Signaling resolve,democratization, and the first battle of Fallujah

Perceptions and efforts to signal resolve can play an important role in counterinsurgency. The Coalition offensive against Fallujah in April 2004 demonstrates the limitations of relying on military force to signal resolve. The offensive catalyzed insurgent violence in Iraq and generated popular support for the insurgency. The Coalition prematurely halted the offensive because the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) could not maintain support for the Coalition in the face of popular outrage. Given the importance of democratizing Iraq and establishing a sovereign government, the objections of the IGC could not be ignored. Without Iraqi political support, military force ultimately signaled weakness instead of resolve.     

Measures for Security in a Counterinsurgency

Quantitative measures to gauge progress in a counterinsurgency in use today include the number of enemy, friendly, and civilian casualties, and the level of violence. While common, each of these has drawbacks. With this and the sparseness of the literature on this topic in mind, we argue for a series of improved measures. These include the ratio of who is initiating incidents, an historical analysis of incidents and related variables, and an analysis of insurgent target sets. These measures are presented using data for Al Anbar province, Iraq, along with a discussion of their advantages over more common metrics.     

Boko Haram insurgency in Northern Nigeria and the vicious cycle of internal insecurity

The phenomenon of the Boko Haram insurgency in Northern Nigeria has generated many security concerns. This article explores the implications of the Boko Haram insurgency in Northern Nigeria for internal security. The article, which relies on a study of secondary sources of data, reveals that the insurgency has spawned varied implications such as an international image crisis, huge economic losses, a health and humanitarian crisis, a huge burden on the security apparatuses, arms proliferation, and endangered national unity. It holds that the insurgency is essentially interlinked with a breakdown of the social contract manifested in opportunistic behavior, economic stagnation, and lack of functioning institutional mechanisms for policy conduct and conflict resolution. Owing to the security menace posed by the insurgency, the article recommends that the root causes of the insurgency should be tackled rather than relying on reactive measures that cannot guarantee enduring peace and internal security.     

Factors leading to insurgency in Balochistan

Balochistan has been in the midst of a full fledged insurgency for over five years now. Pakistani establishment has tried to project the current insurgency as a tribal mischief being perpetrated by a few feudal lords but the widespread support that the insurgents have been enjoying and the impunity with which they have been targeting symbols of government authority not only across the entire length and breadth of Balochistan but even outside, indicate that there are deep rooted, well defined causes that have led to this insurgency. The paper attempts to analyse the factors that have led to current round of insurgency in Balochistan.     

Why Pakistan failed: tribal focoism in Kashmir

The classical repertoire of insurgency types is under-specified, and does not apply well to the case of Pakistan's conduct of insurgency in Kashmir. Pakistan's approach to insurgency has been a consistent tribal variant of focoism, in which there is a reliance on imported itinerant insurgents to conduct raids to stimulate an uprising. This has its basis in the traditional warfare of the region, learned US insurgency doctrine in the 1960s, and an historical disregard for subject populations, which has led to an aversion to fostering grass-roots political movements.     

A transformed insurgency: The strategy of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) in the light of communist insurgency theories and a modified Beaufrean exterior/interior framework

This paper examines the insurgency in Nepal (1996–2008) from a military theoretical point of view. It looks at the insurgency from André Beaufre's exterior/interior framework, which is modified to match postmodern conflicts. Simultaneously the importance of the political is underlined. The author critically examines the relevance of the Maoist label the movement and insurgency have received. He claims that the insurgency became a hybrid consisting of Chinese, Latin American, and Leninist thoughts wrapped in pragmatic/revisionists and nationalist ideas. The author also suggests that the ability of insurgents – or counter-insurgents – to combine the effects of the exterior and interior is more likely to constitute the key centre of gravity of a conflict than any single political, economic, or military factor.     

The Fire Within: Naxalite Insurgency Violence in India

India is at a crossroads today. While it is fast emerging as a global power with a vibrant democratic polity, a robust economy and a nuclear-weapons capable military, the country is also witnessing a growing polarisation between the rich and poor and between urban and rural areas, a rise in communal tensions, large numbers of suicides by impoverished and indebted farmers and a spurt in terrorist activities and attacks by various disgruntled organisations and groups. Of these various challenges, as attested to by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh himself, the most dangerous threat to India's territorial integrity, prosperity and wellbeing has come from the Naxalite insurgency or ‘people's war’ that is manifest in large areas of eastern, central and southern India. But what factors account for the formation and persistence of Naxalite insurgency in India? What are the key objectives of the Naxalites and why is violence directed against the Indian State? And how has the Indian State (both central and state governments) responded to the Naxalite insurgency and with what effect? These are the main research questions that we attempt to answer in this paper. We put forward two broad arguments. First, the Naxalite insurgency in India is the latest manifestation of peasant struggles caused by grinding poverty, exploitation and inequality that have prevailed in rural areas for centuries. What sustains these struggles to this day is the fact that socio-economic conditions in rural areas have changed little and the policies followed by the post-independent Indian State have generally failed to mitigate rural problems. Second, the Naxalite insurgency has emerged as the most dangerous threat mainly due to the movement's spatial spread, growing support base in tribal and backward areas and enhanced fighting capabilities. The Indian State has viewed the movement as a ‘law and order’ problem and responded with force. But a ‘law and order’ approach to the Naxalite insurgency is unlikely to produce a lasting resolution of the problem, since it would not effectively redress deep-rooted grievances felt by a majority of India's rural poor for decades.     

Whose Hearts and Whose Minds? The Curious Case of Global Counter-Insurgency

Traditionally regarded as a secondary activity in military thinking and practice, the notion of counter-insurgency (COIN) has undergone a remarkable renaissance. This analysis traces the origins of this renaissance to two distinctive schools: a neo-classical school and a global insurgency school. The global insurgency school critiques neo-classical thought and presents itself as a more sophisticated appreciation of current security problems. An examination of the evolution of these two schools of counter-insurgency reveals how the interplay between them ultimately leaves us with a confused and contradictory understanding of the phenomenon of insurgency and the policies and strategies necessary to combat it.     

The Ethnic Russian as an Enemy of Islam: Frame Analysis of the Kavkaz Center News Agency (2001–2004)

Abstract

Typically, when analysing contemporary Russian–Chechen conflicts, the relegation of the nationalist struggle to a secondary role by the religious battle waged by the North Caucasus insurgency is pinpointed as one of the fundamental differences between the First and Second War in Chechnya. This article discusses how it was reflected in one of the most important media of the Chechen Islamist insurgency: the Kavkaz Center. To this end, 2859 English language news items posted on the website during 2001–04 were reviewed using media frame analysis.     

Boko Haram insurgency and gendered victimhood: women as corporal victims and objects of war

ABSTRACT

Boko Haram insurgency in North East Nigeria has exposed women (girls, ladies, and mothers) to a complex jeopardy. While some women have suffered untimely widowhood or child-lack as a result of the Boko Haram onslaught, others have suffered death, forced abduction, and allied assaults on the main and side lines of the insurgency. Oftentimes, women have faced direct violence that essentially degrade their humanity. This is evident in the deployment of women as war-front sex slaves, human shields, and suicide bombers by the insurgents. The virtual expendability of women in the context of Boko Haram insurgency has been vividly demonstrated by the gale of female suicide bombings in Nigeria over the recent years. By means of a textual and contextual analysis of library sources and/or documentary data, as well as an adroit application of the theory of objectification, this study posits that, in addition to suffering collateral vulnerabilities, women have equally been instrumentalized as objects of terror in the context of Boko Haram insurgency. The paper further argues that the ‘weaponization’ of women’s bodies as bomb vessels and human shields by the insurgents highlights the height of women’s corporal victimization and objectification in contemporary asymmetric warfare.     

Legacy of Bitterness: Insurgency in North West Rwanda

The insurgency in North West Rwanda is a good example of a small scale conflict that provides a first step into the more complex world of regional instability in central Africa. Following the genocide of 1994, genocidaires and ex-military personnel fled to what was then Zaire and established a network of anti-Tutsi bases. Linking up with local groups in Eastern Zaire, these insurgents, usually known as ‘infiltrators’ have carried out a low-intensity but consistent insurgency campaign in Rwanda.

The constant barrage of propaganda aimed at the local population, a technique pioneered during the 1994 genocide, has led to a general, manufactured support for the insurgency. In particular, those people returning from Zaire have been fed a constant diet of anti-Tutsi and Rwandese Patriotic Army (RPA) propaganda, making it easier to act against these groups. Even within the local government and other official bodies, there are widespread Hutu sympathies that have led to additional aid reaching the insurgents.

The particular strain of ethnic violence has led to an insurgency in which civilian villages are as likely to be attacked as RPA military installations. More surprising, given the nature of the insurgency, Hutus themselves have been targets. Initially, moderate Hutus were singled out as examples, but increasingly indiscriminate killings have been aiming to force all Hutus to take sides.

The insurgents have deliberately polarised large parts of Rwanda and this has profound implications for conflict resolution. In particular, supplementing the military campaign with political social campaigns, at least partly to combat the mythology of grievance among the Hutus, and tackling the conflict as part of a supra-national conflict that goes beyond ‘national’ borders.     

‘Full spectrum dominance’: Donald Rumsfeld,the Department of Defense,and US irregular warfare strategy, 2001–2008

This article examines the evolution of US irregular warfare (IW) doctrine and practice from 2001 onwards. It argues that, after 9/11, top-tier civilian policymakers in the US Department of Defense (DoD) and across the US government developed a heightened awareness of asymmetric threats and non-conventional forms of warfare, especially those shaped by contemporary globalisation. The result was a gradual turn towards irregular warfare, led by Rumsfeld and the DoD, designed to ensure ‘full spectrum dominance’ across all modes of conflict. This pre-dated the insurgency in Iraq and the promotion of counterinsurgency in the US Army by General David Petraeus and others. Policymakers' reluctance to acknowledge the insurgency in Iraq was not down to a failure to understand the concept of IW, but because they had viewed Iraq in conventional terms for so many years and were reluctant to admit their mistake.     

Reconstruction,the Long Tail and Decentralisation: An Application to Iraq and Afghanistan

In this paper, we examine the current state of knowledge in the economics literature on the conduct of reconstruction activities in Iraq and Afghanistan. As stabilisation and reconstruction missions grow in importance for units deployed to these regions, it becomes more important to understand what activities can promote economic growth at the local level. While military operations focus on interdicting the insurgency, successful counter-insurgency campaigns have typically addressed the conditions conducive to the insurgency. Mitigating the incentives for individuals to participate in an insurgency is imperative. Well-crafted and timed reconstruction activities can, we argue, attenuate these incentives.     

Challenging the Hegemon: Al Qaeda's Elevation of Asymmetric Insurgent Warfare Onto the Global Arena

This chapter examines how Al Qaeda, an asymmetric power, was able to become a global challenger to the existing international structure. Neither regional insurgency theories nor grand-scale global theories alone are adequate to explain Al Qaeda's ability. Rather, a modification of the seven dimensions of the Manwaring paradigm for successful insurgency combined with key concepts of global revolutionary or imperial powers formerly applied to states gives insight to this fundamental question. Al Qaeda's asymmetric global challenge is unique, and understanding the nature of the threat is key to finally defeating it.     

Community preferences,insurgency, and the success of reconstruction spending

Existing theory on counterinsurgency does not adequately explain persistent insurrection in face of the reconstruction work currently underway in Afghanistan and Iraq. We starkly depart from the literature by developing a simple model of reconstruction allowing misalignment of occupier spending with community preferences. Insurgency arises endogenously as a result of the mix of spending rather than its level. Occupier insistence on its preferred path of reconstruction may lead to fewer projects of any kind being completed. In equilibrium, the occupier may accept an endogenous insurgency to achieve a preferred project mix, or be constrained in its choice even when no insurgency occurs.     

The vanguard's dilemma: understanding and exploiting insurgent strategies

The purpose of this paper is to provide a better conceptualization of insurgent strategies. Specifically, I shall examine Che Guevara's ‘Foco’ theory of insurgency, as it is one of the most theoretically popular and most pervasive strategies of insurgency currently practiced throughout the world. After briefly examining the origins, objectives, and theoretical strengths of the Foco theory (also known as the Vanguard Theory), I will argue that Guevara's theory suffers from an internal tension that I term the ‘Vanguard's Dilemma’. The significance of this dilemma creates a tension within the Vanguard Theory that can be fatal for insurgents if properly exploited by counterinsurgent operations. This paper will examine in detail this dilemma and show how it can be exploited. Given that several insurgent groups within Iraq and Afghanistan currently adhere to the Vanguard Theory of insurgency, a proper understanding of this insurgent strategy is an essential first step in the long road towards confronting and winning asymmetrical conflicts.     

British counter‐insurgency in Kenya, 1952–56: Extension of internal security policy or prelude to decolonisation?

Despite considerable post‐war planning, the British counter‐insurgency campaign in Kenya did not constitute a Colonial Office strategy for decolonisation. COIN in Kenya had one purpose: to re‐impose law and order, or British control. If for no other reason, this is demonstrated by the initial reluctance of the Colonial Office to intervene. Frequent re‐assessments and postponement of the ending of the State of Emergency, and the subordination of socio‐economic and political reforms to military objectives, show clearly that decolonisation was not high on the British list of priorities in Kenya. This article questions the relationship between COIN and decolonisation, and the validity of models of British counter‐insurgency.     

Analyzing the Cambodian insurgency as a social field

This article investigates power practices in the Cambodian insurgency after 1979 as being part of a social field. There are various types of power practice being exercised by commanders aiming at making soldiers disciplined inside the insurgency. The hypothesis explaining these variations being proposed here is that the type of power being exercised depends on the habitus of the respective commander. Power practices are shaped by the incorporated classificatory discourse of commanders on good soldierhood and leadership. Thereby, armed groups can be analyzed as a social field in which practices are always relational and part of symbolic struggles between different commanders.     

Boko Haram’s increasingly sophisticated military threat

ABSTRACT

This paper evaluates Boko Haram’s military capabilities and details the process of how its standing army, driven by these capabilities, came to pose a phased threat between 2013 and 2015 in particular. This was a period when military fighting dominated the insurgency in north-east Nigeria. Whereas there is an abundance of literature on Boko Haram’s histories and the impact of its insurgency on north-east Nigeria, analysis of Boko Haram’s military campaigning is still deficient. Attempting to fill this gap, this paper uses field findings and battlefield case studies from north-east Nigeria to highlight how Boko Haram’s overt front – its standing army – came to supplant its guerrilla operations as the main security threat to the frontier area.

This pivot towards military fighting, for a group initially composed of a few ragtag combatants, on the surface might seem surprising. Yet, whereas Boko Haram may lack the popular support required for ‘people’s war’, classic insurgency theories nevertheless hold some explanatory power for this deliberate shift: away from guerrilla warfare as the expedient of the weaker side, and towards the use of a large standing army of locals to swarm, and sometimes successfully overrun, state forces.