A New Era of Insurgent Recruitment: Have ‘New’ Civil Wars changed the Dynamic?

ABSTRACT

This article surveys the way in which political scientists and non-traditional scholars have analysed insurgencies and counterinsurgencies. We contend that insurgent recruitment is different in ‘new’ wars due to globalisation. We note continuity in ‘old’ and ‘new’ civil wars, but that collapsed states and the ascent of new types of insurgents with different power bases is markedly different from a pre-globalised era. While there is nothing new about the concept of contemporary insurgent recruiting processes, recruitment efforts have shifted towards a global audience, drastically changing the context and character of these wars and the ways in which they are waged.

Acknowledgements

A prior version of this article was presented at a conference, “Recruitment for Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in Colonial Warfare,” July 13-14, 2017, Koninklijk Instituut, Leiden, Netherlands.

Disclosure statement

The views expressed by Jahara Matisek in this article are his own views and do not reflect those of the US government, US Department of Defense, US Air Force, US Army, US Air Force Academy, or US Military Academy at West Point.

Notes

1. Before Taber (1965), Sir Charles Gwynn (1934) wrote of policing actions by the British Empire, but he was silent on ethnicity as a consideration when dealing with anti-government violence in British India.

2. For a deeper analysis of over analysing every variable in a war, refer to Hegre and Sambanis (2006).

3. High ranking journals in the United States in the 21st century have increasingly rejected qualitative articles, whereas journals in Europe give qualitative analyses more preference. For further discussion, see Horowitz (2010, chapter 2).

4. For example, Kriger (1992) stressed the coercive aspects of insurgent recruitment and challenged the idea of the altruistic anti-colonial rebels mobilising communities striving to be liberated. Though her analysis presaged later civil war classics (i.e., Kalyvas 2006, etc.), her book initially attracted harsh criticism from scholars (i.e., Moore (2005)) who privileged the ideological appeals of Zimbabwe’s insurgents.

5. Guinea-Bissau is a narco-state controlled by government and military officials. This is substantiated by interviews conducted at US Africa Command (AFRICOM), Stuttgart, Germany, 1–4 August 2017.

6. Both authors of this essay have extensive experience in conflict zones over the last decade, ranging from Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Middle East.

7. Several examples of over reliance on ‘ethnic group counting’ in data sets include Fearon and Laitin (2003), Wucherpfennig et al. (2012), Bosker and De Ree (2014), and Denny and Walter (2014).

8. Fujii (2013) gives numerous explanations on the strategic value of armed actors displaying violence as a sort of spectacle to build their own social status and capital.

9. FM 3–24 Counterinsurgency (2006) was so popular that it was published at a university press: The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, Forewords by General David H. Petraeus, Lt. General James F. Amos, and Lt. Colonel John A. Nagl (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007).

10. Prior to 2016, the joint U.S. military manual known as Joint Publication (JP) 3–07 Stability (2016) was referred to as ‘Stability Operations.’ This shift on American military doctrine and its lexicon change is reflective of the institution being engaged in perpetual wars of simultaneously engaging in post-war reconstruction, state-building, and COIN, and its desire to move such operations to the strategic level.

Additional information

Funding

Will Reno benefitted from funding from the Norwegian University of Life Sciences // Research Council of Norway, ‘The Jihadist War Economies Project.’ Jahara Matisek benefited from funding from the Social Science Research Council and Northwestern University’s Buffett Institute for Global Studies, Program for African Studies, and the Department of Political Science.

Notes on contributors

William Reno

William Reno is a Professor in the department of Political Science at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, USA. He is the Director of the African Studies Program at the Northwestern University, where he specialises in African politics, the politics of state collapse and organisation, and the behaviour of non-state armed groups.

Jahara Matisek

Jahara Matisek holds a PhD in Political Science from Northwestern University. He is a pilot and officer in the U.S. Air Force, and is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Military and Strategic Studies at the US Air Force Academy and is a Non-Resident Fellow with the Modern War Institute at West Point, Colorado Springs, Colorado, USA.