Quote Originally Posted by Bob's World View Post
Certainly all insurgencies are like snowflakes. No two manifests in the same way due to the unique circumstance of the micro-environments they are created in; but all share the same principles and factors for causation...

...Once one gets to looking past the fact that "all snowflakes are different" and gets to looking to how they are similar, one can begin to craft effective preventative and countering measures. The vast majority of those involve not the populace, but rather the government.

"Populaces do not fail governments, it is governments which fail the populaces".
"All" and "always" are troublesome words. Certainly many, possibly most insurgencies are conflicts between "the government" and "the populace" that trace back to weak or bad governance, but it would be dangerous to say "all". Sometimes the root cause is conflict among portions of the populace, often portions with incompatible definitions of "good governance".

Quote Originally Posted by Bob's World View Post
As to your paper, I agree with those who suggest that you pick one small target and laser in on it. Masters and Ph.D.s are intended to be an inch wide and a mile deep. If you go for a mile wide and an inch deep, drilling down deeper where necessary across the problem, you will gain great wisdom, but struggle in your academic pursuits.
An inch wide and a mile deep is perhaps not a hole one wants to spend a career in, but there are good reasons to start a career with that experience. Until you've gone deep and developed specialist knowledge you really don't understand or appreciate what depth is, and how much there is to know about every fraction of every picture. That can lead to dangerous overconfidence. I don't see wide and shallow as a road to wisdom; necessarily, especially without that base of specialized knowledge. Too often it leads to dangerously superficial conclusions.