Defining Insurgency

[Dayuhan]

Looking at the RCJ definition:

Insurgency:An illegal political challenge to a governing body that may be either violent or non-violent in terms of tactics employed and campaign design.

and the Steve Metz definition:

Insurgency is a strategy used by a weak organization against a power structure and the organizations which dominate it.

One difference is immediately obvious. RCJ's definition involves a challenge to "a governing body", SM's merely requires a challenge to "a power structure and the organizations which dominate it". Under the former definition a "global insurgency" is not possible, as there is no global governing body. There is a global power structure with dominant organizations, so under the SM definition a global insurgency is possible.

In the RCJ elucidation of the causes of insurgency, a significant word appears in significant places:

Poor Governance:Poor Governance is assessed through the perceptions of each significant segment of society...

[Governance, that may be either effective or ineffective, that through the nature of its performance prevents the growth of conditions of insurgency. Subjective, and measured as assessed by each significant segment of a populace

What makes a segment of society "significant"? Is it the size of that segment, or its capacity to make noise, or its capacity for violence? The didtinction is, well, significant, because the modern media and the tactics of modern terrorism allow groups of relatively insignificant size to produce significant noise and significant violence. We cannot assume that whoever shouts loudest or blows things up speaks for a populace or a significant segment thereof.

That distinction answers the question of why so many groups don't adopt the non-violent mass movement techniques that have proven effective elsewhere. They can't. They simply don't have enough popular support to make these tactics effective. That's why they resort to terrorist tactics in the first place.

Where good governance exists insurgency is unlikely.

Good governance may protect against insurgency, but it does not peotect against political violence perpetrated by small groups with passionately held beliefs that are not shared by the bulk of the populace. If I believe that the US needs to be an Aryan state with no homosexuals, or if I believe that Indonesia should be placed under Shariah law, and if I'm willing to kill to advance these causes, my definition of good governance is so fundamentally incompatible with that of the nation at large that any government seen as "good" by the majority is only going to provoke me to violence.

It can be a mistake to mistake broad-based insurgency for the actions of a violent lunatic fringe. It can also be a mistake to mistake the actions of a violent lunatic fringe for a broad based insurgency. We can't assume that we're seeing one or the other, we have to assess each case according to its own unique conditions.