Counterinsurgency comes home

ABSTRACT

Two recent books suggest that the crisis of American democracy can be productively understood and addressed through concepts from security studies, namely ‘counterinsurgency’ and ‘civil war’. Yet doing so raises a host of ethical and practical problems which are only likely to make the crisis of American democracy worse.

KEYWORDS:

• Counterinsurgency
• insurgency
• far right
• American democracy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Fox News uses the tag ‘Capitol Protests’ for any articles about the events of that day on its website. See https://www.foxnews.com/category/us/capitol-protests.

² Jasko et al., ‘A Comparison of Political Violence by Left-Wing, Right-Wing, and Islamist Extremists in the United States and the World’. advance access online.

³ Belew, ‘Militant Whiteness in the Age of Trump’, 85. For more on the white power movement, see Belew, Bring the War Home.

⁴ Fitzsimmons, ‘Hard Hearts and Open Minds?’