The occupier's dilemma: Problem collaborators

ABSTRACT

Every occupying power recruits collaborators but potential recruits vary with respect to their acceptance by occupied populations. That matters because the legitimacy of the occupation regime facilitates securing the war aims of the occupying power. This article surveys the different reasons why collaborators often elicit popular contempt, a response which may inspire insubordination and resistance, to produce a conceptual stencil of the optimal rather than the ideal collaborator. Limited pools of potential recruits mean that occupying powers may not be able to recruit ideal candidates. The resulting conceptual stencil can serve a checkoff list for evaluating the utility of potential collaborators.

Notes

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11. Ibid., 270.

12. Ibid., 274.

13. Ibid., 274.

14. Ibid., 275.

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50. Ibid., 423.

51. Ibid., 553.

52. Ibid., 473–474, 554–556.

53. Ibid., 694–695.

54. Ibid., 705–706.

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63. Ibid., 232–233.

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68. Michela Wrong, It's Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistle-Blower (New York: Harper, 2009) 110, 112.

69. Ibid, 288.

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John Hickman

John Hickman ([email protected]) is a professor of political science in the Department of Government and International Studies at Berry College in Rome, Georgia, where he teaches comparative politics and international relations. He holds both a PhD in political science from the University of Iowa and a JD from Washington University, St. Louis. Hickman is the author of Selling Guantanamo (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013) and Space is Power: The Seven Rules of Territory (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016).