Insurgency in the 21st Century
Just for chuckles and grins, I thought I'd toss the introduction to the book I'm working on up here. The title is Perdition's Gate: Insurgency in the 21st Century. It's under contract to Polity (although I'm past due so they may dump me). I only have about 50 additional pages written, but am plugging away.
The mere mention of insurgency evokes diverse images and emotions. For some, it is admirable, even glorious, with heroic freedom fighters throwing caution and personal safety to the wind in pursuit of elusive justice. For the populations who have lived through it, it is tragedy, a source of protracted danger and suffering, often with both insurgents and counterinsurgents acting as violent parasites. For security forces which confront it, it is a vexing and complex problem where strength and weakness take bizarre psychological forms, where the normal logic of strategy is twisted in strange ways, often leaving no good courses of action, only a series of bad and worse ones. For Western publics, the image is often of confusing and desultory wars in confusing, far away places stealing their treasure and youths. None of these are entirely wrong. Insurgency is all this. And more.
How can one thing have such radically diverse implications, even meanings? The answer is that insurgency is simply a strategy (albeit a psychologically complex one with a paradoxical logic). Its techniques vary in diverse venues. Insurgency in one cultural and historical setting is somewhat like insurgency in other ones, but is also very different. At its simplest, insurgency is a strategy adopted by groups which feel compelled to force a major alteration of the political situation in which they find themselves but see no other effective means to do so. They reject working within the existing political structures and are too weak to change in through a direct application of power, whether a coup de main or the waging of conventional war.
Like conventional war, insurgency has both an enduring essence and a changing nature. Its essence is protracted, asymmetric violence; political, legal, and ethical ambiguity; and the use of complex terrain, psychological warfare, and political mobilization. It arises when a group decides that the gap between their political expectations and the opportunities afforded them is unacceptable and can only be remedied by force. Insurgents avoid battlespaces where they are at a disadvantage--often the conventional military sphere--and focus on those where they can attain parity, particularly the psychological and the political. They seek to postpone decisive action, avoid defeat, sustain themselves, expand their support, and alter the power balance in their favor. And because insurgency involves a layered psychological complexity, multiple audiences and a range of participants with different methods and objectives, it is imbued with what Edward Luttwak called a “paradoxical logic”--what initially appears best may not be, and every positive action has negative implications as well.
Insurgency in some form has existed as long as there have been states and empires. As these political units expanded their territory and control, they sometimes encountered less formal organizations like tribes and clans, many with a warrior ethos and a tradition of raiding and small scale armed violence. These informal groupings lacked the resources to confront states and empires through conventional methods. They were, by contrast, practiced in the ways of irregular warfare and what later became known as guerrilla operations. So they did what they could. The result was asymmetric warfare that often dragged out for years, decades, even centuries. It may have not been modern insurgency with its focus on the psychological domain but it was, at least, "proto-insurgency." The same sometimes happened when populations under the control of a state or empire grew restive to the point of violent resistance or otherwise sought to further their ends through armed violence. Asymmetric methods, particularly guerrilla warfare, piracy, or organized banditry were their only options.
Modern insurgency, then, is the linear descendent of protracted asymmetric warfare and other forms of irregular or guerrilla activity organized for political objectives and focused on the psychological battlespace. It too has existed for a very long time. It is impossible identify its historic beginnings. But, over time, it has varied in two dimensions. One is the role that insurgency plays in the wider security environment. It has vacillated, for instance, in strategic significance. At times it has played a major role in shaping the wider security environment, at other times it has been peripheral. Similarly, there have been periods when insurgency is closely linked to other forms of conflict. In the Cold War, for instance, it was surrogate war between superpowers concerned that direct confrontation between them might escalate to nuclear armageddon. At other times, insurgencies raged with little relationship to the interaction of great powers (the African, Asian, and American insurgencies of the 1990s, for instance). The second dimension is the form and dynamics of insurgency itself. This has multiple components which will be explored in this book.
The question, then, is why this book has been written. There are two central reasons. First, insurgency itself—and, by necessity, counterinsurgency—are changing. One of the most important tasks for both scholars and professionals working the fields of security and intelligence is to understand the distinction between insurgency's enduring essence and its changing nature. It would be a mistake to err too far on either the side of continuity or change. Insurgency is different in some key ways than during its "golden age" of the second half of the 20th century. But not everything has transformed. Throughout this book, then, we will point a finer point on the observation that insurgency has both an enduring essence and a changing nature, seeking to add analytical meat to that skeleton of an idea.
Originally Posted by selil
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