Drawing on a conceptual framework on borders, policing and the production of fear, the article argues that there exists an intimate connection between the employed policing strategies and the transformation of urban space with the potential of fundamentally reconfiguring urban sociality in areas such as Bagong Silang.

Beyond the Arab Cold War: The International History of the Yemen Civil War, 1962–68

Beyond the Arab Cold War: The International History of the Yemen Civil War, 1962–68

Use It or Lose It: The Political Economy of Counterinsurgency Strategy

Regular budget cycles and annual evaluations of bureaucratic funding have created a “use-it-or-lose-it” atmosphere in agencies throughout the American government, resulting in large expenditures in the fourth quarter of the fiscal year. We show that these spending patterns apply in a least likely case: junior officers in a war zone, and that indiscriminate fourth-quarter expenditures are correlated with increases in insurgent violence. Using reconstruction data from the war in Iraq, this article shows that the tendency to overspend at the end of the fiscal year is both pervasive and detrimental to security objectives. By combining extensive interview work with econometric analysis, this article offers new insights into the politics of war, civil–military relations, and postconflict reconstruction and suggests that these pathologies may have a substantive, negative impact on a government’s ability to effectively wage counterinsurgency operations.