The revisionist historiography of Britain’s decolonisation conflicts and political science theses of civilian victimisation in counterinsurgency

ABSTRACT

Recent historical research exposed the myth of self-restraint as the distinctive feature of British counterinsurgency during decolonisation. This article shows that the revisionist historiography of British counterinsurgency has important, but unnoticed, implications for political scientists. Specifically, historical scholarship challenges the predictions and causal mechanisms of the main social scientific theses of civilian victimisation in counterinsurgency. Using revisionist historians’ works as a source of data, I test those theses against Britain’s decolonisation conflicts. I find that they do not pass the test convincingly. I conclude that political scientists should be more willing to explore the theoretical implications of new historical evidence on counterinsurgency campaigns.

KEYWORDS:

• Historiography
• British decolonisation
• counterinsurgency
• civilian victimisation
• non-combatants
• theory
• test

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Thompson, Defeating Communist Insurgency.

2. Nagl, Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam, 205; Charters, “The British Adaptation to Low Intensity Conflicts,” 194, 228; Mockaitis, “The Origins of British Counterinsurgency,” 213, 215; Mockaitis, British Counterinsurgency 1919–1960, 57; Mockaitis, “Low-Intensity Conflict,” 10–12; Thornton, “The British Army and the Origins of its Minimum Force Philosophy.” See also McInnes, Hot War Cold War, 116–7; Ucko, “Countering Insurgents Through Distributed Operations,” 51–63; and Mahnken, “The British Approach to Counterinsurgency,” 227–32 .

3. Some of the most significant revisionist works are Newsinger, “Minimum Force, British Counterinsurgency”; Newsinger, British Counterinsurgency; French, The British Way in Counterinsurgency; Grob-Fitzgibbon, Imperial Endgame; Anderson, Histories of the Hanged; Elkins, Britain’s Gulag; Bennett, Fighting the Mau Mau; French, Fighting EOKA. See also Reis, “The Myth of British Minimum Force”; Dixon, “Hearts and Minds?”; Hack, “The Malayan Emergency as Counterinsurgency Paradigm”; Hack, “Everyone Lived in Fear”; Bennett, “A Very Salutary Effect”; and Anderson, “British Abuse and Torture.”

4. Reis, “The Myth of British Minimum Force,” 275.

5. French, The British Way in Counterinsurgency, chapter 4.

6. Hack, “Everyone Lived in Fear.”

7. These phases have been described as counter-terror (1948–949), clear and hold (1950–1952), and optimisation (1952–1960). See Ibid., 673.

8. Since this article tests political science arguments about civilian victimisation in counterinsurgency, it is necessary to consider the main definitions provided by political scientists themselves. According to Alexander Downes civilian victimisation would be a ‘government-sanctioned military strategy that intentionally targets and kills non-combatants or involves operations that will predictably kill large numbers of non-combatants’. See Downes, Targeting Civilians, 14. Downes’ definition, however, would miss acts of violence that may not be intended to kill but would still harm civilians, like rape. Ivan Arreguìn-Toft offers a more comprehensive definition of civilian victimisation as ‘the deliberate or systematic harm on non-combatants (e.g. rape, murder, torture) in pursuit of a military or political objective’. See Arreguìn-Toft, How the Weak Win Wars, 31. This definition is consistent with recent studies on civilian suffering in warfare, according to which violence against non-combatants includes murder, torture, rape, dispossession, deportation and displacement, disease and famine. See Slim, Killing Civilians, chapters 2 and 3. Accepting such a comprehensive understanding of the concept, this article will use the terms civilian victimisation, civilian targeting, and indiscriminate violence as synonyms.

9. These campaigns were the major sources of evidence in the historical debate on the characteristics of British counterinsurgency during decolonisation.

10. See Elman and Fendius Elman, eds. Bridges and Boundaries.

11. On political scientists’ reluctance to update their theories in response to new historical evidence, see Wohlforth, “A Certain Idea of Science.” See also Lieber, “The New History of World War I.”

12. Engelhardt, “Democracies, Dictatorships, and Counterinsurgency,” 57. See also Downes, Targeting Civilians in War, 212–3; Valentino, Final Solutions, 229–30; DeVore, “Institutions, Organisational Culture, and Counterinsurgency Operations,” 171–2; Nagl, Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam; and Long, The Soul of Armies, chapter 8.

13. George and Bennett, Case Studies and Theory Development, 21–2.

14. Ibid. 181; and Van Evera, Guide to Methods, 56.

15. See Beckett, Modern Insurgency and Counterinsurgency.

16. Since the historical scholarship on British decolonisation mostly addressed expeditionary counterinsurgency, this article will do the same. Interestingly, most of the detailed case studies elucidating the causal logic of political science theses of indiscriminate violence in anti-guerrilla warfare focus on expeditionary counterinsurgency. See notes 17 and 19.

17. Mack, “Why Big Nations Lose Small Wars”; Arreguin-Toft, How the Weak Win Wars; Merom, How Democracies Lose Small Wars; Engelhardt, “Democracies, Dictatorships, and Counterinsurgency”; Caverley, “The Myth of Military Myopia”; Caverley, “Explaining U.S. Military Strategy in Vietnam”; Downes, “Draining the Sea by Filling the Graves”; Lyall and Wilson III, “Rage against the Machines”; Byman, “Death Solves All Problems”; and Hazelton, “The ‘Hearts and Minds’ Fallacy.”

18. See especially the works by Merom, Caverley, and Lyall and Wilson III in note 17.

19. Valentino et al., “Draining the Sea”; Valentino, Final Solutions, chapter 6; Downes, Targeting Civilians in War, chapter 5; Kahl, “In the Crossfire or the Crosshairs?”; DeVore, “Institutions, Organisational Culture, and Counterinsurgency Operations”; and Long, The Soul of Armies.

20. Merom, How Democracies Lose Small Wars, 15, 18–21, 24. On democracy as a source of self-restraint see also Engelhardt, “Democracies, Dictatorships, and Counterinsurgency.”

21. Caverley, “The Myth of Military Myopia,” 120, 127–39.

22. Ibid., 140–55.

23. DeVore, “Institutions, Organisational Culture, and Counterinsurgency Operations.”

24. Posen, The Sources of Military Doctrine, 41–59.

25. DeVore, “Institutions, Organisational Culture, and Counterinsurgency Operations,” 174.

26. Ibid., 175.

27. Kier, “Culture and Military Doctrine,” 69–70; Kahl, “In the Crossfire or the Crosshairs?,” 37–8; and Long, The Soul of Armies, chapter 2.

28. For a historical study that shows how military culture shapes the use of indiscriminate violence in counterinsurgency see Hull, Absolute Destruction.

29. Lyall and Wilson III, “Rage against the Machines,” 72.

30. Ibid., 75–7.

31. Ibid.

32. Valentino et al., “Covenants without the Sword,” 349–50.

33. Salter, Barbarians and Civilisation in International Relations, 38–9.

34. Slim, Killing Civilians, 122.

35. Ibid., 204–9.

36. Downes, Targeting Civilians in War, 31–2.

37. Valentino et al., “Draining the Sea,” 385–6.

38. Ibid., 386–7. As Hugo Slim points out, the decision to use indiscriminate violence for strategic reasons does not deny the existence of civilians, but suspends the principle of non-combatant immunity temporarily for the sake of military necessity. Slim, Killing Civilians, 122–3, 151–61.

39. Ibid.; Downes, Targeting Civilians in War, 165–77, 212–3, 237–8.

40. Alexander Downes, for instance, used large samples and statistical methods to test desperation to win against regime type, military organisational factors, and the image of the enemy as causes of civilian targeting in warfare; however, his data set only includes interstate conventional wars. In spite of that, Downes does contend that desperation to win would explain civilian targeting in anti-guerrilla warfare too, but he only tests his candidate causal factor on a single case of counterinsurgency: the Second-Anglo Boer War (1900–1902). See Downes, Targeting Civilians in War, chapters 2 and 5.

41. See Valentino et al., “Draining the Sea.” Valentino et al. only considered cases in which the counterinsurgent intentionally killed at least 50,000 civilians in five years. One may presume that factors that can account for mass killing and genocide can also explain cases in which violence against non-combatants resulted in a lower number of civilian deaths. This article suggests that, in fact, this is not necessarily the case.

42. See Merom, How Democracies Lose Small Wars; Caverley, “The Myth of Military Myopia”; Long, The Soul of Armies; Kahl, “In the Crossfire or the Crosshairs?.”

43. Engelhardt, “Democracies, Dictatorships, and Counterinsurgency,” 57. See also Downes, Targeting Civilians in War, 212–3; Valentino, Final Solutions, 229–30; and DeVore, “Institutions, Organisational Culture, and Counterinsurgency Operations,” 171–2.

44. Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 311–27; and Bennett, Fighting the Mau Mau, 223–4.

45. Elkins, Britain’s Gulag, chapter 3; Newsinger, British Counterinsurgency, 77–80; and Anderson, “British Abuse and Torture.”

46. Bennett, Fighting the Mau Mau, 165–70.

47. Blacker, “The Demography of Mau Mau,” 225–6.

48. French, The British Way in Counterinsurgency, 222–6.

49. Bennett, Fighting the Mau Mau, 48–50.

50. Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 326; and Elkins, Britain’s Gulag, 291–8, 332–40.

51. See note 6 above.

52. Bennett, “A Very Salutary Effect.”

53. Ibid., 419.

54. Hack, “Everyone Lived in Fear,” 673.

55. Ibid.

56. Newsinger, British Counterinsurgency, 32.

57. Bennett, Fighting the Mau Mau, 43–4.

58. Ibid., chapter 3; and Reis, “The Myth of British Minimum Force.”

59. French, The British Way in Counterinsurgency, 16–27, 33–41.

60. Ibid., 167–73. See also French, Fighting EOKA, 205–6, 214; and Bennett, Fighting the Mau Mau, 194.

61. See Bennett, “A Very Salutary Effect”; Bennett, Fighting the Mau Mau, 29. Revisionist historians, however, never contend that factors like the military culture of the British Army or lack of information were sufficient to explain British violence against civilians during decolonisation. They simply suggest that these factors are necessary, but in a multi-causal explanation including other contributing factors.

62. DeVore, “Institutions, Organisational Culture and Counterinsurgency Operations,” 174.

63. French, The British Way in Counterinsurgency, 76–82, 86–96.

64. Elkins, Britain’s Gulag; Anderson, “Surrogates of the State”; Branch, “Enemy Within”; and Branch, Defeating Mau Mau.

65. Bennett, Fighting the Mau Mau, 172–3.

66. Ibid., 173–5.

67. Branch, Defeating Mau Mau, 71; and Anderson, “Surrogates of the State.”

68. Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 130–2.

69. Anderson, “Surrogates of the State,” 164–5.

70. Bennett, Fighting the Mau Mau, chapter 8; and Grob-Fitzgibbon, Imperial Endgame, 274–5.

71. Elkins, Britain’s Gulag, 319–32; Anderson, ‘British Abuse and Torture’.

72. Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 315–7; and Blacker, “The Demography or Mau Mau,” 225–6.

73. Recent political science works on military culture in counterinsurgency acknowledge that the British Army was not the only organisation involved in the repression of the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya. Yet, those studies still miss that political leaders and civil agencies played the main role in shaping the fate of civilians. See, Long, The Soul of Armies, chapter 8.

74. Charters, The British Army and Jewish Insurgency, 88–9; and TNA, “Cyprus Emergency: Army Reinforcements, 1955–1958,” WO 32/16260.

75. The Jewish community in Palestine and the Greek Cypriot population numbered 560,000 and 521,000 respectively. See Newsinger, British Counterinsurgency, 12; and French, Fighting EOKA, 14.

76. Newsinger, British Counterinsurgency, 16–7, 96.

77. Ibid., 14; French, Fighting EOKA, 57–8, 73–4.

78. Anderson, “Policing and Communal Conflict,” 184–5.

79. Grob-Fitzgibbon, Imperial Endgame, 328–9, 335–6; Newsinger, British Counterinsurgency, 15–28.

80. French, Fighting EOKA, 194–202, 221–6, 233–6. Prisoners and captured documents were Britain’s main source of intelligence during the Cyprus campaign.

81. French, The British Way in Counterinsurgency, 67.

82. Holland, Britain and the Revolt in Cyprus, 268.

83. Ibid., 288.

84. Ibid., 187.

85. French, Fighting EOKA, 177.

86. Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 4.

87. Grob-Fitzgibbon, Imperial Endgame, 249.

88. Ibid., 256.

89. See Bennett, Fighting the Mau Mau, 12–9, 160–80.

90. Downes, Targeting Civilians in War, 212–3.

91. Hack, “Everyone Lived in Fear’; Hack, ‘The Malayan Emergency as Counterinsurgency Paradigm.”

92. See note 52 above.

93. Quoted in Ibid., 428.

94. Ibid., 424.

95. Guzzini, “The Significance and Roles of Teaching Theory,” 99.

96. Waltz, Theory of International Politics, 8–10.

97. Ucko, “The People Are Revolting.”

98. The historiography of Britain’s decolonisation conflicts would be less helpful as a source of data to test explanations for insurgent violence against civilians. Indeed, since revisionist historians focus on Britain’s performance in anti-guerrilla warfare, they mostly provide evidence about counterinsurgent violence. For a recent explanation for insurgent violence, see Boyle, ‘Bargaining, Fear, and Denial’. According to Boyle, insurgent violence would be a way of bargaining within and between sectarian communities competing for power. Insurgents’ attacks against civilians would signal capacity and willingness to fight to rival sects. Killing civilians would also help the perpetrator to maintain political momentum and attract more recruits than other armed groups in rival communities. At the same time, the show of power deriving from civilian targeting would enable armed groups to establish themselves in intra-sectarian political contests. The ensuing climate of fear would induce civilians to support those groups that can offer protection, which would encourage the proliferation of militias and cause further violence.

99. See Clayton, The Wars of French Decolonisation; Luttikhuis and Moses, eds. Colonial Counterinsurgency and Mass Violence; and Cann, Counterinsurgency in Africa.

100. Elman and Fendius Elman, “Negotiating International History,” 23.

101. Walter, Colonial Violence, chapter 3.

102. Ibid., 190–1.