Everything You Know About Counterinsurgency History Is (possibly) Wrong!

[Taiko]

And which framework would that be, since there are several that use that term?

1. Power is an individual's capacity to act, but above all to influence the actions or feelings of other individuals.

2. Power is the capacity of a political unit to impose its will on other units.

Behaviour is empirical - you can see it; "power" isn't, it has to be inferred.

Power is empirical, it can be measured by the number of the barrel of guns being pointed at me, or the votes cast in a ballet box. It can be measured by the resources, including technological, a individual or state brings to bear in order to impose its will on another individual or political unit to change their behaviour. This can be measured when the will to resist ceases: they stop shooting at me and blowing stuff up, or accept the vote as valid and prepare for the next election cycle. If this was not the case then the balance of power would be a hollow phrase indeed. The material sources of power are easily measured, the ideational sources of power less so.

Also, at least as far as research methods are concerned, even within a nomonological-deductive framework in the social sciences, you can always exchange the dependant ind independant variables. A strict deductive methodology that doesn't allow that is usually called a theology .

Far from being a theology, a deductive approach can build a phenomenological abstraction which can provide a superior generalization of the cause and effect of the phenomenon being studied. I'll take one CvC for a bus load of Jominis or Bulows any day of the week.

Personally, I think you are confusing the potentiality for power (however that may be defined) with the socio-technical conditions that allow for or inhibit the practice of power.

Not at all. I am speaking truth to power. I am pointing out that your theoretical proposition is itself an exercise in power. The mask of ontology and methodology can only hide an ideology for so long

Sounds like another axiomatic assumption - did you want an "Amen, Brother" after it ?

More seriously, anyone who doesn't think that changes in technology will cause (in the inductive sense I described earlier) changes in behaviour needs to seriously rethink their position.

Hello pot meet the kettle. This statement is a tautology based on a teleological assumption arrived at via induction. You have identified the effect, now lets finish the proposition by identifying the cause, the struggle for power.

I'll see your Dilthey and raise you an Aron