Understanding Insurgent Resilience

This book examines terrorist and insurgent organisations and seeks to understand how such groups persist for so long, while introducing a new strategic doctrine for countering these organisations. The work discusses whether familial or meritocratic insurgencies are more resilient to counterinsurgency pressures. It argues that it is not the type of organization that determines resilience, but rather the efficiency functions of social capital and trust, which have different natures and forms, within them. It finds that while familial insurgencies can challenge incumbents from the start, they weaken over time, whereas meritocracies will generally strengthen. The book examines four of the most enduring and lethal insurgent organizations: the Haqqani Network in Afghanistan, Lashkar-e-Taiba in Pakistan, Jemaah Islamiyah in Indonesia, and the Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines. The author breaks down each group into its formative strengths and vulnerabilities and presents a bespoke model of strategic counterintelligence that can be used to manipulate, degrade and destroy each organization. This book will be of much interest to students of counterinsurgency, terrorism, intelligence, security and defence studies in general.

This edited volume critically assesses emerging trends in contemporary warfare and international interventionism as exemplified by the ‘local turn’ in counterinsurgent warfare. It asks how contemporary counterinsurgency approaches work and are legitimized; what concrete effects they have within local settings, and what the implications are for how we can understand the means and ends of war and peace in our post 9/11 world. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding recent changes in global liberal governance as well as the growing convergence of military and seemingly non-military domains, discourses and practices in the contemporary making of global political order.

Some rebel groups abuse noncombatant populations, while others exhibit restraint. Insurgent leaders in some countries transform local structures of government, while others simply extract resources for their own benefit. In some contexts, groups kill their victims selectively, while in other environments violence appears indiscriminate, even random. This book presents a theory that accounts for the different strategies pursued by rebel groups in civil war, explaining why patterns of insurgent violence vary so much across conflicts. It does so by examining the membership, structure, and behavior of four insurgent movements in Uganda, Mozambique, and Peru. Drawing on interviews with nearly two hundred combatants and civilians who experienced violence firsthand, it shows that rebels' strategies depend in important ways on how difficult it is to launch a rebellion. The book thus demonstrates how characteristics of the environment in which rebellions emerge constrain rebel organization and shape the patterns of violence that civilians experience.

In this project, I define disintegration as the loss of personnel experienced by an insurgent group. Existing scholarly literature has tended to equate disintegration with splintering or splits. However, there are many ways in which insurgent groups break apart, ranging from no disintegration to large-scale splits. In this dissertation project, I develop a novel theoretical framework centered around the unexplored role of intra-group leaders within insurgent groups to explain variation in the outcome. I posit that preference divergence and intra-group leader capacity are jointly sufficient for the occurrence of disintegration, and the form of disintegration is determined by variation in leader capacity. I test the predictions of this project's theoretical framework by implementing a crisp-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (csQCA) on a dataset with data on 102 intra-group leaders in 29 insurgent groups. The findings lend support to the project's emphasis on intragroup leader's capacity as a key determinant of the form of insurgent group disintegration. Another contribution of this project is an alternative conceptualization of fragmentation to remedy two major analytic drawbacks in how fragmentation is conceptualized in the literature. I draw on institutional theory to develop a resilience-fragmentation model based on this alternative conceptualization. I demonstrate the utility of this model by applying it to the Taliban during the Afghanistan War (2001-2021). Finally, this project's outcome, the magnitude of disintegration, was developed by examining the trajectories of 153 intra-group leaders in 46 insurgent groups. The raw values show that there are nine discrete ways in which intra-group disputes can play out. Therefore, I contribute to the literature by presenting a multichotomous operationalization of disintegration instead of a dichotomous operationalization which condenses these diverse outcomes into a binary, the occurrence or non-occurrence of splintering. Understanding how and why insurgent groups disintegrate is critical for waging war and peace. This dissertation project's focus on intra-group dynamics demonstrates the limits of external factors for explaining insurgent group disintegration. It highlights the internal sources of vulnerability and resilience for insurgent groups by focusing on intra-group leader capacity and identifies causal pathways through which groups stay resilient or disintegrate.

Counterinsurgency remains the most challenging form of conflict conventional forces face. Embroiled in the longest period of sustained operations in its history, the U.S. Army maintains a fragile peace in Iraq and faces a chronic insurgency in Afghanistan. In much of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, active insurgent conflicts continue and potential ones abound. The United States may become involved in some of these conflicts, either directly or by providing aid to threatened governments. Understanding how insurgencies may be brought to a successful conclusion is, therefore, vital to military strategists and policymakers. The author, Dr. Thomas Mockaitis, examines in great detail how past insurgencies have ended and how current ones may be resolved. Drawing upon a dozen cases over half a century, the author identifies four ways in which insurgencies have ended. Clearcut victories for either the government or the insurgents occurred during the era of decolonization, but they seldom happen today. Recent insurgencies have often degenerated into criminal organizations committed to making money rather than fighting a revolution, or into terrorist groups capable of nothing more than sporadic violence. In a few cases, the threatened government has resolved the conflict by co-opting the insurgents. After achieving a strategic stalemate and persuading the belligerents that they have nothing to gain from continued fighting, these governments have drawn the insurgents into the legitimate political process through reform and concessions. This monograph concludes that such a co-option strategy offers the best hope of success in Afghanistan and in future counterinsurgency campaigns.

"Imagine getting on the bus to go from one major city to another. It had been a long week and all you wanted to do is get home and take a nap while doing that. Imagine falling asleep and enjoying the rest on the bus. Now imagine as the bus is driving up a mountain you wake to hearing someone scream out something incoherent and you can feel the bus swerve to the right and through a road barrier and over the side of the mountain. Some of the people you are with on the bus fly out the window as it crashes down the mountain into a ravine while others fly around the bus slamming into each other, into metal and into shattering glass. As the bus slams down you can feel parts of your body break and you see other people die in front of you. You then lose consciousness. When you wake, you are lying outside the bus with glass and screaming people around you just above a bus that is now with its roof on the ground. Besides your own pain you can see the dead, the dying and the broken people all around you and dozens of people streaming down the valley to come help you and the people around you"--

The most useful forms of outside support for an insurgent movement include safe havens, financial support, political backing, and direct military assistance. Because states are able to provide all of these types of assistance, their support has had a profound impact on the effectiveness of many rebel movements since the end of the Cold War. However, state support is no longer the only, or indeed necessarily the most important, game in town. Diasporas have played a particularly important role in sustaining several strong insurgencies. More rarely, refugees, guerrilla groups, or other types of non-state supporters play a significant role in creating or sustaining an insurgency, offering fighters, training, or other forms of assistance. This report assesses post-Cold War trends in external support for insurgent movements. It describes the frequency that states, diasporas, refugees, and other non-state actors back guerrilla movements. It also assesses the motivations of these actors and which types of support matter most. This book concludes by assessing the implications for analysts of insurgent movements.

This book contributes to a better understanding of what makes people and communities resilient in the face of disasters, violence and terrorism. This resilience is understood as a resource that facilitates recovery, effective functioning and positive outcomes in the wake of major critical events that threaten the well-being of individuals, families, communities and nations. The chapters in this publication present complementary perspectives on resilience in a variety of socially adverse settings and how to assess resilience beyond the level of an individual. The contributing authors not only consider evidence of resilience in the aftermath of mass trauma, but uniquely explore it from a developmental perspective and expand the focus from individual resilience to the broader ecological levels of community and society.The book contains 11 chapters reflecting different aspects of resilience. Presentation of these different perspectives will be helpful to scholars and students of human behavior affected by life-threatening crises. Together, the chapters present up-to-date research that affirms human strength when confronted by the extreme experiences. The book also covers the broad landscape of current knowledge and research topics on resilience that are related to mass violence and terrorism, which is one of the growing concerns of the world today.

Insurgent conflict has become the most prevalent form of warfare in the modern era. At the onset of conflict, an insurgent force is usually at a great disadvantage in comparison to the counterinsurgent force. Despite this, modern insurgents often win. What dynamics play into the strategy of the insurgents? How can an insurgent force best use its limited resources to increase its chances of success? This study shows that there are four best practices and two worst practices for insurgents. Beyond the dynamics of specific factors, this study also demonstrates that there are common "causal recipes" that help to explain the outcome of post World War II insurgencies. The analysis process for this thesis uses both a quantitative and qualitative method, using 21 variables to study 70 insurgency cases. Ultimately, this research demonstrates that insurgents must devote few material resources to attacking COIN forces and many material resources to influencing a population's perception. These findings are important to anyone who must understand what actions drive an insurgency toward eventual success or failure. The findings can explain past conflicts and can be applied to ongoing or future conflicts to better understand the dynamics at play.