‘The People are Revolting’: An Anatomy of Authoritarian Counterinsurgency

ABSTRACT

Rather than win hearts and minds, authoritarian counterinsurgency is said to rely heavily on coercion. It has a reputation for effectiveness, if also for its amorality. Still, the research into authoritarian counterinsurgency is surprisingly lacking. By distilling common features from key cases, this article concludes that this approach goes beyond the indiscriminate violence that typically captures the imagination. Like their democratic counterparts but differently, authoritarian regimes also engage in mobilisation, create narratives, and turn military advantage into political gain. The analysis explains how these tasks are undertaken and, by contradistinction, sheds light on more liberal approaches as well.

KEYWORDS:

• Authoritarianism
• Counterinsurgency
• Counterterrorism
• Regime type
• Violence

Acknowledgements

This article is based on a paper written for the RAND Insurgency Board. I would like to thank Janine Davidson, Thomas Marks, James Page, and Erin Simpson for their comments on earlier drafts. I am also tremendously grateful for the research assistance of Trish Bachman and Camille Majors at the National Defense University library. The views expressed here are mine alone and not represent the US government, the Department of Defense, or the National Defense University.

Notes

¹ As the 2006 US Army and Marine Corps manual stated, ‘counterinsurgents aim [over time] to enable a country or regime to provide the security and rule of law that allow establishment of social services and growth of economic activity’. See US Army and Marine Corps, FM 3-24 Counterinsurgency (Fort Leavenworth, KS: Department of the Army 2006) 1–1.

² Nothing captures the sentiment as vividly as Ralph Peters’ rant on Fox News: ‘You do not nation build, you don’t try to hold ground. You go wherever in the world the terrorists are and you kill them, you do your best to exterminate them, and then you leave, and you leave behind smoking ruins and crying widows’. See ‘Peters’ Plan to Fight Terror’, Fox News Insider. January 09, 2015 <http://insider.foxnews.com/2015/01/09/lt-col-peters-plan-fight-terror-leave-behind-smoking-ruins-crying-widows>.

³ Needless to say, the counterinsurgency practice of these democratic actors is far less convergent.

⁴ Juan J. Linz, ‘An Authoritarian Regime: The Case of Spain’, in Yrjo Littunen and Eric Allardt (eds), Cleavages, Ideologies and Party Systems (Helsinki: Academic Bookstore 1964) 297.

⁵ Economic Intelligence Unit, ‘Democracy in Limbo’ Democracy Index 2013, 29.

⁶ Gil Merom, How Democracies Lose Small Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge UP 2003) 230–1.

⁷ Edward Luttwak, ‘Dead End: Counterinsurgency Warfare as Military Malpractice’, Harper’s Magazine, February 2007, 40–1.

⁸ Jason Lyall, ‘Does Indiscriminate Violence Incite Insurgent Attacks? Evidence from Chechnya’, Journal of Conflict Resolution 53/3 (2009,) 332.

⁹ Monica Duffy Toft and Yuri M. Zhukov, ‘Denial and Punishment in the North Caucasus: Evaluating the Effectiveness of Coercive Counter-insurgency’, Journal of Peace Research 49/6 (2012) 786.

¹⁰ Stathis N. Kalyvas, ‘The Paradox of Terrorism in Civil War’, The Journal of Ethics 8/1 (2004) 97–138.

¹¹ Michael G. Findley and Joseph K. Young, ‘Fighting Fire with Fire? How (not) to Neutralize an Insurgency’, Civil Wars 9/4 (2007) 379 (my emphasis).

¹² Michael J. Engelhardt, ‘Democracies, Dictatorships and Counterinsurgency: Does Regime Type Really Matter?’, Journal of Conflict Studies 12/3 (Summer 1992) 56–7. For a criticism of this idea of a ‘winning record’ or a particularly British style, see Robert Egnell and David H. Ucko, ‘True to Form? Questioning the British Counterinsurgency Tradition’, in Beatrice Heuser et al. (eds), National Styles in Insurgencies and Counterinsurgency? (Cambridge: Cambridge UP 2015).

¹³ See Dawn Brancati, ‘Democratic Authoritarianism: Origins and Effects’, Annual Review of Political Science 17 (2014) 314.

¹⁴ Toft and Zhukov, ‘Denial and Punishment in the North Caucasus’, 785, 788.

¹⁵ See Lyall, ‘Does Indiscriminate Violence Incite Insurgent Attacks’, 332.

¹⁶ Ian F.W. Beckett, ‘The British Counterinsurgency Campaign in Dhofar 1965–1975’, in Daniel Marston and Carter Malkasian (eds), Counterinsurgency in Modern Warfare (Oxford: Osprey Publishing 2008) 175–190. On Taimur’s rule, see James J. Worrall, State Building and Counter Insurgency in Oman: Political, Military and Diplomatic Relations at the End of Empire (London: IB Tauris 2013) 52–3.

¹⁷ Joseph Holliday, ‘The Assad Regime: From Counterinsurgency to Civil War’, Institute for the Study of War (2013).

¹⁸ See, respectively, John J. Mearsheimer, ‘Assessing the Conventional Balance: The 3:1 Rule and its Critics’, International Security 13/4 (1989) 54–89; Ivan Arreguin-Toft, ‘How the Weak Win Wars: A Theory of Asymmetric Conflict’, International Security 26/1 (2001) 93–128, and Philip Keefer, ‘Insurgency and Credible Commitment in Autocracies and Democracies’, The World Bank Economic Review 22/1 (2008) 33–61. See also Michael C. Desch, ‘Democracy and Victory: Why Regime Type Hardly Matters’, International Security 27/2 (2002) 5–47.

¹⁹ When Lyall equates ‘occupation’ with an external power invading another, he forgets that many indigenous populations experience operations even by their ‘own’ security forces as occupation (178). This is certainly the case in southern Thailand but also in Anbar province, Iraq. When he notes that only two regimes became more authoritarian in the year prior to conflict (177), he omits the many cases where an autocratic turn dashed expectations of progress and triggered insurgency (Malaya, El Salvador and the Jeju island rebellion in Korea are but three examples). He also somewhat dubiously codes army mechanisation as indicating an inappropriate force structure for counterinsurgency (179), when much depends on how such means are used, rather than their mere existence. See Lyall, ‘Do Democracies Make Inferior Counterinsurgents? Reassessing Democracy’s Impact on War Outcomes and Duration’, International Organization 64/1 (2010) 167–92.

²⁰ Abrahms, for example, makes no distinction between counter-terrorism and counterinsurgency, including both in the same dataset. In his discussion of ‘concessions’ to ‘terrorists’ he also conflates willed diplomatic accommodation and coerced battleground losses, even though each occurs for different reasons and with different intent. See Max Abrahms, ‘Why Democracies Make Superior Counterterrorists’, Security Studies 16/2 (2007) 223–53. Similarly, Getmansky argues that ‘popular support’, defined by the ‘provision of public goods’, is ‘one of the more important determinants of insurgency onset and outcomes’. In contrast, the literature is quite clear that support means nothing in the absence of presence, mobilisation, and strategy, and that the service provision means nothing without security. See Anna Getmansky, ‘You Can’t Win If You Don’t Fight: The Role of Regime Type in Counterinsurgency Outbreaks and Outcomes’, Journal of Conflict Resolution 57/4 (2013) 713–14.

²¹ Getmansky (‘You Can’t Win If You Don’t Fight’, 713–14) sees democratic regimes as capable of rational decision-making as to whether ‘to become involved in insurgency’, when such decision points are often unclear and gradual (one may query when Britain ‘decided’ to conduct counterinsurgency in Malaya, or when the United States ‘decided’ the same in Iraq).

²² Lyall, ‘Do Democracies Make Inferior Counterinsurgents?’, 188. Getmansky (‘You Can’t Win If You Don’t Fight’, 725) concludes, similarly, that for various reasons ‘we might not be able to directly observe the effect of regime type on insurgency outcomes’.

²³ See Russell W. Glenn, Rethinking Western Approaches to Counterinsurgency: Lessons from Post-Colonial Conflict (Abingdon: Routledge 2015) ch. 2; Alexander B. Downes, ‘Draining the Sea by Filling the Graves: Investigating the Effectiveness of Indiscriminate Violence as a Counterinsurgency Strategy’, Civil Wars 9/4 (2007) 420–44; Eugene Miakinkov, ‘The Agency of Force in Asymmetrical Warfare and Counterinsurgency: The Case of Chechnya’, Journal of Strategic Studies 34/5 (2011) 647–80.

²⁴ For statistics on the violence in North Caucuses today, see Elena Pokalova, Chechnya’s Terrorist Network: The Evolution of Terrorism in Russia’s North Caucasus (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO 2015) 175–8.

²⁵ Stanislav Andreski, Social Sciences as Sorcery (Penguin: Harmondsworth 1973) 130.

²⁶ Jonathan D. Caverley, ‘The Myth of Military Myopia: Democracy, Small Wars, and Vietnam’, International Security 34/3 (2010) 119–57. For a critique, see David Ucko, ‘Bad COIN Wins Votes (Apparently)’, Kings of War, 1 March 2010 <http://kingsofwar.org.uk/2010/03/bad-coin/>.

²⁷ Engelhardt, ‘Democracies, Dictatorships and Counterinsurgency’, 60.

²⁸ Ibid., 55.

²⁹ James Hughes, Chechnya: From Nationalism to Jihad (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press 2011) 123.

³⁰ Engelhardt, ‘Democracies, Dictatorships and Counterinsurgency’, 55.

³¹ Bruno C. Reis and Pedro A. Oliveira, ‘Cutting Heads or Winning Hearts: Late Colonial Portuguese Counterinsurgency and the Wiriyamu Massacre of 1972‘, Civil Wars 14/1 (2012) 96.

³² Elizabeth Jean Wood, Forging Democracy from Below: Insurgent Transitions in South Africa and El Salvador (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge UP 2000) 6, passim.

³³ On this last grouping, see Eva Bellin, ‘The Robustness of Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Exceptionalism in Comparative Perspective’, Comparative Politics 36/2 (2004) 149–50. For the specific example of Syria, see Roger Owen, Rise and Fall of the Arab Presidents for Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP 2012) 38.

³⁴ Linz, ‘An Authoritarian Regime’, 297–301, 316.

³⁵ James Quinlivan, ‘Coup-Proofing: Its Practice and Consequences in the Middle East’, International Security 24 (Fall 1999). See also Daniel Byman, ‘Death Solves All Problems: The Authoritarian Model of Counterinsurgency’, Journal of Strategic Studies.

³⁶ Holliday, ‘The Assad Regime’, 13, 14, 26.

³⁷ Linz’ work separates authoritarianism not only from democracy (the standard dichotomy) but also from totalitarianism, yet argues that in times of crisis – such as insurgency – this difference is lessened. Whereas ‘stabilized authoritarian regimes’ do not regularly include the people in the politics of the nation, the ‘emergence of a crisis would involve considerable and often very intensive popular participation’ – otherwise a hallmark of totalitarianism. Similarly, instability within the authoritarian state is likely to bring increased use of state terror – also typical of totalitarianism. The media and press are more strictly controlled in totalitarian regimes, but an authoritarian regime in crisis is likely also to tighten its grip. In the end, both authoritarian and totalitarian regimes can therefore be part of our discussion. See Linz, ‘An Authoritarian Regime’, 304, 316–17.

³⁸ Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Publishers 1994) 306.

³⁹ Robert W. Schaefer, The Insurgency in Chechnya and the North Caucasus: From Gazavat to Jihad (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO 2010) 199.

⁴⁰ Miakinkov, ‘The Agency of Force’, 666. Boevik translates loosely to fighter or combatant.

⁴¹ Hughes, Chechnya, 112.

⁴² John Dunlop, The Moscow Bombings of September 1999: Examinations of Russian Terrorist Attacks at the Onset of Vladimir Putin’s Rule (Stuttgart: Ibidem 2014).

⁴³ Hughes, Chechnya, 122.

⁴⁴ Patrick Seale, Asad: The Struggle for the Middle East (London: I.B. Tauris 1988) 327.

⁴⁵ Ibid., 328.

⁴⁶ Madawi Al-Rasheed, ‘No Saudi Spring: Anatomy of a Failed Revolution’, Boston Review 37/2 (2012) 36.

⁴⁷ Martin Wayne, Understanding China’s War on Terrorism: Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up Approaches, doctoral dissertation, Graduate School of International Studies, University of Denver, 13 July 2006, 194–5.

⁴⁸ ‘Xinjiang to Crack Down on the “Three Evil Forces”’, China Daily, 6 March 2012 <http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2012-03/06/content_14766900.htm>; Liselotte Odgaard and Thomas Galasz Nielsen, ‘China’s Counterinsurgency Strategy in Tibet and Xinjiang’, Journal of Contemporary China 23/87 (2014) 546.

⁴⁹ Geremie R. Barmé, ‘To Screw the Foreigners is Patriotic: China’s Avant-Garde Nationalists’, The China Journal, 34 (July 1995) 233.

⁵⁰ Wayne, Understanding China’s War on Terrorism, 82.

⁵¹ John James Kennedy, ‘Maintaining Popular Support for the Chinese Communist Party: The Influence of Education and the State-Controlled Media’, Political Studies 57/3 (2009) 521.

⁵² Wayne, Understanding China’s War on Terrorism, 88.

⁵³ Zhukov, ‘Examining the Authoritarian Model of Counter-insurgency: The Soviet Campaign against the Ukrainian Insurgent Army’, Small Wars & Insurgencies 18/3 (2007) 461, fn. 4.

⁵⁴ Ibid., 448.

⁵⁵ Zhukov, ‘Counterinsurgency in a Non-Democratic State: the Russian Example’, in Paul Rich and Isabelle Duyvesteyn (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Insurgency and Counterinsurgency (London and New York: Routledge 2012) 290.

⁵⁶ Schaefer, The Insurgency in Chechnya, 210.

⁵⁷ Justin Rudelson and William Jankowiak, ‘Acculturation and Resistance: Xinjiang Identities in Flux’, in Frederick S. Starr (ed.), Xinjiang: China’s Muslim Borderland (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe 2004) 317.

⁵⁸ Hunjoon Kim, ‘Seeking Truth after 50 Years: The National Committee for Investigation of the Truth about the Jeju 4.3 Events’, International Journal of Transitional Justice 3/3 (2009) 410–11.

⁵⁹ T. David Mason and Dale A. Krane, ‘The Political Economy of Death Squads: Toward a Theory of the Impact of State-Sanctioned Terror’, International Studies Quarterly 33/2 (1989) 190.

⁶⁰ Middle East Watch, Syria Unmasked: The Suppression of Human Rights by the Asad Regime (New York: Human Rights Watch 1991).

⁶¹ Holliday, ‘The Assad Regime’, 15, passim.

⁶² Human Rights Watch, Genocide in Iraq: The Anfal Campaign against the Kurds (New York: Middle East Watch Report 1993) preface.

⁶³ United States Institute for Peace, ‘International Commission of Inquiry for Burundi: Final Report’, par. 85.

⁶⁴ US Army, The US Army Operating Concept: Win in a Complex World 2020–2040, TRADOC Pamphlet 525-3-1, 31 October 2014, 11. Notably, this document specifies that ‘Army leaders seek overmatch in close combat while applying firepower with discipline and discrimination’ (22).

⁶⁵ Holliday, ‘The Assad Regime’, 23.

⁶⁶ Ibid., 24. For greater context, see Annia Ciezadlo, ‘The War on Bread: How the Syrian Regime is Using Starvation as a Weapon’, New Republic, 14 February 2014 <http://www.newrepublic.com/article/116615/syrian-war-crimes-regime-bombs-bakeries-uses-starvation-weapon>.

⁶⁷ Kelly M. Greenhill, Weapons of Mass Migration: Forced Displacement, Coercion, and Foreign Policy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP 2011) 13, passim. See also Miakinkov, ‘The Agency of Force’, 674, and Lyall, ‘Does Indiscriminate Violence Incite Insurgent Attacks’.

⁶⁸ Hughes, Chechnya, 10. See also Alexander Statiev, The Soviet Counterinsurgency in the Western Borderlands (New York: Cambridge UP 2010) 164–94.

⁶⁹ Zhukov, ‘Counterinsurgency in a Non-Democratic State’, fn. 45.

⁷⁰ Barnett R. Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan: State Formation and Collapse in the International System (New Haven and London: Yale UP 2002) 227, 231. It should be noted that as far as the guerrillas were concerned, a lack of local support was soon off-set by increased international assistance.

⁷¹ Hughes, Chechnya, 121.

⁷² Robert H. Scales Jr., ‘Russia’s Clash in Chechnya: Implications for Future War’, National Security Studies Quarterly VI/2 (Spring 2000) 49–58. See also Olga Oliker, Russia’s Chechen Wars 1994–2000: Lessons from Urban Combat (Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation 2001) 46.

⁷³ Joanna Macrae and Anthony Zwi, ‘Famine, Complex Emergencies and International Policy in Africa: an Overview’, in J. Macrae and A. Zwi (eds), War and Hunger: Rethinking International Responses to Complex Emergencies (London: Zed Books 1994) 18–19.

⁷⁴ Holliday, ‘The Assad Regime’, 20.

⁷⁵ Odgaard and Nielsen, ‘China’s Counterinsurgency Strategy’, 547; James A. Millward, Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang (New York: Columbia UP 2007) 306–10, 342.

⁷⁶ Jim Nichol, Russia’s Chechnya Conflict: Developments in 2002–2003, Congressional Research Service RL31620, 15 April 2003, 1, 6. Oliker (44) claims 100,000 troops were in Grozny alone, producing a similar force ratio in the capital.

⁷⁷ Schaefer, The Insurgency in Chechnya and the North Caucasus, 202.

⁷⁸ Zhukov, ‘Examining the Authoritarian Model’, 448.

⁷⁹ Holliday, ‘The Assad Regime’, 12.

⁸⁰ Seale, Assad, 328–31.

⁸¹ Wayne, Understanding China’s War on Terrorism, 95.

⁸² Edmund S. Howe and Cynthia J. Brandau, ‘Additive Effects of Certainty, Severity, and Celerity of Punishment on Judgments of Crime Deterrence Scale Value’, Journal of Applied Social Psychology 18/9 (1988) 797. I am indebted to Thomas Rid for alerting me to this model.

⁸³ On the limiting effects of clandestinity, see Donatella Della Porta, ‘Left-Wing Terrorism in Italy’, in Martha Crenshaw (ed.), Terrorism in Context (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP 1995) 105–59; Della Porta, Social Movements, Political Violence, and the State: A Comparative Analysis of Italy and Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge UP 2006) 113–32.

⁸⁴ Stathis N. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge UP 2006) 111–45.

⁸⁵ Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 320, 323.

⁸⁶ Ibid., 435. On this phenomenon, see also Wayne, Understanding China’s War on Terrorism, 170–1.

⁸⁷ Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 323.

⁸⁸ United Nations Committee Against Torture, ‘Conclusions and recommendations of the Committee against Torture, Uzbekistan’, CAT/C/UZB/CO/3, 39^th Session Geneva, 5–23 November 2007 <http://www1.umn.edu/humanrts/cat/observations/uzbekistan2007.html>.

⁸⁹ Jennifer Murtazashvili, ‘Coloured by Revolution: the Political Economy of Autocratic Stability in Uzbekistan’, Democratization 19/1 (2012) 87.

⁹⁰ Wayne, Understanding China’s War on Terrorism, 125.

⁹¹ Ibid. See also pp. 139–41.

⁹² ‘China Bans Beards, Veils from Xinjiang City’s Buses in Security Bid’, Reuters, 6 August 2014; Steven Jiang, ‘China Bans Wearing Burqa in Biggest Muslim City’, CNN.com, 14 January 2014.

⁹³ Interview with Alexander Neill, Shangri-La Dialogue Senior Fellow for Asia-Pacific Security, International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1 February 2015.

⁹⁴ Ibid.

⁹⁵ Ibid. See also ‘Grid locked’, The Economist, 22 June 2013. It is worth noting the lengthy record of such an all-encompassing approach; see Thomas A. Marks, Counterrevolution in China: Wang Sheng and the Kuomintang (London: Frank Cass 1998) esp. 11–76.

⁹⁶ Hughes, Chechnya, 124.

⁹⁷ Ibid., 122.

⁹⁸ For a critique of the clear-hold-build model, see David H. Ucko, ‘Beyond Clear-Hold-Build: Rethinking Local-Level Counterinsurgency after Afghanistan’, Contemporary Security Policy 34/3 (2013) 526–51.

⁹⁹ Thomas A. Marks, ‘Counterinsurgency in the Age of Globalism’, Journal of Conflict Studies 27/1 (2007).

¹⁰⁰ Christian Davenport, ‘Multi-Dimensional Threat Perception And State Repression: An Inquiry Into Why States Apply Negative Sanctions’, American Journal of Political Science (1995) 707.

¹⁰¹ Patrick Johnston, ‘Negotiated Settlements and Government Strategy in Civil War: Evidence from Darfur’, Civil Wars 9/4 (2007) 364–5.

¹⁰² Such pragmatism could also be seen in the Bolshevik’s pacification of Basmachi resistance in the Ferghana Valley. See John P. Riordan, Red DIME: Dissecting the Bolshevik Liquidation Campaign in the Ferghana Valley against the Basmachi Resistance (Fort Leavenworth, KS: School of Advanced Military Studies 2008) 8–9.

¹⁰³ Statiev, The Soviet Counterinsurgency, 146.

¹⁰⁴ Ibid. The effects of war-fatigue should not be discounted.

¹⁰⁵ Anton Minkov and Gregory Smolynec, Economic Development in Afghanistan during the Soviet Period, 1979–1989: Lessons Learned from the Soviet Experience in Afghanistan (Ottawa: DRDC Centre for Operational Research and Analysis 2007) 11.

¹⁰⁶ Ibid., fn. 53.

¹⁰⁷ Paul Robinson, ‘Soviet Hearts and Minds Operations in Afghanistan’, Historian 72/1 (2010) 10–13.

¹⁰⁸ Hughes, Chechnya, 125.

¹⁰⁹ Ibid., 125–6.

¹¹⁰ That there was no open ‘no-campaign’, no international monitoring, and that it occurred during military occupation obviously undermines the credibility of the political establishment that it created – and of the elections that followed in its wake.

¹¹¹ Schafer, The Insurgency in Chechnya, 258–60.

¹¹² Ibid., 260.

¹¹³ Interview with Elena Pokalova, Associate Professor at College of International Security Affairs, National Defense University, 10 February 2015.

¹¹⁴ Schafer, The Insurgency in Chechnya, 253.

¹¹⁵ Millward, Eurasian Crossroads, 299.

¹¹⁶ Elena V. Barabantseva, ‘Development as Localization: Ethnic Minorities in China’s Official Discourse on the Western Development Project’, Critical Asian Studies 41/2 (2009), 247.

¹¹⁷ Ibid., 248–9.

¹¹⁸ Wayne, Understanding China’s War on Terrorism, 179. On the unequal distribution of benefit, see Millward, Eurasian Crossroads, 304–5. See also Odgaard and Nielsen, ‘China’s Counterinsurgency Strategy’, 547.

¹¹⁹ Murtazashvili, ‘Coloured by Revolution’, 88.

¹²⁰ Ibid., 79.

¹²¹ Wayne, Understanding China’s War on Terrorism, 162.

¹²² Dru C. Gladney, ‘The Chinese Program of Development and Control, 1978–2001’, in S. Fredrick Starr (ed.), Xinjiang: China’s Muslim Borderland (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe 2004) 113–14.

¹²³ Wayne, Understanding China’s War on Terrorism, 172–5.

¹²⁴ Ibid., 182–3. The socially calming effect of hope is the premise of James C. Davies’s J-curve theory of social crisis. See James C. Davies, ‘Toward a Theory of Revolution’, American Sociological Review 27/1 (1962) 5–19.

¹²⁵ Al-Rasheed, ‘No Saudi Spring: Anatomy of a Failed Revolution’, 39.

¹²⁶ Ibid.

¹²⁷ On this point, see Ben Hubbard, ‘Saudi King Unleashes a Torrent of Money as Bonuses Flow to the Masses’, The New York Times, 19 February 2015.

¹²⁸ Al-Rasheed, ‘No Saudi Spring: Anatomy of a Failed Revolution’, 39.

¹²⁹ Hence the rise of human security as a concept rivalling or threatening to subsume that of national security. See Neil S. MacFarlane and Yuen Foong Khong, Human Security and the UN: A Critical History (Bloomington and Indianapolis: IN: Indiana UP 2006) 1.

¹³⁰ Thomas Marks, ‘Mao Tse-Tung and the Search for 21st Century Counterinsurgency’, CTC Sentinel 2/10 (October 2009) 20. See the British definition of counterinsurgency as ‘those military, law enforcement, political, economic, psychological and civic actions taken to defeat insurgency, while addressing the root causes’ (my emphasis). British Army 2009, Vol. 1 Part 10: Counter Insurgency Operations. Army Code 71749. London: Ministry of Defence, October 2009, 1–6.

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David H. Ucko

David H. Ucko is associate professor at the College of International Security Affairs (CISA), National Defense University, and an adjunct research fellow at the Department of War Studies, King's College London.