The Routledge Handbook of Insurgency and Counterinsurgency

Paul B. Rich, Isabelle Duyvesteyn, Paul B. Rich, Isabelle Duyvesteyn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415747530
• eBook ISBN: 9781136477652
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This new handbook provides a wide-ranging overview of the current state of academic analysis and debate on insurgency and counterinsurgency, as well as an-up-to date survey of contemporary insurgent movements and counter-insurgencies.

In recent years, and more specifically since the insurgency in Iraq from 2003, academic interest in insurgency and counterinsurgency has substantially increased. These topics have become dominant themes on the security agenda, replacing peacekeeping, humanitarian operations and terrorism as key concepts. The aim of this volume is to showcase the rich thinking that is available in the area of insurgency and counterinsurgency studies and act as a further guide for study and research.

In order to contain this wide-ranging topic within an accessible and informative framework, the Editors have divided the text into three key parts:

• Part I: Theoretical and Analytical Issues
• Part II: Insurgent Movements
• Part III: Counterinsurgency Cases

The Routledge Handbook of Insurgency and Counterinsurgency will be of great interest to all students of insurgency and small wars, terrorism/counter-terrorism, strategic studies, security studies and IR in general, as well as professional military colleges and policymakers.

1

The Study of Insurgency and Counterinsurgency

Paul B. Rich Isabelle Duyvesteyn

The interest in the topics of insurgency and counterinsurgency has been far from consistent. Several times insurgency has been declared dead and buried; Steven Metz wrote in 1995 that ‘[t] he insurgents of the world are sleeping’ (Metz 1995: 1). Walter Laqueur concluded in 1998 that ‘[g]uerrilla war may not entirely disappear but, seen in historical perspective, it is on the decline’ (Laqueur 1998). The interest in counterinsurgency has suffered a similar fate. Preferably forgotten after the Vietnam War, after the recent spike in interest, it has now again been declared beyond its peak and even useless for explaining current violence.

Not only has the interest in the topics come and gone, the level and content of debate has also been subject of harsh criticism. David Kilcullen, who is a contributor to this volume, has contended that ‘[c]lassical counterinsurgency … constitutes a dominant paradigm through which practitioners approach today’s conflicts – often via the prescriptive application of “received wisdom” derived by exegesis from the classics’ (Kilcullen 2006–7: 111). Moreover the distinguished military historian Martin van Creveld rejected the whole notion of counterinsurgency which, he argues, amounts to little on the grounds that since 99 per cent of it has been written by the losing side it is of little real value (van Creveld 2006: 268; Peters 2007; Duyvesteyn 2011).

This unsteady interest in and harsh criticism of insurgency and counterinsurgency studies is in many respects surprising. Not only do we know that the majority of wars in the international system since 1815 are of an intra-state, as opposed to an inter-state, variety; importantly, these wars have often been fought in an irregular manner (Kalyvas 2007). After the end of the Cold War, the many conflicts that emerged, such as in the Balkans, East and West Africa, were all fought predominantly using indirect strategies of attack. The most notable exception has been the confrontation between Ethiopia and Eritrea between 1998 and 2000, where trench warfare occurred (repeating a pattern set in the Iran–Iraq War in the 1980s).

Given this background, the study of insurgency and counterinsurgency in the academic fields of military and strategic studies has been a rather marginal enterprise. There is hardly a consistent body of scholarship devoted to these topics. Roughly since Clausewitzean times until the 1960s, guerrilla warfare and insurgencies were often viewed as peripheral to mainstream military conflict, which was centred around conventional inter-state war in which military assets were mobilised in pursuit of political objectives by rival states in an anarchic international system. During the period of the Cold War insurgencies were viewed by many analysts as dark, even exotic phenomena which did not fit easily into strategic classification centred on theories of nuclear deterrence.¹ At the same time the body of strategic thought forged during the Cold War era became increasingly abstract and ahistorical and imprisoned by a technological determinism. By the time the Cold War came to an end, nothing short of an ‘existential crisis’, in the words of Hew Strachan, had emerged within strategic studies. It was out of this crisis that insurgency (which now replaced the rather dated term ‘low intensity conflict’) became subsequently catapulted onto the central plane of strategic studies as many Western states found themselves involved in a range of military conflicts around the world resulting from ethnic and clan conflicts in weak or ‘failing’ states (Strachan 2008). While devising answers to these security challenges, most states involved largely overlooked the relevance of insurgency and counterinsurgency thought.

In recent years, however, and more specifically since the insurgency in Iraq from 2003, academic interest in insurgency and counterinsurgency has substantially increased. These topics have become dominant themes on the security agenda, replacing peacekeeping, humanitarian operations and terrorism as key concepts. Apparently, ‘more has been written on [counterinsurgency] … in the last four years than in the last four decades’ (Kilcullen 2006–7: 111). In these last few years, a growing body of strategic theorists has recognised that insurgencies are an inextricable part of mainstream strategic studies. In 1999 Colin Gray observed in a major textbook that ‘small wars and other savage violence’ are ‘part of the same empirical and intellectual universe which includes Western strategic experience’ (Gray 1999: 293; Strachan 2008).² Since the operations in Afghanistan and Iraq started to provide unforeseen challenges, the discussion about insurgency and counterinsurgency re-emerged with force. Not only for its historical notoriety but also because of its academic significance and necessity, this fickle attention for the topics seems unjust. The aim of this volume is to demonstrate the rich thinking that is available in the area of insurgency and counterinsurgency studies and act as a further guide for study and research.

The Historical Evolution of ‘People’s War’, Guerrilla and Insurgency

The general analytical surveys of insurgency usually emphasise both the range and diversity of these conflicts and the relatively small number that have succeeded on their own in overthrowing state power and achieving any form of major political transformation. Stretching back to guerrilla conflicts in the Ancient World such as those of the Jewish guerrillas against Roman rule in Judea or the Gallic guerrillas against Caesar in Gaul, most guerrillas failed in the end to overthrow states on their own and required help in some form from external regular forces (Ellis 1995).³ Guerrilla conflict has tended to wax and wane in its political and strategic saliency, in part because – for long periods of ancient and early modern history – the exact differences between regular and irregular military formations were not especially clear and on occasions blurred. With the end of the Ancient World for instance the gap between regular uniformed armies and those of guerrilla narrowed in the European Middle Ages as the armed forces of medieval monarchical states and those of irregular military formations was not especially wide. With the ‘military revolution’ of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries this gap proceeded to increase once more as the seventeenth-century nation-states’ armies underwent what J.R. Hale has termed a ‘military reformation’ in the terms of increased technological sophistication; by the following century, this would be accompanied by growing professionalism in terms of organisation, drill, uniforms and structures of command (Hale 1985; see also Arnold 2002; Ellis 1995; Anderson 1988; Duffy 1987).

In the nineteenth century a considerable number of guerrilla struggles were waged on the borders and frontiers of European colonial empires. The very term ‘small wars’ only really entered into general strategic parlance through the writings of Colonel Charles Callwell in the 1880s and 1890s, especially his book published by the British War Office in 1896: Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice. The term had actually been used much earlier in European military writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but this debate did not have much impact on wider military and strategic thinking – perhaps because of the very negative effect of the guerrilla in Spain against the French occupying force between 1808 and 1813 from which the word guerrilla (Spanish for ‘small war’) derives (Laqueur 1977: 100).⁴

The Spanish guerrillas or partidas proved highly ill disciplined and were prone as much to banditry as attacking the French. Though they did help to tie down French occupying forces they helped to undermine the Spanish regular army as many troops deserted to the partidas (Esdaile 1988: 250–80). They hardly served as a major model for insurgency in the nineteenth century and Callwell’s book focused more on colonial rebellions that had emerged in various parts of the European colonial empires in the years following the Indian ‘Mutiny’ of 1857. His book was especially notable for focusing on principles of mobile warfare which would soon be tested in campaigns by Britain in South Africa against the Boers between 1899 and 1902 and by the United States in Cuba and the Philippines between 1895 and 1902 (Beckett 2001: 35–7).⁵

Callwell’s conceptualisation of ‘small war’ however lacked any really dynamic features. He failed to see it as expanding to a conventional level and he preferred to make a rather more static three-fold classification of ‘small wars’ into: (1) campaigns of conquest and annexation; (2) campaigns for the suppression of insurrection and lawlessness; and (3) campaigns to avenge a ‘wrong’ or to ‘overthrow a dangerous enemy’ (Callwell 2010: 21–5). This static dimension to his discussion was in part a product of the fact that he set himself the relatively limited task of providing a ‘tactical textbook’ as well as the fact that he wrote at a time when neither the legitimacy nor durability of European imperial power was in any serious doubt. The book though was useful for the way it pointed to the problems presented to incumbent forces by the difficulties of terrain and climate which in effect acted as a form of force multiplier for indigenous guerrilla forces; in turn they made offensive action essential in order to secure a decisive military victory. Callwell had no real grasp of ‘protracted war’ by guerrilla forces which he felt were always liable to rapid collapse should their leaders or ‘chiefs’ be removed or incapacitated (Callwell 2010: 88).

The onset of two world wars in the first half of the twentieth century ensured that this marginalisation of debate on insurgency would continue well into the 1950s when the onset of ‘wars of national liberation’ began to exercise the minds of strategic planners and military theorists in various Western states. By this time some major developments had occurred in the very conceptualisation of insurgency by the expansion of guerrilla conflict in various parts of what would become known as the developing world in the decades after the First World War.

Before the twentieth century guerrilla conflict was often linked to reactionary or even counter-revolutionary movements – as in the case of the revolt in the Vendée in the 1790s – and did not have anything like the same meaning as ‘people’s war’ (Joes 1998; Laqueur 1977: 22–9).⁶ This latter term evolved only slowly in the course of the nineteenth century since it was avoided by many of that century’s most notable revolutionary thinkers such as Marx and Engels who were sceptical that there could be anything like a proper ‘people’s war’ in industrialised Europe. Both revolutionaries effectively started with Clausewitz’s argument that guerrilla should at best be seen as an adjunct to conventional war, leading them to emphasise the idea of mass revolutionary insurrection on the French revolutionary model in order to ensure the moral rather than the military collapse of state power (Beckett 2001: 14; Ibrahim 2004: 114).

Indeed there were only a few scattered efforts before 1914 to link guerrilla warfare to revolution. In Italy the Piedmontese and Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini saw guerrilla conflict as aiding an insurrection against Habsburg rule but the most sophisticated treatment of this idea was probably by the lesser known figure of Carlo Bianco, an Italian revolutionary who rather misleadingly interpreted the guerrilla conflict in Spain against Napoleon as a model for insurrectionary warfare against the Habsburgs. Bianco envisaged small guerrilla units of 10–50 rebels in the early stages of this struggle, gradually widening to encompass a popular insurrection that would eventually include flying columns and a regular revolutionary army (Ibrahim 2004: 116). These ideas did not get far in the middle years of the nineteenth century when the Piedmontese state was wary of using even small bands of popular militias and Mazzini preferred to leave the whole issue of social revolution until after Italian unification (which would not occur through an insurgent people’s war as Garibaldi and his followers had hoped).

So the idea of ‘people’s war’ really had to wait until the twentieth century before it could become part of strategic parlance. There are some surprising features to this, since the concept of popular sovereignty and the very invention of the idea or fiction of the people as a decisive political force stemmed from the English revolution of the 1640s. In a rather more attenuated form it had been embodied in the revolutionary settlement in America in the 1780s so that, as a political concept, popular sovereignty was hardly new by the mid to late nineteenth century (Morgan 1989). However, outside the Atlantic littoral of the English-speaking proto-democracies the term was still an unfamiliar one that threatened established and hierarchical elites resting on traditional forms of dynastic power, especially following the demise of radical liberalism in the decades after the Napoleonic wars. The nineteenth century has often been rather inaccurately termed an ‘age of revolutions’, for most of the revolutions that did occur during this period such as those of 1830 and 1848 failed to achieve long-term political transformation of states and certainly failed to secure the wide-ranging social revolutions that would occur in Mexico after 1910, Russia after 1917 and China after 1949. To this extent the real turning point for revolutionary ‘people’s war’ was the end of the First World War when the collapse of four empires in Europe created the opening and opportunities within international politics for revolutionaries to seize and hold power (Hobsbawm 1994: 54–84; Hall 1996: 67–110). Even then, though, ‘people’s war’ did not make that many advances in the interwar period with perhaps the most notable insurgent achievement being the liberation of southern Ireland in the early 1920s from British rule while elsewhere rebellions in North Africa, the Middle East and India were crushed. Even in China Mao Zedong was largely unsuccessful in the 1930s in implementing his guerrilla war theories and it would not be until the Japanese invasion after 1937 and the advent of the Second World War that the real break came in the evolution of Maoist protracted war (Porch 2001: 199–201).

We should in any case be wary of allowing the concept of ‘people’s war’ to be completely dominated by Maoist concepts of protracted guerrilla warfare which some recent scholars of insurgencies and ‘post Maoism’ have been inclined to do (Ellis 1995: 11; Taber 1970; Clapham 1998: 2; Mackinlay 2009. See also Rich 2010 for criticisms of this approach). This will be further discussed below. Historians of insurgencies have paid far too little attention to the trinitarian features of military conflict originally identified by Clausewitz: people, state and army (Duyvesteyn 2005). The term ‘people’s war’ tends to obfuscate this division and leads to the rather false assumption that the ‘people’ have in some way become mobilised into a popular mass army operating against in many cases a foreign or colonial regime.

This mobilisation obviously depended upon different kinds of political processes in the societies concerned, rendering periodisation and generalisation difficult, not least because the wars concerned were subject to varying degrees of external intervention by other states (Laqueur 1977: 279). There has been a tendency in some historical writing on insurgency (such as those of Walter Laqueur) to resist any serious generalisation and to ascribe guerrilla war to the combination of a number of chance factors.

However, there is still a considerable need in this area for the application of an historical sociology that can begin to unravel differing political responses to processes of modernisation and economic transformation resulting from the increasing integration of these societies into a global market economy. The study of the various examples of ‘people’s war’ such as Mexico in the early twentieth century following the revolution of 1910, China under Mao in the 1930s and 1940s, Vietnam from the 1950s through to the mid 1970s, Cuba with the Castro revolution of 1959 and Algeria during the war against the French from 1954 to 1962 suggests a varying pattern of conflict in...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1 The Study of Insurgency and Counterinsurgency
• Part I Theoretical and Analytical Issues
• Part II Insurgent Movements
• Part III Counterinsurgency Cases
• Index