Community preferences, insurgency, and the success of reconstruction spending

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• Reconstruction
• Development
• Insurgency
• Conflict

AMS Subject Classifications:

• O21
• H56
• N4

Notes

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

1 The US government outlays for reconstruction projects in both countries were increasing from 2003 to 2007 as evidenced by data obtained from the Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS 2008). Similarly, data obtained from NATO C3 Agency’s Afghanistan Country Stability Picture (NATO 2010) indicate a consistent increase in outlays to Afghanistan over the period for which data is available (approximately 2005 to 2009). Data from the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START 2014) at the University of Maryland indicate a consistent upward trend in violence from the beginning of each respective operation until 2010 (the final year for which GTD data is available).

2 The role of reconstruction in counterinsurgency was explicitly incorporated in the US Army Field Manual 3–24 (US Army 2006).

3 The ‘hearts and minds’ model permits spending to differ in the degree to which it conveys benefits, but does not allow projects to have any adverse consequences.

4 We use the term ‘occupier’ to describe the central authority in our model. This is a normatively neutral position taken to emphasize the potential disconnect between preferences of the agent responsible for public goods provision, and those of the end users of those goods.

5 A third (government) agent would significantly complicate the analysis but, practically in Afghanistan and Iraq, a small proportion of post-conflict reconstruction assistance has actually been channelled through domestic government authorities. Nevertheless, for the general peacebuilding context, the interaction between peacebuilders, domestic government and local elites is modelled in Barnett, Fang, and Zürcher (2014).

6 is homogeneous without loss of generality.

7 Were the support of to include negative values, some community members would never join an insurgency for any level of sector spending. These members would welcome all reconstruction, the more, the better. Were the support of to include values sufficiently greater than 1, there might be a set of extremists who were in permanent rebellion. This would decrease the occupier’s payoff and render community resistance more damaging, acting as additional leverage against sector spending. In either case, the game between occupier and community remains essentially the same.

8 The controversial ‘occupier’ here includes foreign private contractors in addition to military personnel. Projects implemented by members of the local population are less relevant to this framework, but project choice and design by an occupier could nevertheless render them subject to community resistance.

9 Instead, we could assume that there are convex costs of reconstruction.

10 For simple numerical simulations exploring the latter in a similar framework (see Scoones 2013).

11 Notice that this is not a true constraint on the occupier: the occupier can choose to spend relatively more on sector than this, but spending above this level leads to resistance from some community members.

12 This, of course, can be derived directly from community preferences, which in fact depend on output not spending.

13 Notice that with an active resistance, the spending allocation is independent of . This is an artifact of the functional forms we have chosen, and not a general property.