Counterinsurgency Practices Research Articles

Participatory Security as Form of Control: Kaziranga National Park, India

Abstract ‘More security, more conservation’ is the mantra utilised by the Indian forest service to ensure the protection of flora and fauna. Aligned with international agreements aiming at securing wildlife and preserving forests, the Union and the State governments of India have adopted a series of green measures to ensure both the securitisation and participation of local communities in conservation efforts. This research article illustrates how participatory forms of conservation are employed to complement the securitisation of conservation, serving as a means to indirectly control people’s lives and create new environmental subjects. It does so through a case study of Kaziranga National Park, a biodiversity conservation hotspot in the northeastern state of Assam, renowned for the successful conservation of the Greater One-horned Rhino Rhinoceros unicornis. This ‘success’ emerges amidst critiques of its violent and militarised anti-poaching conservation measures and the efforts deployed to protect the rhino ‘at any cost’. The research article analyses the participatory protection mechanisms supported by state and non-state agencies to ensure the conservation of Kaziranga, primarily carried out through the revitalisation of two bodies: the eco-development committee and the voluntary defence organisation. The results demonstrate how soft forms of violence complement hard forms, thereby supporting a broader process of structural violence and national building in Assam. It shows how participatory mechanisms are used as ‘counterinsurgency practices.’ Abstract in Hindi: rb.gy/rhcrzz

‘Women helping women’: Deploying gender in US counterinsurgency wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

Central to the goal of ‘hearts and minds’ counterinsurgency is the need for knowledge, understanding and influence in relation to local populations. Building on feminist scholarship on counterinsurgency, the article focuses on the ‘female engagement’ work undertaken by four programmes developed by the US military between 2003 and 2014. The article offers three key arguments. First, it maintains that the gendered subjectivities of Iraqi and Afghan women and US female counterinsurgents are constructed as strategic assets and as vulnerable subjects. Second, these programmes reveal the extent to which gendered counterinsurgency is constituted and regulated by emotional and embodied norms and rules for both female soldiers and civilians. Third, it suggests that the discursive construction of ‘winning hearts and minds’ works to render less visible the violence of gendered counterinsurgency practices. Although gendered counterinsurgency mobilizes a relational ontology predicated on the emotional labour required for developing knowledge of the Iraqi and Afghan ‘other’, female engagement activities cannot escape the logic of instrumental reasoning within which they are located. Ultimately, recognizing the policy of female engagement as central to forms of knowledge production reveals the extent to which the violences of war rely on a complex set of gendered and affective relations.

The Great Power Competition for North America: Western Expansion and the Conquest of Trans-Appalachia, 1680–1821

Great power competition elevates the American way of war over counterinsurgency practices, violating the need to balance these two modes of warfare. This article calls for a restoration of that balance, and does so by example. A look at the early period of settlement in North America, from East Coast lodgments to the Mississippi River, reveals a nation able to wage two wars at once. An American push to establish a permanent frontier that excluded European rivals coincided with a counterinsurgency war unleashed within newly claimed tracts of land. That effort proved effective, if immoral. Today, that balance must again take hold, with a reminder that cultural accommodation inherent in all wars means that a counterinsurgency war avoids the mandate of destruction called for in seeking victory by employing force of arms.

Police, Provocation, Politics: Counterinsurgency in Istanbul

Police, Provocation, Politics: Counterinsurgency in Istanbul

Networking the Counterrevolution: The École Supérieure de Guerre, Transnational Military Collaboration, and Cold War Counterinsurgency, 1955–1975

Abstract Over the past several decades, scholars have devoted considerable attention to tracing the influence of French counterinsurgency practices developed in Indochina and Algeria on other militaries during the Cold War. This article builds on that literature to offer an explanation for why French counterrevolutionary knowledge circulated so broadly, and to connect the French military more concretely to an emerging literature on anticommunist internationalism. At the center of French efforts, this article argues, stood the Army’s École Supérieure de Guerre (ESG) in Paris, which trained growing numbers of high-ranking foreign officers after 1945. The ESG taught counterrevolutionary warfare directly, but as this article argues, it also helped constitute an audience abroad for such ideas by cultivating affective bonds, strategic preferences, and personal connections over the longer term. In tracing the partnerships cultivated through the ESG in this period, this article also illustrates the broader entanglements between counterinsurgency, international military cooperation, and professionalization at midcentury. For military partners seeking to professionalize their own forces, the attractiveness of French doctrines lay as much in the easily accessible set of materials, training, and expertise the French military offered as in their capacity to combat subversion. By tracing the transnational networks of exchange knit together by military academies in this period, this article concludes, scholars can better historicize the rise of counterinsurgency as a key paradigm of cold warfare.

Uma anomalia comum

Neste artigo, exploro a fronteira que tradicionalmente separa “defesa” de “segurança pública”, confrontando as premissas que dão sustentação a essa diferenciação. Para tal, tomo como ponto de partida o caso da Colômbia, frequentemente considerada uma anomalia no que diz respeito à referida fronteira. Primeiramente, discuto como a contrainsurgência foi alçada a uma posição privilegiada na doutrina militar colombiana na segunda metade do século XX. Em seguida, inscrevo a dinâmica envolvendo Estados Unidos e Colômbia em um escopo mais amplo de circulação de saberes militares: as Américas. Com isso, mostro que, para compreender como os limites espaciais e funcionais da defesa vieram a ser historicamente constituídos na Colômbia, é preciso rastrear as pegadas transnacionais que vieram a constituir práticas de defesa nesse país. Assim, sustento que uma perspectiva focada na circulação de saberes militares revela não apenas que os domínios da segurança pública e da defesa são indissociáveis entre si, mas também transnacionalmente constituídos. Por fim, analiso as principais implicações teórico-conceituais dessa abordagem para as premissas subjacentes à afirmação de uma fronteira entre defesa e segurança pública – as mesmas que levam ao enquadramento da Colômbia como uma anomalia.

Methods in the madness? Exploring the logics of torture in Syrian counterinsurgency practices

ABSTRACT While the administrations of Hafez and Bashar al-Assad employed torture regularly as a tool of authoritarian governance, this usage changed dramatically in nature as the revolution moved from protests to insurgency, which posed an increasingly significant threat to the regime’s survival. In the counterinsurgency literature, torture’s function is generally tied to intelligence gathering. In the context of Syria’s post-2011 Counterinsurgency (COIN) campaign, torture functioned more as a way to intimidate the population, forcing them to explicitly choose a side—especially in contested zones. The threat posed by the uprising amplified the scale, form, targeting, and purpose of torture, expanding it significantly. This article traces these dynamics, not only to explain the changing logics and practices of torture in Syria, but also to identify key actors, structures, and sites of analysis. It attempts to avoid falling into the normative trap of simply condemning torture, by moving its examination into a more analytical space, thereby demonstrating how torture can perform a critical function beyond intelligence gathering within an authoritarian COIN campaign.

Assessing Misaligned Counterinsurgency Practice in Niger and Nigeria

ABSTRACT While representing a major military threat in Niger and Nigeria, the two branches of the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP-Liptako Gourma and ISWAP-Lake Chad) have increasingly sought to win popular support (distinguishing themselves from other groups in the region, especially Boko Haram). Yet, despite some improvements in the recent past, both Niger’s and Nigeria’s different counterinsurgency practices have not been sufficiently adapted to (and therefore remain strategically misaligned vis-à-vis) ISWAP’s more population-centric approach. Strategic rethinking and realignment of the still predominantly enemy-centric approaches of both states are essential so that ISWAP strategy can be countered in the long term.

Theory and Practice of Insurgency and Counterinsurgency: The Case Study of Balochistan

Insurgency is a violent political struggle borne out of grievances in a local community. The phenomenon of insurgency is old and the ways of tackling insurgencies have always been studied with interest. Pakistan has faced sporadic insurgencies in its Balochistan province. This study applies conceptual framework propounded by Scott Moore to Balochistan insurgency and analyzes the complex combination of Actions triggered by varied Beliefs and Structures of the Baloch society. In order to employ effective countermeasures to insurgency, an integrated approach needs to be worked out that seeks to create positive changes in the intertwined dimensions of Actions, Beliefs and Structures. The study finds that such an approach to handle insurgency in Balochistan has generally been successful. And the Baloch society has largely been mainstreamed in the national society and the state of Pakistan.

Research as a military mascot: Political ethnography and counterinsurgency in southern Thailand

The term ‘political ethnography’ has been used to describe a recent trend whereby political scientists, including scholars of security studies and international relations, increasingly deploy fieldwork to explore a variety of political arenas. This article challenges a one-dimensional understanding of political ethnography that sidelines the politics activated in an ethnographic research process and instead calls for political ethnographers to self-reflectively analyse their own positionality in terms of imperial complicity. It discusses experiences of researching counterinsurgency practices in southern Thailand and outlines different dimensions through which counterinsurgents positioned the author as a ‘military mascot’. These include assumptions about the Western and Christian identity of the researcher as well as ideas about the author’s ability to produce objective ‘facts’ in reporting a presumably peaceful military mission. The article concludes by reflecting on the problematic alliance between political science and imperial military projects of counterinsurgency, arguing that the lack of discussion about this affinity constitutes one of the conditions that facilitate the ‘mascotting’ of political ethnographers with military interlocutors.

Governmental Re-organization in Counterinsurgency Context: Foreign Policy Program Transfer and Operation Switchback in South Vietnam

Foreign policy program transfer, the shifting of implementation responsibility for a foreign policy program from one organization to another, is a ubiquitous, yet under-studied, counterinsurgency phenomenon. This article conceptually develops program transfer as an important object of study; analyzes, using archival sources, an empirical case of program transfer, Operation Switchback, drawn from US counterinsurgency practice in South Vietnam; and formulates two preliminary theoretical claims related to program transfer: (1) transferred programs will tend to be altered in accordance with the characteristics of the gaining organization, and (2) program transfer may act as a signal or early-warning indicator of foreign policy change.

Permission to Torture

9/11 introduced a new phase in us foreign policy launching the war on terror. Integral to this new us global counterinsurgency was the use of torture as technique deployed to save us lives threatened by international terrorism. President George Bush’s declaration in 2001, ‘Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists’ expresses the logic of counterinsurgency strategy to divide the world into friends and enemies. The division of the world into friends and enemies is based on asymmetrical counterconcepts based on the negation of the ‘Other’. This article argues that the legitimation of torture in the Cold War and Post 9/11 eras arises from imperial/global politics based on a counterinsurgency, terror and torture nexus. Through an analysis of the role of torture in Cold War us counterinsurgency policy in Latin America it argues that torture was a technique of governance to produce victims and forge new political subjectivities. In the Latin American dictatorships abduction, detention and secrecy created legal voids that allowed torture. Post 9/11 global counterinsurgency practices are differentiated between geographical zones identified as the zone of integration and zone of intervention. It is in the zone of intervention that torture has been deployed as a technique in which the distinction between civilian and terrorist has become blurred. It argues that Obama’s failure to close Guantánamo Bay prison as promised reveals that global counterinsurgency continues and that the issue of the us military or intelligence resort to torture remains live despite legal and political attempts to stop it.

The Effectiveness of Coercive and Persuasive Counterinsurgency Practices since 1945

Which counterinsurgency approaches are most effective in defeating insurgencies? Counterinsurgency advocates and critics have debated the effectiveness of winning hearts and minds as well as using brute force against ordinary civilians. But little scholarship has sought to systemically compare these counterinsurgency approaches among a broad range of cases. This paper seeks to remedy this gap in the literature with an empirical analysis of 47 counterinsurgency wars from 1945–2000 to evaluate the effectiveness of coercive and persuasive approaches to counterinsurgency. To do so, I use crisp-set qualitative comparative analysis (QCA), or Boolean analysis, to identify the presence or absence of six coercive and persuasive counterinsurgency practices across all cases. This method enables me to highlight how counterinsurgency victory can be produced by combinations of practices rather than a single set of practices that might be expected to be useful across cases. The results demonstrate that many combinations of coercive, persuasive, and mixed counterinsurgency practices can lead to victory. However, more persuasive combinations of practices consistently lead to counterinsurgent victory compared to others, although limited coercion against civilians is constant in all cases of counterinsurgency. These findings cast doubt on the ability of counterinsurgents to refrain from harming civilians and suggest that victory requires a mix of both positive and negative incentives for cooperation.

Local defence forces and counterinsurgency in Afghanistan: learning from the CIA's Village Defense Program in South Vietnam

This research note makes the case that if the US and its international allies are to successfully use ‘Local Defence Forces’ (LDF) to overcome counterinsurgency constraints in Afghanistan, current initiatives need to be significantly modified. A key issue is that the Village Stability Operations/Afghan Local Police (VSO/ALP) LDF program is unlikely to be effective in filling security gaps in rural Afghanistan because, much rhetoric to the contrary, it is essentially focused on militarily combating the insurgency rather than fully developing local communities as counterinsurgency resources by winning their support for the Afghan central government. The CIA's Village Defense Program in South Vietnam, a counterinsurgency program that has thus far received cursory attention in current LDF literature, provides a useful counterpoint. Through a comparison of the VDP and VSO/ALP operational patterns, implications are drawn for current and future US counterinsurgency practice employing LDF components.

How Can Weak Insurgent Groups Grow? Insights From Nepal

How can insurgent groups that are militarily far weaker than the state survive and grow? Influential accounts drawing on Kalyvas' “control-collaboration” model argue that limited state reach can make this possible by allowing rebel groups to carve out pockets of control where they can elicit collaboration. I suggest that this account is inadequate. Even states with limited reach are likely to transfer sufficient forces to rebel-affected areas to establish at least partial control. Weak rebels therefore often face the challenge of building capacity without local control to begin with. I identify two broad factors that can make this feasible: first, strong pre-existing rebel networks, which facilitate collaboration through solidarity, norms of reciprocity, and social incentives; and second, counterinsurgency policies and practices that fail to exploit the opportunities that control offers for incentivizing collaboration and shaping political preferences. These arguments are grounded in a fieldwork-based case study of insurgency processes in a hamlet of Rolpa, Nepal.

Grenzziehungen von „Zivilisation“, Nationalstaat und Geschlecht. Militärische Aufstandsbekämpfungan Straßensperren in Südthailand

Schlüsselwörter: Aufstandsbekämpfung, Geschlecht, postkoloniale Analyse, Südthailand----- Gendered Practices of Counterinsurgency at Checkpoints in Southern Thailand.AbstractThe author uses the example of checkpoints to discuss the gendered dynamics of counterinsurgency in southern Thailand. Conceptually, she argues for broadening the Foucauldian concept of ‘policing’ to include postcolonial and feminist readings of the nation-state. She thereby suggests that the productivity of counterinsurgency practices should be comprehended as demarcating the gendered boundaries of nation-state order, which also operates to differentiate the ‘civilised’ nation-state from ‘uncivilised’ insurgent violence. In her empirical discussion, she shows that soldiers, who are often themselves put in very vulnerable and ambiguous positions, use checkpoint controls to maintain gendered hierarchies that are historically grounded in the formation of the Thai nation-state vis-à-vis its ‘Malay-Muslim’ provinces. In rationalising insurgent violence, soldiers thereby produce young Malay-Muslim men as ‘uncivilised’ and effeminised victims of indoctrination, drug abuse, and poverty – a construction that denies their political agency and legitimises the military mission as a ‘civilised’ endeavour. The author ends by proposing that a stronger focus on the politics of affect could be mobilised to further conceive of military masculinities beyond stereotypical ‘martial’ forms.Keywords: counterinsurgency, gender, postcolonial analysis, southern Thailand-----Bibliographie: Streicher, Ruth: Grenzziehungen von „Zivilisation“, Nationalstaat und Geschlecht. Militärische Aufstandsbekämpfung an Straßensperren in Südthailand, PERIPHERIE, 1-2014, S. 26-45. https://doi.org/10.3224/peripherie.v34i133.22461

The Uses of Happiness in Counterinsurgencies

This essay examines the instrumentalization of emotions and affect—especially of happiness—in evaluating the outcome of counterinsurgencies. Traditionally, metrics and statistics have been utilized as the main means of measuring the achievement of military goals. However, given the centrality of noncombatant populations in counterinsurgencies, military theorists have increasingly sought to incorporate culture and intuition in their arsenal of tactics. Focusing on the development of the uses of affect by the United States, this study illuminates the ongoing tensions between political and military actors who seek to promote specific forms of knowledge—statistical versus qualitative—about war. This essay points to the sedimentation of colonial practices around affection and disaffection, and of colonial intimacy in these counterinsurgency practices. By drawing on the writings and memoirs of counterinsurgents and on official documents drawn up by the US military, the essay situates the current US practices at the point of convergence between contemporary practices of governmentality and historical colonial discourses.

Security Atmospheres or the Crystallisation of Worlds

This paper makes several moves towards the study of geographies of security through notions of atmosphere. Two related claims circulate through this paper: that security is becoming attuned to what we might call affective atmospheres, whilst it is itself becoming atmospheric. The paper proceeds to develop, first, a correlation of ideas across concepts of security, power, and affective atmospheres. The following section sees security understood atmospherically, before it goes on to explore how security is increasingly attuned to affective atmospheres as its object-target. Finally, by way of conclusion, the paper offers several manners of contestation and critique. Throughout, the paper draws on a variety of secondary literature as well as primary documentary research and analysis, focusing empirically upon a set of counterinsurgency practices known as ‘atmospherics’.

From Kabul to Baghdad and back: the U.S. at war in Afghanistan and Iraq

From Kabul to Baghdad and Back provides insight into the key strategic decisions of the Afghan and Iraq campaigns as the United States attempted to wage both simultaneously against al-Qaeda and its supporting affiliates. It also evaluates the strategic execution of those military campaigns to identify how well the two operations were conducted in light of their political objectives. The book identifies the elements that made the 2001 military operation to oust the Taliban successful, then with combat operations in Iraq as a standard of comparison, the authors analyze the remainder of the Afghan campaign and the essential problems that plagued that effort, from the decision to go to war with Iraq in 2002, through the ill-fated transition to NATO lead in Afghanistan in 2006, the dismissal of Generals McKiernan and McChrystal, the eventual decision by President Obama to make the Afghan campaign the main effort in the war on extremism, and the final development of drawdown plans following the end of the war in Iraq. No other book successfully compares and contrasts the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan from a national strategic perspective, analyzing the impact of fighting the Iraq War on the success of the United States campaign in Afghanistan. It is also the first book to specifically question several key operational decisions in Afghanistan including: the decision to give NATO the lead in Afghanistan, the decisions to fire Generals McKiernan and McChrystal and the decision to conduct an Iraq War-style surge in Afghanistan. It also compares the Afghan campaigns fought by the Soviet Union and the United States, the counterinsurgency campaigns styles in Iraq and Afghanistan and the leadership of senior American officials in both Iraq and Afghanistan. In the final chapter, the key lessons of the two campaigns are outlined, including the importance of effective strategic decision-making, the utility of population focused counterinsurgency practices, the challenges of building partner capacity during combat, and the mindset required to prosecute modern war.

Fashioning the Gentlemanly State

Undergirded by the notion of the manly state, feminist works on military masculinities have tended to focus on prerogative practices of soldiering. Yet the significance of the military uniform can only be grasped if read against a performative concept of the gentlemanly state, emphasizing that the abstraction from violence is constitutive to military masculinities. Thus the powerful function of soldierly costume can be understood as one of demarcating boundaries of gentlemanly statehood: dressed in military attire, the soldier is authorized to use ‘civilized force’. Based on this conceptual argument, I trace the uniform's imperial reconfigurations, before describing the manifold historical strands of meaning that have been woven into its contemporary fabric in Thailand. Exploring the gentlemanly connotations attached to the soldiers' costume by girls in Thailand's southern provinces, I moreover argue that its favourable contours have to be read in light of military counterinsurgency practices that have intensified the vestimentary encoding of gendered, religious and ethnic difference. In this context, the military uniform has been attached to Thai notions of gentlemanly modernity, encompassing gentlemanly manners, light skin as well as fashionable progress. In conclusion I argue for broadening the feminist research agenda towards practices of gentlemanly soldiering that work to codify and re-define its violent Other.