Quote Originally Posted by Rifleman View Post
120mm,

Care to expound on that a little more please?
I wasn't prepared to really expound on it, as I've had a kernel of an idea for awhile, concerning this.

A couple months ago, the COIN center asked for research into the role of criminality on COIN.

I don't think most of what we call "criminality" in COIN is actually "criminal", as Society is mainly responsible for defining "criminal" activity. As insurgents really don't answer to our society, but to their own peers, what they're doing isn't actually criminal.

So the guy who grows poppies in Afghanistan to make into drugs isn't criminal, at all. He's just "making his way, the only way he knows how" as the country song goes. "His" society tells him that is acceptable behavior.

Same thing with so-called "criminal" gangs. As long as the government tolerates gang formation, gangs get to make their own societal rules, and the individuals committing crimes are not necessarily individually "criminal", but rather members of a sub-society behaving in accordance with that society's rules.

Where this ties in to pushing democracy to the lowest level, is that the lower you push democratic participation, to include things like policing and service in the military/government organization, the harder you crowd sub-societal groups, like criminal gangs.

The problem is, how do you prevent the lower level organizations from mimicking criminal gangs and prevent the creation of a bunch of independent and out of control militias in every neighborhood in America?

To me, democracy doesn't just magically appear on election day. It involves citizens acting within the community on things like security, infrastructure and decisions about direction and economics. The more "professional" police become, and the more tax dollars you send to higher than community level, and the more "professional" the military becomes, the less and less connection ordinary citizens feel toward the higher levels of gov't. And the less effective that central gov't becomes, vis-a-vis it's citizens.

Like I said, I wasn't prepared to really write a thesis on it. There are still holes in this idea, but I think there might be something there.