A few items worth considering and discussing.

1. what is it when one segment of a populace battles another within some state. Neither battling, presumably against or to change the state, but rather simply to sort out some issue of localized power, wealth, grievance, etc?

In the US we have called such things "feuds" as in the Hatfield's and the McCoys; also "Range Wars" or "Water Wars" as parties in an expanding West battled for control of critical grazing, or more often, water resources. More modernly "turf wars" between rival gangs of various criminal nature. But we don't call them insurgencies. Which such activities often cause challenges to the local authorities and impact the local populace, they are not politically motivated and are not driven from some base of political grievance within some segment of a populace, so IMO, are not insurgency.

We must learn to classify such illegal violence among the people by the nature of its roots, not by the nature of the form or tactics that it ultimately adopts. When we do this we shift from setting out to defeat the symptoms of such problems to one of setting out to actually resolve them in a relatively enduring manner.

2. "...they (governments) already know why there is an insurgency." Certainly sometimes this is true. I am sure there are many times government officials privately admit that actions within their control or that are directly or indirectly the cause of government action or policy are at the roots of the insurgency they face; while officially they blame ideology, religion, economy, foreign agents, internal malign actors, etc, etc etc and set out to defeat the symptoms. And yes, where no legal means are available to force such governments to make changes, illegal and violent means will often be taken up by such populaces in efforts to force the government to change. Bill actually validates my position with his counter position.

But do we think that some populaces prefer to fight and die and bring state violence down upon their self, their families and their communities when effective, trusted, and certain legal means that make sense within the context of their culture exist to address their grievances with that same government??? I need a couple of examples, because I can't think of any. I mean real examples, not ones like Afghanistan where sham elections of certain officials in Kabul exist, but where people have no true means to address the Northern Alliance monopoly of governance, and certainly no means that is rooted in the traditional processes of their culture and history.

3. "No one root cause." Totally agree. "Poor Governance" as I define and apply it is a broad family of critical perceptions between a populace and their governance. Insurgency is political and is about illegal popular challenges levied against a government by a segment of its populace. Other types of violence are not insurgency. It does us no good to lump such violence by the very character of the violence, but we must focus on who the conflict is between and what the essence of the movement is. Far too many types of conflict are lumped under insurgency these days. The most glaring example is the rise of criminal drug cartels in Mexico. Certainly they challenge government, but their primary purpose is profit and power by individuals and small business/family organization. That is not insurgency and requires a very different solution set to be applied against it.

Another example is AQ. What Kilcullen calls "global insurgency" conflates what are dozens of separate nationalist movements and localized grievances, that are indeed in most part each a unique insurgency against some government or another, all under the common banner of AQ who conducts UW to leverage those diverse pools of insurgent energy to their common cause, while applying a common unifying ideology. That is UW, that is not "global insurgency" any more than the efforts of the US and the Soviets to leverage the insurgent energy of various populaces to their larger Cold War goals in that era were "global insurgency."

We need to clean up our lexicon and how we group and define these things.

I know with great certainty that Bill Moore, Dayuhan and Bob Jones all are in about 90% agreement on these matters, yet we flog each other over the 10%. Yes, the 10% is important, but much of it is because the lexicon of this field of conflict is such a muddy mess.