Since Entropy has added "good governance", which is central to COL Jones' populace-centric construct, I'm going to add one more term, "legitimacy", as viewed by Timothy J. Lomperis, Vietnam's Offspring:The Lesson of Legitimacy (Winter 1986, Conflict Quarterly).

From that, we have this chart:

Domestic Legitimacy.jpg

In this chart (more fully discussed in the article), Lomperis is not considering "legitimacy" from the viewpoint of a nation-state; but from the different viewpoints of persons (three levels) in each of two incumbant models and the revolutionary insurgency model.

The individual "legitimacy issues" (which Lomperis considers fluid and variable) look much to me like "causation" or "motivation" issues - whichever box you put them in.

I understand that the 1986 article was expanded and became a chapter in Lomperis' 1996 book, From People’s War to People’s Rule: Insurgency, Intervention, and the Lessons of Vietnam. Only two reviews, but the second (from 2005) is interesting:

This is a book about the non-lesson "lessons" of the Vietnam War. Published in 1996, it could be considered the most horribly confusing book about political-military strategy ever conceived. Based tightly on articulating research bounded inside a "paradigmatic presupposition," many early readers would venture to believe Lomperis wasted a decade of research to make sense of a society "in the throes of a revolutionary insurgency struggling to form and consolidate an independent and modernizing state." But reading this book in 2005 makes it all relevant. It actually makes perfect sense, so much so that when read and digested properly, it can be used to predict not only how the newly formed Iraqi government will stabilize and prevail, but will also predict when it will happen by month and year, and that will determine the US exit strategy.
....
To bring about the change of government from turmoil due to insurgency and into a sphere of stability, Chapter 11 is the most interesting and useful because it demonstrates how to create a timeline for an exit strategy. Using lessons from six case studies ranging from Mao's long march in China from 1920-1949, Greece 1941-1949, Philippines 1946-1956, Malaya 1948-1960, Cambodia-Laos 1949-1975, to Sendero Luminoso's Peru 1970-1992, Lomperis benchmarked insurgent successes and defeats in a smartly laid out timeline that identifies factors important to legitimate governments. He then plots categories and possible futures which are laid out for policy analyst to mull over. Lomperis' work shows that from legitimate national elections to victory will take approximately five years to achieve, if, all involved will stay the course.
I guess I will get sucked in to see what he actually says.

Regards

Mike