Hard Hearts and Open Minds? Governance, Identity and the Intellectual Foundations of Counterinsurgency Strategy

Abstract

The premise of most Western thinking on counterinsurgency is that success depends on establishing a perception of legitimacy among local populations. The path to legitimacy is often seen as the improvement of governance in the form of effective and efficient administration of government and public services. However, good governance is not the only basis for claims to legitimacy, especially in environments where ethnic or religious identities are politically salient. Some experience in Iraq suggests that in environments where such identities are contested, claims to legitimacy may rest primarily on the identity of who governs, rather than on how whoever governs, governs. This article outlines the intellectual foundations of existing policy and doctrine on counterinsurgency, and argues that development and analysis of counterinsurgency strategy would benefit from a greater focus on the role of ethnic and religious identity in irregular warfare.

Key Words:

• Insurgency
• Counterinsurgency
• Ethnic Conflict
• Hearts and Minds

The counterinsurgency field manual published by the US Army and Marine Corps in Dec. 2006 states that ‘The primary objective of any counterinsurgent is to foster the development of effective governance by a legitimate government’.1 This judgment is in keeping with a conventional wisdom about counterinsurgency strategy that has accumulated over several decades of war and scholarship.

And yet, in Nov. 2006, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director General Michael Hayden told the Iraq Study Group that:

The current situation, with regard to governance in Iraq, was probably irreversible in the short term, because of the world views of many of the [Iraqi] government leaders, which were shaped by a sectarian filter and a government that was organized for its ethnic and religious balance rather than competence or capacity … The Iraqi identity is muted. The Sunni or Shia identity is foremost.2

Hayden's comment highlights a tension between two potentially countervailing strategic factors. The premise of most Western thinking on counterinsurgency is that success depends on establishing a perception of legitimacy for the ruling regime among some critical portion of the local population. Among the mechanisms available to counterinsurgents for establishing that legitimacy, one of the most prominent in both practice and doctrine has been the improvement of governance in the form of effective and efficient administration of government and public services. Good governance, by this logic, is the key to ‘winning hearts and minds’.

However, good governance is not the only plausible basis for claims to legitimacy among contending political factions, especially in environments where ethnic or religious identities are politically salient. Experience in Iraq suggests that in environments where the ethnic or religious identity of the ruling regime is contested, claims to legitimacy may rest primarily on the identity of who governs, rather than on how whoever governs governs.

Scholars and policymakers are just beginning to acknowledge and address these challenges to traditional views on counterinsurgency strategy. This process will require a careful synthesis of ideas and empirical insights from a wide range of academic disciplines and historical experiences that bear on the complex interactions among concepts of legitimacy, governance, ethnic identity, and political violence. This article aims to provide an early step in this effort by outlining the intellectual foundations of existing policy and doctrine on counterinsurgency, making a case for a greater focus in counterinsurgency strategy on the role of ethnic and religious identity, and suggesting opportunities for new empirical work on the subject.

Winning Hearts and Minds: Popular Support and Governance

Rebellion and counter-rebellion are as old as civilization. For most of political history, the main tools of defeating rebellion – that is, what today we would call ‘counterinsurgency strategy’– were coercion, repression, annihilation, intimidation, and fear.3 So, while the twentieth century produced the phrase, ‘winning hearts and minds’, the nineteenth century British imperial experience offered up the ditty, ‘Whatever happens, we have got/The Maxim gun, and they have not’.4 Notwithstanding all of the carnage piled up by irregular warfare5 in the twentieth century, default to this ‘Roman model’ of threatening wholesale slaughter generally ceased to be a viable choice in the counterinsurgency strategies of Western governments. Although paternalism remained firmly entrenched in Western policies toward the rest of the world, Wilsonian concepts of self-determination and legitimacy largely displaced one the main philosophical pillars of counter-revolutionary policy in colonial and earlier times: that might makes right.

These changing attitudes, however, made insurgency and counterinsurgency neither simpler nor rarer, and their prevalence in the twentieth century has generated a vast literature on the subject by historians, political scientists, sociologists, military analysts, and others. Lists of principles for the conduct of successful counterinsurgency are abundant in this literature,6 but if all these principles were reduced to a single central theme it would be that success and failure depend on the resolution of the political conflicts underlying the military hostilities. According to this line of reasoning, the application of military force is not nearly as efficacious as in more conventional warfare. Rather, the contest between insurgents and counterinsurgents is seen as a competition for the prevailing sympathies of the non-combatant populations where conflict is taking place. In one of the classic works of this literature, Mao Tse-tung famously observed that the relationship between insurgents and the broader population in which they operate is akin to fish and water, such that ‘guerrilla warfare basically derives from the masses and is supported by them, it can neither exist nor flourish if it separates itself from their sympathies and cooperation’.7

From this understanding of insurgency came a broad consensus that one of the chief objectives of any organization conducting counterinsurgency operations must be to gain the loyalty and trust of the local civilian population. The popular shorthand for this complex socio-economic-political-military objective became ‘winning hearts and minds’. To be sure, other considerations, including more traditional military ones such as intelligence, logistics, and attrition of enemy forces, are crucial elements of counterinsurgency strategies as well. But in this type of warfare, it is supposed that the hearts and minds of the people, not territorial control or leadership, constitute the strategic ‘center of gravity’ for which the adversaries compete.8 In his renowned study, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice, French army officer and theorist Lieutenant Colonel David Galula listed as his ‘first law’ of counterinsurgency that ‘the support of the population is as necessary for the counterinsurgent as for the insurgent’.9

With popular support as the foundation of counterinsurgency strategy, the question must turn then to how counterinsurgents can prevail in their competition for the people's allegiance. In this regard, winning hearts and minds is very often equated with the provision of good governance, in the form of improved material standards of living and government efficiency. The British counterinsurgency expert Sir Robert Thompson, who served in Malaya and as an advisor to the American and South Vietnamese governments, concluded that: “‘Winning” the population can tritely be summed up as good government in all its aspects … such as improved health measures and clinics  … new schools  … and improved livelihood and standard of living’. Later in the same work, Thompson continues, ‘the real purpose of aid in all contexts, including counter-insurgency [is] to help the local government get its organization right and its departments working efficiently’.10

One representative scholarly rendering of this view comes from Bard O'Neill:

popular support [for insurgency] from the elites and especially the masses stems primarily from concrete grievances concerning such things as land reform, injustice, unfair taxation, and corruption. It is over these issues that the battle to win hearts and minds is most directly enjoined. History suggests that a government can most effectively undercut insurgencies that rely on mass support by splitting the rank and file away from the leadership through calculated reforms that address the material grievances and needs of the people.11

Insurgency and counterinsurgency historian Thomas Mockaitis argues along similar lines: ‘Trust and cooperation depend … on recognizing and as far as possible addressing the real needs and the legitimate grievances on which the insurgency feeds … People generally support an insurgency out of a shared sense of wrong or frustration at not having their basic needs met’.12 Or, as writer and retired US Marine T. X. Hammes has succinctly put it, ‘the fundamental weapon in counterinsurgency is good governance’.13

This perspective is not limited to scholars or policy analysts. It is also clearly evident in the way US government organizations approach the problem of insurgency and counterinsurgency. One prominent example of this view can be found in the Central Intelligence Agency's Guide to the Analysis of Insurgency, which argues that:

Support of the people is vital to the survival of the insurgents who depend on them for food, shelter, recruits, and intelligence. The government's challenge is to regain the allegiance of a population already alienated by government failures to address basic grievances. Poor peasants and farmers are, however, seldom motivated by abstractions or vague promises. Their willingness to provide support hinges on concrete incentives – material benefits or demonstrable threats.14

Also, as noted at the beginning of the article, the US military's new counterinsurgency doctrine features this conception of the centrality of popular support and governance, stating that ‘The primary objective of any counterinsurgent is to foster the development of effective governance by a legitimate government’.15 And the Irregular Warfare Joint Operating Concept, written by the Marine Corps and the Special Operations Command, asserts that forces conducting irregular warfare should emphasize ‘winning the support of the relevant populations, promoting friendly political authority, and eroding adversary control, influence, and support’.16

Moreover, beyond these academic and doctrinal assertions is a history replete with projects launched by counterinsurgents focused on land reform, economic development, public health, education, construction of infrastructure and other such initiatives.

In sum, the strength and ubiquity of such views on the importance of providing good governance and of winning hearts and minds amounts to what might reasonably be labeled conventional wisdom on counterinsurgency strategy. What accounts for this phenomenon? How did this conventional wisdom develop and why has it retained its appeal over several decades of irregular warfare?

The Roots of Conventional Wisdom: Legitimacy, People's Wars and Modernization Theory

The association of legitimacy and good governance is rooted in the dominant traditions of Western political philosophy. In the works of such foundational thinkers as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, legitimacy is seen as derived from a social contract between a government and free individuals. Individuals relinquish some of their own sovereignty to the government in exchange for a specific set of privileges and protections. In this formulation, legitimacy and good governance are tightly woven, if not synonymous. The German sociologist Max Weber characterized this conception of legitimacy as a ‘legal’ or ‘rational’ paradigm, one of three pure types of authority, or ‘legitimate domination’. Legal authority, according to Weber, rests ‘on a belief in the legality of enacted rules and the right of those elevated to authority under such rules to issue commands’.17 Weber contrasts this form of authority with ‘traditional’ and ‘charismatic’ forms in which legitimacy comes more from, respectively, traditional social hierarchies or an individual personality rather than from codified rules and laws. The discussion will return to ‘traditional authority’ later, but it is the legal-rational conception of legitimacy that has dominated Western political thought in the modern world.

Moreover, a rational, governance-based view of legitimacy formed the basis for political development not only in advanced, Western, or industrialized societies. It also formed the foundation of the most prominent revolutionary philosophy of the twentieth century – Marxism. In their emphasis on developmental aspects of capitalism and on economic classes as the basic units of political life, both Leninist and Maoist incarnations of Marxism were deeply modern and, at least in principle, hostile to traditionally-based, nationalist or ethnic political structures.18 Accordingly, communist insurgents throughout the developing world advanced a fundamentally materialist view of social justice. In their view, legitimate government was not simply one that guaranteed freedoms and basic public goods, but one that enforced a particular distribution of resources and capital seen to be inextricably linked to freedom. In this sense, Marxist revolutionaries that dominated the landscape of post-World War II insurgency saw legitimacy as even more closely linked to specific forms of ‘good governance’ than did their liberal opponents.

Probably the most important variety of this revolutionary ideology in action was the Maoist ‘people's war’. Over nearly two decades of civil war in China, Mao Tse-tung transformed Lenin's urban, elite-driven interpretation of Marxism into a rural, peasant-based revolutionary doctrine. Revolutionaries throughout the developing world have since seized on Mao's principles to help organize popular revolts among rural masses against elite, allegedly repressive governments. Rebels from the Viet Minh in the 1940s to the Shining Path in the 1980s to the Communist Party of Nepal in the 2000s have claimed Mao's mantle. Though people's wars have varied considerably across different times and cultures, Maoist ideology retained most of its central Marxist elements related to class conflict, social justice, and economic determinism, especially at the height of the Cold War.19

At the same time, opponents of Marxist ideology and revolution, especially in the United States, were constructing their own interpretive framework for explaining political and economic development in the post-war era. The 1950s and 1960s saw the emergence of ‘modernization theory’ in Western academic and policy communities, a theory of development that emphasized a teleological convergence of societies through several stages of modernization from primitive traditional forms toward Western-style industrialization, secularization, and political pluralism.20 Legitimacy in this framework was earned by whoever could most reliably guide the society along these hypothesized paths of modernization, with their characteristic signals of good governance – economic growth, political representation and efficient administration.

The principles of modernization theory were quite influential among policy-makers in Washington who were eager for guidance in navigating the complex Cold War competition underway in the decolonizing ‘Third’ World. Modernization theory played a significant role in guiding American policy toward the developing world generally,21 and toward counterinsurgency specifically.22 Walt Rostow, an economist who had written one of the most prominent books on modernization and development, became President John F. Kennedy's deputy national security advisor. In a 1961 speech to Army Special Forces graduates, he characterized the Kennedy administration's perspective this way:

The US has a special responsibility of leadership … in aiding the long-run development of those nations which are serious about modernizing their economy and social life. And, as President Kennedy has made clear, he regards no program of his Administration as more important than his program for long-term economic development … Independence cannot be maintained by defensive measures alone. Modern societies must be built, and we are prepared to help build them.23

By 1962, these concepts had been formalized in the US Overseas Internal Defense Policy statement of August 1962 and in the Inter-departmental Seminar on Counterinsurgency that was taught at the State Department. These new statements of policy and doctrine codified the notion that the remedy to political violence and instability in the developing world, in the words of historian Ian Beckett, ‘lay in socio-economic development and appropriate nation-building measures based on concepts of security, good government and progress’.24

Before long, the application of this philosophy to counterinsurgency policy had acquired the name ‘hearts-and-minds theory’. RAND Corporation analysts Nathan Leites and Charles Wolf summarized the principal tenets of hearts-and-minds theory as: emphasis on popular support based on inherent ‘ardor and preferences’; stress on internal grievances over external influence; emphasis on economic deprivation and inequality; and conception of insurgent conflict in terms of ‘electoral analogy’, where outcomes are driven by and reflect the prevailing affiliations of majorities or substantial minorities. In their judgment, made in 1970, hearts-and-minds theory ‘influences and perhaps dominates much discussion and thinking about this range of problems’.25

Viewed through the lens of Cold War competition between the United States and the Soviet Union, Marxist revolutionary ideology and hearts-and-minds counterrevolutionary ideology may appear to stand in stark opposition to one another. And within the framework of Western political philosophy, they do. Outside of this framework, however, they might more usefully be characterized as opposite sides of the same Western coin. While their normative aspects point in different directions, their assumptions and descriptions of the developing world share much in common. As political scientist D. Michael Shafer argues:

Both revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries assume that the Third World's shared experience with colonialism had everywhere produced a potentially revolutionary situation. Thus, Americans fret over the consequences of modernization – in particular, the possibility of Communists capturing uprooted peoples in the hiatus between tradition and a higher state, modernity. The revolutionary masters also focus on the inevitable, universal course of development, but in the deracination process they see the formation of classes, and so the fundamental dynamic of development. Each, however, assumes the malleability of the masses and, despite reference to an overarching process of change, focuses on tactical measures for ‘helping history’. In other words, both revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries identify their role as manager of modernization.26

Based in part on this assessment, Shafer characterizes American counterinsurgency doctrine as ‘Mao minus Marx’.27

Among the important similarities between these approaches to insurgency and counterinsurgency are the factors they assume to be dominant in establishing political legitimacy. In Weber's terms, both approaches posit rationalist grounds for legitimate authority. In his study of the role of legitimacy in insurgencies, Timothy Lomperis points out that:

modern legitimacy can turn to several different models, including communist ones. Communism, after all, is a product of, or at least a reaction to, the industrial revolution of the West and offers a competitive system of modern political legitimacy to that of the liberal democracies. Yet even communists hold to the two hallmarks of modern legitimacy. They, too, have a view of history rooted in a ‘dialectic’ of material progress …28

One important product of the similarities in these opposing strategies is that successful application of one may in fact defeat the other, since they are competing, in some sense, on equivalent terms. From this perspective, the gradual expansion in the numbers of liberal democracies around the world may have something to do with the declining incidence of Maoist people's wars. As Ian Beckett concludes, ‘where states genuinely embraced or moved toward democracy the Maoist model had little to offer, since much depended on convincing the population that the limited consultation process envisaged in the relationship between the party and the “masses” was sufficient democracy’.29

Thus was forged the intellectual foundations of counterinsurgency strategy in the United States, and much of this foundation is still visible in the current policy and doctrine cited above. Even so, the influence and longevity of these concepts and policies have not been without their critics.

Modernization Theory Under Assault: Hearts and Minds Dethroned or Refined?

For all of its influence in academic and policy circles, modernization theory came under widespread attack by the late 1960s, both for its conceptual shallowness and for its inability to account for the frequency of insurgency and revolution throughout the developing world. Most conspicuously, the persistence of the Vietcong's resistance to American and South Vietnamese counterinsurgency efforts raised pointed questions about the viability of the assumptions of prevailing strategy and doctrine.

Another wave of literature emerged aiming to correct some of the flaws of modernization theory, particularly its emphasis on elites as critical agents of modernization and its tendency to link economic development inextricably with political stability. This literature sought to address the causes of revolution and insurgency directly and tended to locate those causes in socio-economic dislocations associated with the transition of societies from traditional to modern forms. One of the earliest and most influential of these works was Samuel Huntington's Political Order in Changing Societies (1968), where he argued that violence and instability ‘was in large part the product of rapid social change and the rapid mobilization of new groups into politics, coupled with the slow development of political institutions’.30 On the one hand, this argument was a departure from the more optimistic perspectives of earlier works that touted the inevitable correlation of modernization and peaceful progress. On the other hand, as Charles Tilly points out, Huntington largely operates from within the broader framework that associates development with Western forms of political and economic organization.31

Another focus of criticism of modernization theory was its general insensitivity to variations in local conditions and the resulting universalism of its policy prescriptions. If, in fact, modernization was supposed to follow similar paths throughout the developing world, then successful policy implementation need not depend on deep expertise or experience in particular regions or cultures. What followed from this were policies of US support for development that were probably more ambitious and optimistic than was warranted, such as the Alliance for Progress in Latin America and the early American involvement in South Vietnam. Former Undersecretary of State George Ball, for one, took a skeptical view of this trend in what he referred to as ‘nation building’, complaining that ‘the most presumptuous undertaking of all [assumed that] American professors could make bricks without the straw of experience and with indifferent and infinitely various kinds of clay’.32

In time, skepticism of grand theories of development helped to foster a new emphasis in academic work on the sociological roots of revolution and insurgency, and particularly on the interaction of modern economic practices with traditional political structures in peasant villages. Sociologist Timothy Wickham-Crowley identifies three ‘microstructural schools’ in this body of work.33

One school argues that different economic structures encourage different dynamics of collective action, and that ‘revolutionary action is to be found when cultivators derive their income from “wages” (rather than land)’.34

According to the second school, capitalism tends to break down ‘age-old systems of patron-client … systems of reciprocity’. Peasant revolts, in turn, represent efforts to protect those systems.35

The third school holds that peasants do not respond to a shared ‘moral economy’ of the kind postulated by the second school, but rather to rational self-interest ‘in a way perfectly intelligible to the economics of utility-maximization’.36

Other analysts seeking explanations for political violence in the developing world looked to the psychological dynamics of individuals and groups in areas of conflict. Prominent among these arguments is the theory that revolution is caused by feelings of relative deprivation. According to this theory, it is not poverty or repression, per se, that cause people to take up arms against their government, but rather the unfulfilled promises of rising expectations in societies in transition. In the words of political scientist Ted Robert Gurr, ‘Discontent [is] not a function of the discrepancy between what men want and what they have, but between what they want and what they believe they are capable of attaining’.37

In addition to these works of sociology and political psychology, part of the national security policy community also dissented with prevailing views of insurgency and counterinsurgency during the late 1960s and 1970s. Most directly relevant to this discussion is the work cited earlier, by Nathan Leites and Charles Wolf Jr. In their 1970 book,38 these analysts argued that the common focus in counterinsurgency strategy on hearts and minds was misdirected and overly ambitious.

First, in their view, the popular support generally considered to be the focus of competition between insurgents and counterinsurgents could be readily understood in terms of cost-benefit trade-offs rather than inherent preferences. ‘Fear (damage-limiting) and reward (profit-maximizing) may be as powerful spurs to desired behavior as conscience and conviction’.

Second, they suggested that actions taken to constrain the behavior of insurgents are more likely to be effective than actions taken to persuade the population to support the government's side.39 Leites and Wolf also questioned the linkage between economic aid and winning popular support, pointing out that greater resources might simply allow people to exercise their existing preferences more effectively rather than actually change their preferences.40

Overall, academic and policy-oriented reactions to modernization theory and hearts-and-minds counterinsurgency theory made substantial strides toward refining understandings and assumptions about development and the causes of political violence. However, two factors limited the impact of these critiques as an impetus for reconceptualizing how counterinsurgency strategy was actually developed and practiced.

First, even these more sophisticated frameworks tended to focus on rural, peasant-based insurgencies and, in emphasizing the economic effects of modernization, retained a predominantly materialist viewpoint on the sources and dynamics of political legitimacy.

Second, the end of the United States' military involvement in Vietnam in 1973 initiated an era of intellectual cleansing of American strategy and doctrine. The prevailing view among American military officers and defense intellectuals after Vietnam was that counterinsurgency and nation-building activities had been a harmful distraction from the military's pre-eminent mission of deterring and preparing to fight the massed conventional forces of the Soviet Union or its proxies.41 Combined with détente's more accommodating posture toward Soviet policies in the developing world, this attitude among the American military leadership went a long way toward severing the link between academic work on insurgency and counterinsurgency and its heretofore receptive government audience.

Interest among national security policy makers in ‘low intensity conflict’ was somewhat refreshed in the 1980s by US involvement in Central American counterinsurgencies and in the 1990s by a spate of ‘small wars’ that prompted US interventions from Somalia to Bosnia. Nevertheless, the study of counterinsurgency remained an intellectual backwater in defense and military education, policy, planning, and discourse.42 Counterinsurgency doctrine in the 1980s, in the form of the US Army Field Manual on Low Intensity Conflict, became little more than a modification of ‘AirLand Battle’, the Defense Department's newly ascendant concept for large-scale, conventional, mechanized warfare.43

Only after the US found itself in the midst of major counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan from 2001 onwards did the national security policy community turn seriously to the task of revisiting the intellectual roots and assumptions of its extant strategy and doctrine on counterinsurgency. And when it did so, what it had to turn to was something of a hodgepodge of modernization theory, anti-communism, and a set of historical experiences that had been only partially digested in any coherent intellectual or strategic sense.

One of the most conspicuous faults of this mixed legacy was its relative silence regarding the role of ethnic and religious identity in determining how people relate to their governments. As political scientist Milton Esman explains, policies grounded in the materialist, progressive assumptions of modernization tended to presume:

that with industrialization, urbanization, bureaucratization, and secularization, local, parochial, ethnic, and other ‘traditional’ identities would become increasingly irrelevant and would be succeeded by more ‘rational’ loyalties and association such as state nationalism, economic class, and cultural and recreational interests.44

Esman's language echoes that used by Weber to delineate different bases for political legitimacy. In those terms, ‘rational’ grounds for legitimacy would comprise more concrete interests and basic grievances than those related to ethnicity, religion or tribe. But Weber also points out that ‘traditional’ authority, in contrast to ‘rational’ authority, rests ‘on an established belief in the sanctity of immemorial traditions and the legitimacy of those exercising authority under them’.45 So, what if ‘concrete interests’ and ‘basic grievances’ in some insurgencies do not arise principally from issues surrounding material benefits or conditions? What if legitimacy is sometimes conferred to governments not according to the quality of their governance, but according to their conformance to group loyalties and traditional hierarchies of power? The next section outlines some of the major contributions of scholarship of the last few decades on ethnic identity and conflict, and suggests the importance of these contributions to the design of counterinsurgency strategies.

Ethnic Identity and Conflict

The end of the Cold War prompted a surge of interest in ethnicity and nationalism as causes of political violence. Bitter civil wars on the periphery of the former Soviet bloc, such as those in Tajikistan, Chechnya, and Bosnia, conveyed a sense that ancient ethnic passions, long suppressed by totalitarian regimes, were once again in the ascendancy. Genocidal violence in Rwanda in 1994 did nothing to moderate this impression. But in fact, large-scale, ethnically and religiously driven political violence had been a constant feature of the post-World War II era, as any residents of southern Nigeria, Bangladesh, and Lebanon, to name only a few, could attest.

Scholars taking up this subject began to examine the ways in which political identities and loyalties can be influenced and even dominated by affiliations with ethnic and religious communities. Debates in this literature begin, naturally, with the definition of ethnicity, itself. Weber's conception that ethnic identity is tied to but not limited to genetic kinship has proved to be quite durable over time. He defined ethnicity as ‘a subjective belief’ in ‘common descent  … whether or not an objective blood relationship exists'.46 In one of the most influential modern works on ethnicity and conflict, Donald Horowitz adopts a similar perspective, saying that ‘ethnicity is based on a myth of collective ancestry, which usually carries with it traits believed to be innate. Some notion of ascription, however diluted, and affinity deriving from it are inseparable from the concept of ethnicity’.47

An even broader definition was offered by Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who argued that ‘forms of identity based on social realities as different as religion, language, and national origin all have something in common, such that a new term is coined to refer to all of them – ethnicity. What they have in common is that they have all become effective foci for group mobilization for concrete political ends’.48 However, while the emphasis in this definition on the political mobilization of ethnic groups is helpful, as nationalism expert Walker Connor points out, lumping ‘national origin’ together with other dimensions of ethnic identification begs some of the most important questions about politics and ethnic identity.49

This semantic confusion derives in part from the modern conflation of the terms ‘nation’ and ‘state’. According to Connor, states are delimited by political boundaries, and nations are delimited by ethnic boundaries, where ‘nation connotes a group of people who believe they are ancestrally related’.50 In practice, however, the two terms are often used interchangeably, together with ‘nation-state’, a term originally reserved for the occasional correlation between an ethnically-based nation and a politically-based state.

As a result, the study of nationalism has developed concepts of different kinds of nationalism. For example, scholar Anthony Smith distinguishes between ‘civic-territorial’ nationalism and ‘ethnic’ nationalism. The former, which Smith calls ‘a peculiarly Western conception of the nation’, is characterized by ‘historic territory, legal-political community, legal-political equality of members, and common civic culture and ideology’. With the latter, Smith argues, ‘the nation is seen as a fictive “super-family”, and it boasts pedigrees and genealogies to back up its claims … the place of law in the Western civic model is taken by vernacular culture, usually languages and customs’.51 Clearly, one of the principal differences between the two models is the basis on which membership and allegiance rests. In the civic model, they are matters of location and individual choice. In the ethnic model, they are matters of birth and group history.

Of course, though these distinctions are indispensable as analytic constructs, clean categorizations of real nations or states are seldom possible. As Smith himself acknowledges, ‘every nationalism contains civic and ethnic elements in varying degrees and different forms’.52 And Horowitz argues that in divided societies there is competition between kinship and territory as the dominant principle for socio-political organization.53 The ambiguity and subjectivity of such classification schema provide the occasion for one of the other principal topics of debate in the literature on ethnicity and nationalism.

In simplest terms, this debate concerns the stability and robustness of political identities.54 On one side of the debate are ‘primordialists’ or ‘essentialists’, who see identities as deeply rooted, powerful political motivations that are very slow to change.55 On the other side are ‘instrumentalists’ or ‘modernists’, who see group identification primarily as a means of political mobilization designed to maximize material and political gains. Instrumentalists see ethnic identities as somewhat contingent and open to manipulation by elites and ‘political entrepreneurs’.56 Analysts offering explanations of ethnic group behavior based on rational choice models and international relations theories such as the security dilemma can reasonably be grouped in with this modernist school.57

In between these two positions are the ‘constructivists’, who agree with instrumentalists that group identities are socially constructed and therefore malleable, but look to a broader set of factors operating over longer periods of time to explain changes in the dynamics of political identities.58

Recent scholarship has tended to favor the modernist and constructivist positions in the debate. As one summary of the debate observed, “‘Essentialism” has … been vigorously criticized, and constructivist gestures now accompany most discussions of “identity”’.59 However, as with many such debates, ample opportunity exists to incorporate aspects from each of these perspectives into coherent analysis of ethnic identity and conflict. Many scholars have taken just such an ecumenical approach. Ted Robert Gurr points out that ‘the fact that … resurgent nationalisms are usually led by modern political entrepreneurs  … should not obscure the fact that their success depends on the persistence of deep-rooted sentiments of separate identity’.60 Horowitz advises that ‘many of the puzzles presented by ethnicity become much less confusing once we abandon the attempt to discover the vital essence of ethnicity and instead regard ethnic affiliations as being located along a continuum of ways in which people organize and categorize themselves  … Group boundaries are made of neither stone nor putty’.61

Overall, the literature on the subject makes clear that, while ethnic identities can be malleable and are not the only types of identities that are politically relevant,62 they do often have important effects that cannot be adequately described or predicted by focusing on individual, rational behavior. This general conclusion is buttressed not only by the work in political science and sociology described above, but also by work in social psychology on the impact of group identification on individual behavior. As one analyst describes it, ‘Group identification is part of a larger phenomenon in which, contrary to the assumptions of economists and sociobiologists, humans find it easy to care about people and things in a way that goes far beyond narrow self-interest’.63

Moreover, two factors suggest the potential for the particularly high relevance of ethnic identity in insurgency and counterinsurgency.

First, while insurgencies tend to last a long time relative to conventional wars,64 they are quite short compared to the generational time frames over which group identities and affiliations tend to evolve. Participants in such conflicts, therefore, can expect the dynamics of ethnic identities to be more of an environmental condition than a pliable object of policy manipulation.

Second, group identities usually take on increased salience during civil conflict in multi-ethnic societies. In this way, ethnic conflict can become self-reinforcing as group boundaries are made more important and distinct simply by the onset of the initial violence.65 These two factors are crucial to account for in applying insights from the literature on identity and ethnic conflict to any analysis of counterinsurgency strategy.

Another key question about how ethnic and religious identities contribute to political violence regards the salience of those identities relative to economic factors. Analytically, addressing this question often (though not necessarily) corresponds to a choice between focusing on behavioral processes in groups and focusing on structural incentives and the preferences of individuals. This dichotomy brings the discussion around again to the earlier points on the historical influence and limitations of modernization theory. To reiterate the broad point, theories and policies of development and counterinsurgency in the United States and other European governments focused heavily on economic factors, structural incentives, and individual preferences. The judgment of the noted British counterinsurgency expert Sir Robert Thompson is representative of this general view: ‘However powerful national or religious forces may be, that of material well-being is as strong if not stronger’.66 The neglect of ethnic identity in the formulation of these theories and policies was sometimes unconscious, sometimes deliberate, but there is little doubt that it was neglect.

The literature on nationalism and ethnic conflict is littered with critiques of excessive emphasis among academicians and policymakers on rationalist, materialist approaches to explaining and addressing civil conflict in the developing world.67 Two articulations of this point will stand here for the rest of them. The first is from Walker Connor:

Explanations of behavior in terms of pressure groups, elite ambitions, and rational choice theory hint not at all at the passions that motivate Kurdish, Tamil, and Tigre guerrillas or Basque, Corsican, Irish, and Palestinian terrorists. Nor at the passions leading to the massacre of Bengalis by Assamese or Punjabis by Sikhs. In short, these explanations are a poor guide to ethnonationally inspired behavior  … Analysts have been beguiled by the fact that observable economic discrepancies are near universal concomitants of ethnic strife  …[but] defining ethnonational conflicts in terms of economic inequality is a bit like defining them in terms of oxygen.68

The second is from Donald Horowitz:

Processual theories of politics, developed in the United States at a time when ethnic claims were largely dormant, contain an inadvertent bias that impedes the understanding of ethnic politics. These theories hold that politics is a process for deciding ‘who gets what’ … following Hobbes, they conceive of power principally as a ‘means to some future apparent good’ … To understand ethnic conflict, it is necessary to reverse this emphasis. Power is, of course, often an instrument to secure other, tangible goods and benefits,  … but power may also be the benefit  … Broad matters of group status regularly have equal or superior standing to the narrow allocative decisions often taken to be the uniform stuff of everyday politics.69

None of this criticism is meant to suggest that economic and material factors are insignificant, that ethnic grievances are more likely to cause civil conflict than economic grievances, or that ethnic and economic factors are always clearly separable.70 To the contrary, a full appreciation of the roots and dynamics of irregular warfare undoubtedly benefits from complementary perspectives on legitimacy as it relates to both identities and the quality of governance. The American insurgency expert Thomas Marks has argued persuasively that these different elements of insurgency have long coexisted to a greater extent than has been widely appreciated.71 And another insurgency scholar, Anthony Joes, reminds us that ‘even during the Cold War, conflicts ostensibly about Communism exhibited deep ethno-religious roots’.72

A debate on the relative importance of political and economic factors, and private and public factors in causing civil wars has emerged in the past decade in a subfield often referred to as the ‘economics of conflict’. Using econometric techniques and large-N data sets, some analysts have presented evidence that economic factors tend to be more potent sparks for civil wars than ethnic diversity.73 Other analysts using similar methods have found direct linkages between the types of ethnic divisions in a society and their proclivity for political violence.74

This article does not seek to resolve these questions since it is not principally concerned with the onset, frequency, or duration of civil wars, per se. But what the preceding discussion is meant to suggest is that when ethnic conflicts do result in wars and insurgencies, their ethnic dimensions are likely to be extremely important in shaping those wars and in determining the success or failure of efforts to stop them.

To be fair, the importance of ethnic identities and dynamics has not escaped the attention of analysts of insurgency, especially in recent years. For example, Bard O'Neill distinguishes insurgent grievances arising from dissatisfaction with the prevailing ‘political communities’ from those arising from grievances related to ‘political systems’ or ‘policies’.75 Steven Metz distinguishes ‘spiritual’ from ‘commercial’ insurgencies.76 And Timothy Lomperis distinguishes legitimacy derived from ‘belief’ from legitimacy derived from ‘opportunity’ or ‘interest’.77 Each of these frameworks is directly related to the distinction made here between ‘identity’ and ‘governance’ as potential bases for legitimacy. More recently, the US military's new counterinsurgency manual counts ‘identity-focused’ insurgencies as one of six main types of insurgencies.78 And other analysts writing about irregular warfare in the midst of the war in Iraq have noted the powerful influence of ethnicity and religion on such wars.79

Nevertheless, the implications of these dynamics for the design and conduct of counterinsurgency strategy remain under-examined by systematic empirical inquiry. And many still hold out great hope for the contributions of improved governance in prosecuting counterinsurgency in Iraq. Therefore, with the body of scholarship outlined in this article as a conceptual frame of reference, it is reasonable if not imperative to wonder whether improving governance in the form of economic benefits and material standards of living is always an effective instrument for dampening civil conflict. In cases where ethnic identities are salient, it seems quite possible that the individually-based social contract of Western political philosophy can be displaced by a ‘contract’ based on groups or communities, and that the quality of governance would then take a back seat to identity in the conference of legitimacy on political institutions.

Governance, Identity, and Counterinsurgency Strategy in Iraq and Beyond

Iraq presents a particularly complex environment in which to explore alternative concepts of governance, identity, and legitimacy. The insurgencies there have been unusually, if not uniquely, decentralized, and comprise a variety of disparate interests.80 One consequence of this complexity is significant disagreement among policymakers and analysts in the United States about the best course for counterinsurgency strategy.

At least four distinct approaches in this regard have been prominent since the beginning of the insurgency.

First, particularly prevalent in the early days of the conflict, was a ‘kinetic’ approach to counterinsurgency. Taken somewhat by surprise by the fact of the insurgency and its intensity, the US military reverted to its organizational and doctrinal propensity to address hostile action through the application of overwhelming force.81

A second approach quickly emerged, partly in response to the first, which cast the Iraqi insurgency as a successor to the long line of insurgencies faced in the past by American and other Western militaries. According to this view, counterinsurgents in Iraq should be looking to the lessons learned in previous counterinsurgencies, such as those in Malaya, Algeria, and Vietnam, for guidance on their strategies and tactics.82 This view has emphasized the centrality of winning hearts and minds in its traditional sense, focused on provision of security and good governance.

The third view, emerging in 2006 and 2007, began to question the applicability of traditional approaches to counterinsurgency, and has emphasized the differences between today's insurgents and those of the twentieth century.83 This view takes exception to the notion that defeating the Iraqi insurgency depends on winning hearts and minds, emphasizing the sectarian nature of much of the violence in Iraq and concluding that addressing material grievances will matter little in squelching the insurgency. For example, defense analyst Stephen Biddle has argued:

The current struggle is not a Maoist ‘people's war’ of national liberation; it is a communal civil war with very different dynamics … Economic aid or reconstruction assistance cannot fix the problem: would Sunnis really get over their fear of Shiite domination if only the sewers were fixed and the electricity kept working?84

In a similar vein, the Coalition Provisional Authority's Governance Coordinator in al- Anbar province in 2003–2004 concluded that ‘a good political settlement without economic aid can still lead to stability, while no level of macroeconomic support can produce stability absent a viable political process’.85

In terms of the broad distinctions drawn in this article, the second view essentially presumes predominance of governance-driven motivations behind the insurgency, while the third presumes predominance of identity-driven motivations. A fourth view, which arguably has been adopted by the US leadership in conjunction with General David Petraeus's arrival as the head of the military effort from Feb. 2007, seems to balance aspects of both the second and third views. Of course, it is too early to characterize these dynamics with much accuracy, and facts on the ground continue to change. Nevertheless, it seems clear that the emerging history of the Iraq war provides rich opportunities for analysis of the issues raised here. Different Iraqi provinces and cities offer diverse combinations of key variables such as ethnic and religious dynamics and counterinsurgent strategies applied. Comparative analysis of cases studies drawn from experiences in Iraq should constitute a robust agenda for research over the next several years.

This article has tried to draw a clear distinction between the political dynamics of government performance in meeting the needs of its citizens (‘governance’) and ethnically and religiously driven group loyalties (‘identity’) as they relate to insurgency and counterinsurgency. At the same time, it has acknowledged that this distinction between governance and identity as alternative bases for legitimacy is neither novel nor always stark in practice. Still, the preceding discussion reveals three crucial reasons for further study in this area.

First, current counterinsurgency doctrine and policy continues to reflect conventional wisdom that was forged in the 1950s and 1960s in response to formative experiences in that era, the heyday of Maoist people's wars, modernization theory, and Cold War great power competition.86 In particular, the concept that ‘winning hearts and minds’ is central to counterinsurgency strategy, while rhetorically flexible enough to transcend narrow interpretation, is, historically speaking, firmly rooted in this intellectual tradition of a materialist conception of social welfare, justice, and legitimate authority.

Second, most of the social scientific literature in this field has focused on explaining the causes of revolution and insurgency, not on the causes of success or failure in the conduct of counterinsurgency.87

Third, the current war in Iraq presents new and promising empirical opportunities to illuminate these issues.

In sum, policymakers would benefit from a framework for developing and analyzing counterinsurgency strategy that is integrative of a diverse range of approaches to governance, identity, and legitimacy. A great deal of work will be needed to build such a framework, but the concepts outlined here will be important building blocks in that task. And in the meantime, policymakers might consider adopting a new version of the classic metaphor of counterinsurgency: much may depend in the coming years on finer discrimination between the ‘hard hearts’ of insurgents who fight for their identities and the ‘open minds’ of insurgents who fight for better governance.

Notes

¹Field Manual 3-24 / Marine Corps Warfighting Publication 3-33.5, Counterinsurgency (Washington DC: HQ, Dept. of the Army; HQ, Marine Corps Combat Development Command, Dept. of the Navy, Dec. 2006) (hereafter referred to as FM 3-24 / MCWP 3-33.5), 1-21. The views in this article are the author's own.

²Quoted in Bob Woodward, ‘CIA Said Instability Seemed “Irreversible”’, Washington Post, 12 July 2007, 1.

³For a concise summary, see Ian F.W. Beckett, Modern Insurgencies and Counterinsurgencies: Guerrillas and Their Opponents Since 1750 (London/New York: Routledge 2001), 26–43.

⁴The Maxim gun was one of the first machine guns invented (patented 1882) and was used to devastating effect in late nineteenth century colonial wars. See Charles E. Callwell, Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice, 3rd ed. (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press 1996, orig. published in 1906), 440–1.

⁵This general type of warfare goes by many names: revolutionary, insurgency and counterinsurgency, irregular, guerrilla, fourth-generation, and low-intensity conflict, to name the most prominent ones. Differences among these terms can be distinguished, but all of them refer to warfare conducted by relatively weak parties against more powerful adversaries by often sporadic and indirect means and usually toward the end of gaining political concessions or control. I will favor the terms ‘counterinsurgency’ and ‘irregular warfare’ here.

⁶For example, David Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice (New York: Praeger 1964), 74–90; Robert G. K. Thompson, Defeating Communist Insurgency: The Lessons of Malaya and Vietnam (New York: Praeger 1966), 50–8; Anthony James Joes, Resisting Rebellion: The History and Politics of Counterinsurgency (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky 2004), 233–46; Bard O'Neill, Insurgency and Terrorism: From Revolution to Apocalypse, 2nd ed. (Washington DC: Potomac Books 2005), 164–90; Eliot Cohen, Conrad Crane, Jan Horvath and John Nagl, ‘Principles, Imperatives, and Paradoxes of Counterinsurgency’, Military Review (March–April 2006), 49–53, and FM 3-24 / MCWP 3-33.5, 1–21 to 1–29.

⁷Mao Tse-tung, On Guerilla Warfare, trans. by Samuel B. Griffith (New York: Praeger, 1961), Chapter 6, p.4 and Chapter 1, p.2.

⁸The first use of the phrase ‘hearts and minds’ in the context of revolutionary warfare is often attributed to the British administrator during part of the 1948–60 Malayan Emergency, Lt.-Gen. (later Field Marshal) Sir Gerald Templer, who argued in 1952 that ‘the answer lies not in pouring more troops into the jungle, but in the hearts and minds of the people’. See Richard L. Clutterbuck, The Long, Long War; Counterinsurgency in Malaya and Vietnam (New York: Praeger 1966), 3; and Richard Stubbs, Hearts and Minds in Guerrilla Warfare: The Malayan Emergency 1948–1960 (Oxford: OUP 1989), 1–2.

⁹Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare, 74.

¹⁰Thompson, Defeating Communist Insurgency, 112–13, 161.

¹¹O'Neill, Insurgency and Terrorism, 171–2.

¹²Thomas Mockaitis, ‘Winning Hearts and Minds in the “War on Terrorism”', Small Wars and Insurgencies 14/1 (March 2003), 21–2.

¹³Thomas X. Hammes, ‘Countering Evolved Insurgent Networks’, Military Review (July–August 2006), 20–1.

¹⁴Central Intelligence Agency, Guide to the Analysis of Insurgency (undated), 8.

¹⁵FM 3-24/MCWP 3-33.5, p. 1–21.

¹⁶ Irregular Warfare Joint Operating Concept (Version 1.0) (Washington DC: US Dept. of Defense, June 2007), 18.

¹⁷Max Weber, ‘The Types of Legitimate Domination’ in Michael Hechter (ed.), Theories of Social Order (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press 1978), 184.

¹⁸See John Shy and Thomas W. Collier, ‘Revolutionary War’ in Peter Paret (ed.), Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age (Princeton Univ. Press 1986), esp. 826–8, 838–45.

¹⁹See Thomas A. Marks, Maoist Insurgency Since Vietnam (London: Routledge 1996).

²⁰Representative works include David Apter, The Politics of Modernization (Univ. of Chicago Press 1965); Cyril E. Black, The Dynamics of Modernization: A Study in Comparative History (New York: Harper & Row 1966); Walt Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press 1960); and Edward Shils, Political Development in the New States (The Hague: Mouton 1962).

²¹See Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press 2003); and Lisa Anderson, Pursuing Truth, Exercising Power: Social Science and Public Policy in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Columbia Univ. Press 2003), 94–97.

²²See D. Michael Shafer, Deadly Paradigms: The Failure of US Counterinsurgency Policy (Princeton Univ. Press 1988), esp. Chapter 5; Douglas S. Blaufarb, The Counterinsurgency Era: US Doctrine and Performance, 1950to the Present (New York: Free Press 1977), Chapter 3; Austin Long, On “Other War”: Lessons from Five Decades of RAND Counterinsurgency Research (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corp. 2006), 21–3.

²³Walt W. Rostow, ‘Guerrilla Warfare in the Underdeveloped Areas’, Speech at the US Army Special Warfare School, Fort Bragg, North Carolina, 28 June 1961.

²⁴Beckett, Modern Insurgencies and Counterinsurgencies, 186.

²⁵Nathan Leites and Charles Wolf Jr, Rebellion and Authority: An Analytic Essay on Insurgent Conflicts (Chicago: Markham 1970), 150. Also see Shafer, Deadly Paradigms, 116–18.

²⁶Shafer, Deadly Paradigms, 108.

²⁷Ibid., 104.

²⁸Timothy J. Lomperis, From People's War to People's Rule: Insurgency, Intervention, and the Lessons of Vietnam (Chapel Hill: Univ. of N. Carolina Press 1996), 66.

²⁹Beckett, Modern Insurgencies and Counterinsurgencies, 81.

³⁰Samuel Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press 1968), 4.

³¹Charles Tilly, ‘Does Modernization Breed Revolution?’Comparative Politics 5/3 (April 1973), 430–6.

³²Quoted in Stephen G. Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area in the World: John F. Kennedy Confronts Communist Revolution in Latin America (Chapel Hill/ London: Univ. of N. Carolina Press, 1999), 30.

³³Timothy Wickham-Crowley, Guerillas and Revolution in Latin America: A Comparative Study of Insurgents and Regimes Since 1956 (Princeton Univ. Press, 1992), 92.

³⁴See Jeffery Paige, Agrarian Revolution: Social Movements and Export Agriculture in the Underdeveloped World (New York: The Free Press 1975).

³⁵See James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press 1976) and Eric R. Wolf, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper & Row 1969).

³⁶See Samuel Popkin, The Rational Peasant: The Political Economy of Rural Society in Vietnam (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press 1979).

³⁷Ted Robert Gurr, Why Men Rebel (Princeton Univ. Press 1970), 359. Also see James C. Davies, ‘Toward a Theory of Revolution’, American Sociological Review 27/1 (Feb. 1962), 5–19.

³⁸Leites and Wolf, Rebellion and Authority.

³⁹Ibid., see esp. 13, 37.

⁴⁰Ibid., 18–20.

⁴¹See Wray R. Johnson, ‘From Counterinsurgency to Stability and Support Operations: The Evolution of US Military Doctrine for Foreign Internal Conflict, 1961–1996’ (PhD dissertation, The Florida State Univ. 1997).

⁴²See ibid., Part IV, John A. Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (Univ. of Chicago Press 2005), 205–8, Robert Cassidy, Counterinsurgency and the Global War on Terror: Military Culture and Irregular Warfare (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International 2006).

⁴³Field Manual 100–20, Low Intensity Conflict (Washington DC: Dept. of the Army, Jan. 1981). See Johnson, ‘From Counterinsurgency to Stability and Support Operations’, Parts IV and V.

⁴⁴Milton J. Esman, Introduction to Ethnic Conflict (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press 2004), 18.

⁴⁵Weber, ‘The Types of Legitimate Domination’, 184.

⁴⁶Quoted in Donald Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press 1985), 53.

⁴⁷Ibid., 52.

⁴⁸Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan, Ethnicity: Theory and Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press 1975), 18.

⁴⁹Walker Connor, Ethnonationalism: The Quest for Understanding (Princeton Univ. Press 1994), 101.

⁵⁰Ibid., xi, 39–42.

⁵¹Anthony D. Smith, National Identity (Reno: Univ. of Nevada Press 1991), 9–12. Smith's treatment of this topic continues on 79–84. Also see Esman, Introduction to Ethnic Conflict, 40–3.

⁵²Smith, National Identity, 13.

⁵³Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, 88–9.

⁵⁴This summary draws esp. on Esman, Introduction to Ethnic Conflict, 30–4; Barbara Harff and Ted Robert Gurr, Ethnic Conflict in World Politics, 2nd ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press 2004), 96–7; and Brendan O'Leary, ‘Nationalism and Ethnicity: Research Agendas on Theories of their Sources and their Regulation’ in Daniel Chirot and Martin Seligman (eds.), Ethnopolitical Warfare: Causes, Consequences, and Possible Solutions (Washington DC: American Psychological Assoc. 2001), 37–48.

⁵⁵See Connor's description, Ethnonationalism, 103–6.

⁵⁶See Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (New Perspectives on the Past) (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press 1983).

⁵⁷For example, Elizabeth Crighton and Martha Abele MacIver, ‘The Evolution of Protracted Ethnic Conflict: Group Dominance and Political Underdevelopment in Northern Ireland and Lebanon’, Comparative Politics 23/2 (Jan. 1991), 127–42; David A. Lake and Donald Rothchild, ‘Containing Fear: The Origins and Management of Ethnic Conflict’, International Security 21/2 (Fall 1996), 41–75; Barry Posen, ‘The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict’, Survival 35/1 (Spring 1993), 27–47.

⁵⁸See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso Press 1991).

⁵⁹Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, ‘Beyond “Identity”’, Theory and Society 29/1 (Feb. 2000), 6.

⁶⁰Ted Robert Gurr, Minorities at Risk: A Global View of Ethnopolitical Conflicts (Washington DC: US Institute of Peace 1993), 91.

⁶¹Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, 55, 66.

⁶²Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (New York: Norton 2006). Also see Connor, Ethnonationalism, 156.

⁶³Clark McCauley, ‘The Psychology of Group Identification and the Power of Ethnic Nationalism’ in Chirot and Seligman, Ethnopolitical Warfare, 359. Also see Miles Hewstone and Ed Cairns, ‘Social Psychology and Intergroup Conflict’ in ibid., 319–42.

⁶⁴See Hammes, ‘Countering Evolved Insurgent Networks’, 19.

⁶⁵See Gurr, Minorities at Risk, 69, 126; and Harff and Gurr, Ethnic Conflict in World Politics, 97.

⁶⁶Thompson, Defeating Communist Insurgency, 65.

⁶⁷In addition to the quotations here, see Connor, Ethnonationalism, 29–57, 72–4, 145–61; Harff and Gurr, Ethnic Conflict in World Politics, 96; Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, 13–14, 87, 96–135; and Smith, National Identity, 5, 125.

⁶⁸Connor, Ethnonationalism, 74, 146, 147. Note that this collection was published in 1994, but the essays from which these quotes are taken were published in 1984 and 1987.

⁶⁹Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, 186–7 (emphasis in original). A similar point is made by Indraneel Sircar, ‘Transnational Consociation in Northern Ireland and Bosnia-Herzegovina: The Role of Reference States in Post-Settlement Power Sharing’ (PhD dissertation, London School of Economics and Political Science 2006), 66.

⁷⁰Stathis N. Kalyvas, ‘The Ontology of “Political Violence”: Action and Identity in Civil Wars’, Perspectives in Politics 1/3 (Sept. 2003), 475–94, presents an argument for the difficulty of distinguishing between ‘political and private identities and actions’.

⁷¹Thomas A. Marks, ‘Ideology of Insurgency: New Ethnic Focus or Old Cold War Distortions', Small Wars and Insurgencies 15/1 (Spring 2004), 107–28.

⁷²Joes, Resisting Rebellion, 3.

⁷³Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, 'Greed and Grievance in Civil War', World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No. 28126, 21 Oct. 2001; and James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin, 'Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War', American Political Science Review 97/2 (Feb. 2003), 75–90.

⁷⁴Nicholas Sambanis, ‘Do Ethnic and Nonethnic Civil Wars Have the Same Causes? A Theoretical and Empirical Inquiry (Part I)’, Journal of Conflict Resolution 45/3 (June 2001), 259–82; and Ibrahim Elbadawi and Nicholas Sambanis, ‘How Much War Will We See? Explaining the Prevalence of Civil War’, Journal of Conflict Resolution 46/3 (June 2002), 307–34.

⁷⁵O'Neill, Insurgency and Terrorism, 15–19.

⁷⁶Steven Metz, The Future of Insurgency (Carlisle, PA: US Army War College/Strategic Studies Institute 1993).

⁷⁷Lomperis, From People's War to People's Rule, 55–9.

⁷⁸FM 3-24 / MCWP 3-33.5, 1-5, 1-8, 3-22.

⁷⁹See Ian Beckett, ‘The Future of Insurgency’, Small Wars and Insurgencies 16/1 (March 2005), 27–31; Cassidy, Counterinsurgency and the Global War on Terror, reviewed in Beatrice Heuser, ‘The Cultural Revolution in Counter-Insurgency’, Journal of Strategic Studies 30/1 (Feb. 2007), 151–71; Frank Hoffman, ‘Neo-Classical Counterinsurgency?’Parameters 37/2 (Summer 2007), esp. 81–2; Steven Metz and Raymond Millen, Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in the 21st Century: Reconceptualizing Threat and Response (Carlisle, PA: US Army War College/Strategic Studies Institute Nov. 2004), 2–3; and Richard H. Shultz Jr and Andrea J. Dew, Insurgents, Terrorists and Militias: The Warriors of Contemporary Combat (New York: Columbia Univ. Press 2006).

⁸⁰For overviews, see Ahmed Hashim, Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in Iraq (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press 2006), Chapters 1–3; and In Their Own Words: Reading the Iraqi Insurgency (Brussels International Crisis Group, 15 Feb. 2006).

⁸¹For two trenchant critiques of this propensity as implemented in Iraq, see Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin Press 2006), esp. Chapters 8–9; and Brig. Nigel Aylwin-Foster (British Army), ‘Changing the Army for Counterinsurgency Operations’, Military Review (Nov.–Dec. 2005), 2–15.

⁸²For example, Ian F.W. Beckett, Insurgency in Iraq: An Historical Perspective (Carlisle, PA: US Army War College/ Strategic Studies Institute Jan. 2005), 2, 15–18; Robert M. Cassidy, ‘Back to the Street Without Joy: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Vietnam and Other Small Wars’, Parameters 34/2 (Summer 2004), 73–83; Andrew Krepinevich, ‘How to Win in Iraq’, Foreign Affairs 84/5 (Sept./Oct. 2005); Melvin Laird, ‘Iraq: Learning the Lessons of Vietnam’, Foreign Affairs 84/6 (Nov./Dec. 2005) and Richard Lowry, ‘What Went Right’, National Review, 9 May 2005.

⁸³See David Kilcullen, ‘Counterinsurgency Redux’, Survival 48/4 (Winter 2006–07), 111–30; Edward Luttwak, ‘Dead End: Counterinsurgency Warfare as Military Malpractice’, Harper's, Feb. 2007; Steven Metz, Rethinking Insurgency (Carlisle, PA: US Army War College/Strategic Studies Institute June 2007); and Hoffman, ‘Neo-Classical Counterinsurgency?’, 71–87.

⁸⁴Stephen Biddle, ‘Seeing Baghdad, Thinking Saigon’, Foreign Affairs 85/2 (March/April 2006). Richard Betts also argues that ‘In Iraq, the conflict  … is about identity rather than ideology’. See ‘Blowtorch Bob in Baghdad’, The American Interest 1/4 (Summer 2006), 36.

⁸⁵Keith Mines, ‘Economic Tools in Counterinsurgency and Post-conflict Stabilization: Lessons Learned (and Relearned) in al Anbar, Iraq, 2003–04’, E-Notes, Foreign Policy Research Institute, Philadelphia, USA, 29 Sept. 2006.

⁸⁶As a RAND Corp. report from 2006 asserted, ‘COIN theory  … is almost entirely a product of the Cold War’. Long, On “Other War”, 21.

⁸⁷Lomperis, From People's War to People's Rule, and Shafer, Deadly Paradigms, are important exceptions. Lomperis, however, explicitly avoids comparing alternative conceptions of legitimacy in favor of experimenting with the interpretive utility of a single assumption regarding legitimacy (xi). Lomperis also focuses exclusively on ‘people's wars’ and subscribes to the transition from ‘traditional’ to ‘modern’ societies as the primary cause of these types of insurgencies (59–66).