Violent and Non-Violent Strategies of Counterinsurgency

Responses to insurgency include both a large-scale societal reform directed at improving the lives of civilians and a direct military response with no additional programs to improve civilian welfare. In this paper, we as, what is the optimal combination of aid and military response from the viewpoint of the state? Using a computational model, we evaluate what mix of these two strategies helps the government defeat an insurgency more quickly. Our model yields that aid may boost a military strategy that avoids civilian casualties, but it may not compensate for a military strategy that targets civilians indiscriminately

The Enemy of my Enemy is my Friend… The Dynamics of Self Defense Forces in Irregular War: The Case of the Sons of Iraq

This paper assesses the effect that leveraging civilian defense force militias has on the dynamics of violence in civil war. We argue that the delegation of security and combat roles to local civilians shifts the primary targets of insurgent violence towards civilians, in an attempt to deter future defections, and re-establish control over the local population. This argument is assessed through an analysis of the Sunni Awakening and ancillary Sons of Iraq paramilitary program. The results suggest that at least in the Al-Anbar province of Iraq, the utilisation of the civilian population in counterinsurgent roles had significant implications for the targets of insurgent violence

The agrarian question and violence in Colombia: conflict and development

This article examines connections between Colombia’s internal armed conflict and agrarian questions. It pays attention to the country’s specific historical trajectory of agrarian change, the violent expression of social tensions that this elicited, and the particular ways in which these dynamics were influenced by a changing global context.This analysis of the intimate ties between violent conflict and agrarian questions in Colombia, both in terms of their historical development and their contemporary manifestations, challenges popular notions of the relationship between armed conflict and development. In particular, the article contributes to a critique of the conventional version of the conflict–development nexus by illustrating ways in which the experience of capitalist development in Colombia has been violent and produced poverty

Blood revenge and violent mobilization: evidence from the Chechen Wars

Despite a considerable amount of ethnographic research into the phenomena of blood revenge and blood feud, little is known about the role of blood revenge in political violence, armed conflict, and irregular war. Yet blood revenge—widespread among many conflict-affected societies of the Middle East, North Africa, and beyond—is not confined to the realm of communal infighting, as previous research has presumed. An empirical analysis of Russia's two counterinsurgency campaigns in Chechnya suggests that the practice of blood revenge has functioned as an important mechanism in encouraging violent mobilization in the local population against the Russian troops and their Chechen proxies. The need to exact blood revenge has taken precedence over an individual's political views, or lack thereof. Triggered by the loss of a relative or humiliation, many apolitical Chechens who initially sought to avoid involvement in the hostilities or who had been skeptical of the insurgency mobilized to exact blood revenge to restore their individual and clan honor. Blood revenge functions as an effective, yet heavily underexplored, grievance-based mechanism encouraging violent mobilization in irregular wars

Governments, Civilians, and the Evolution of Insurgency: Modeling the Early Dynamics of Insurgencies

This paper models the early dynamics of insurgency using an agent-based computer simulation of civilians, insurgents, and soldiers. In the simulation, insurgents choose to attack government forces, which then strike back. Such government counterattacks may result in the capture or killing of insurgents, may make nearby civilians afraid to become insurgents, but may also increase the anger of surrounding civilians if there is significant collateral damage. If civilians become angry enough, they become new insurgents. I simulate the dynamics of these interactions, focusing on the effectiveness of government forces at capturing insurgents vs. their accuracy in avoiding collateral damage. The simulations suggest that accuracy (avoidance of collateral damage) is more important for the long-term defeat of insurgency than is effectiveness at capturing insurgents in any given counterattack. There also may be a critical 'tipping point' for accuracy below which the length of insurgencies increases dramatically. The dynamics of how insurgencies grow or decline in response to various combinations of government accuracy and effectiveness illustrate the tradeoffs faced by governments in dealing with the early stages of an insurgency.Agent Based Models, Insurgency, Dynamics, Civil War

An exploratory study on the impact of electoral participation upon a terrorist group’s use of violence in a given year

Recent studies seeking to understand the determinants of terrorism tend to focus upon situational, rather than structural measures. Typically these studies examine the interaction of terrorist attacks and repressive state actions. However, we know very little about other situational measures that may impact upon a group’s scale of violent activity within a particular year. This preliminary study analyses terrorist attacks committed by both the Provisional IRA (PIRA) and ETA and the electoral performances of the groups’ political wings, Sinn Fein and Batasuna, from 1970 to 1998 and from 1978 to 2005 respectively. More specifically, this paper examines whether the nature and content of terrorist attacks differ in the build-up to that group’s political-wing participating in elections. In other words, this article is a preliminary study of the influence of electoral participation on attack frequency and target selection. Results suggest that PIRA significantly decreased their attacks in an election year and this had a positive impact upon Sinn Fein’s electoral performance. On the other hand, ETA significantly increased its attacks in an election year and this had no significant impact upon Batasuna’s electoral performance

Education & countering violent extremism: western logics from South to North

This paper explores the way education and conflict have become entangled during the post-9/11 ‘war on terror’ response to ‘radical Islam’ at home and abroad. The paper charts the complex ways that education has been deployed to serve Western military and security objectives in multiple locations in the global south and how these strategies have now returned to the ‘ West’ in the form of ‘countering violent extremism’ interventions. Drawing on Foucault’s concept of the ‘boomerang effect’ I will explore whether and how education techniques and strategies deployed abroad in pursuit of imperial interests return to the West and are deployed to monitor, control and suppress marginalised communities in a form of ‘internal colonialism’. Finally, the paper brings the two sections together in the Findings to explore commonalities and divergences

Predator empire: the geopolitics of U.S. drone warfare

This paper critically assesses the CIA’s drone program and proposes that the use of unmanned aerial vehicles is driving an increasingly paramilitarized U.S. national security strategy. The paper suggests that large-scale ground wars are being eclipsed by fleets of weaponized drones capable of targeted killings across the planet. Evidence for this shift is found in key security documents that mobilize an amorphous war against vaguely defined al-Qa’ida “affiliates”. This is further legitimized by the White House’s presentation of drone warfare as a bureaucratic task managed by a “disposition matrix”. Such abstract narratives are challenged through the voices of people living in the tribal areas of Pakistan. What I call the Predator Empire names the biopolitical power that catalogues and eliminates threatening “patterns of life”. This permanent war is enabled by a topological spatial power that folds the environments of the “affiliate” into the surveillance machinery of the Homeland

The Impact of Asymmetric Information Among Competing Insurgent Groups: Estimating an 'Emboldenment' Effect

This paper uses asymmetric access to information to test if an insurgency is factionalized. If it is factionalized, regional variation in information should influence attack levels as groups use violence to compete over visibility, resources and support. Using plausibly exogenous variation in satellite access, we show that attacks increased after the release of information on satellite television about US commitment to remain in Iraq. Because insurgents shift attacks toward more difficult (military) targets, the relative increase in attacks is offset by fewer total fatalities. Our findings illustrate that insurgent groups may be decentralized strategic actors subject to competitive forces.Iraq war, asymmetric information, media and violence