Is an insurgent an insurgent?

[Dayuhan]

Some take aways from this perspective:

1. Insurgency happens when governments fail; so it is the fault of the civil government for breaking it, and the responsibility of the civil government to fix it.
2. COIN is continuous and primarily CIVIL and focused on providing good governance to the populace.
3. Any COIN effort focused just on defeating the military arm of the insurgency merely suppresses it.
4. Any effort to target key leaders or ideology without addressing poor governance also merely suppresses the insurgency. New leaders, new movements, new ideology will emerge to lead the populace once again.
5. The goal of insurgency is not to "defeat" the insurgent, but to repair the poor governance and generally move the populace back into the fold. Efforts to "defeat" are highly likely to be counter to your true goal. After all, how much of the populace must one kill to re-earn their support?

Very much a valid analysis, but there's an element that may require more attention.

Much of our discussion of governments and nations assumes functional nationhood, a condition often missing in practice. Many of the "nations" that figure prominently on the lists of troubled and violent states are not really "nations" at all, as most of us understand the concept. What appears to be a failure of government may be evidence that the "nation" as currently constituted is a fictitious construct and effectively ungovernable. In some cases territories arbitrarily designated "nations" can only be held together as such through despotism: if the people have freedom they will inevitably tend to splinter away from a "nation" that they never considered themselves to be part of in the first place. In such cases you can't "bring them back into the fold" because they were forced into the fold in the first place.

Part of the problem in managing these situations is the Western tendency to impose order at the expense of long-term stability. The process by which people move from clan to tribe to nation (ok, vastly oversimplified) is complex and often very messy: it took the ever-so-civilized Europeans many centuries of war to delineate and respect national boundaries. In much of the world this process was aborted by colonialism; it's still thrashing itself out and the process is messy. A system that is trying to move toward equilibrium may appear to be disorderly and unstable, but it is often far more stable than a system where change has been suppressed by the imposition of artificial order.

Change is often disorderly, and disorder often creates threats. Change is also necessary, and if we try to impose order by suppressing change, we will fail. We need to move beyond seeing change - often expressed through phenomena such as insurgency and opposition to national governments - as inherently negative and threatening, and try to manage the process of change, rather than reflexively trying to suppress it.

Edit:

This question from marct may relate in some cases to the issue discussed above:

How would you account for non-despotic regimes that have a high degree of violence in their populace?

One possibility may be that inherent entropy in an artificially constructed "nation" could produce violence whether or not the government is despotic... in some cases, despotism may be the only way to suppress that entropy, though it's not likely to be a permanent solution.