This course will provide an overview of a broad range of issues connected with counterinsurgency. To date, studies have tended to be highly specialized, focusing on one or at most two particular issues (often: the presumed motives of insurgents and tactical choices among counterinsurgency forces). By contrast, the idea here is to cover a broad terrain, so that research and policy analysis can be more comprehensive.
Contrary to laments about the abstract theorizing in which political scientists are supposedly wont to engage, studies of counterinsurgency have an immediate and apparent policy connection. This does not mean that the authors of those studies necessarily see themselves as helping practitioners of counterinsurgency do a better or more efficient job, but the way the research is set up makes it difficult to avoid being hooked into such debates. Part of the idea behind the broader set of topics addressed in this course is to make participation in those debates a conscious choice. In particular, it is important to separate conceptually the vicissitudes of counterinsurgencies in general from those in which foreign troops are engaged in combat operations on behalf of the local state, especially as the policy debate for many authors revolves around the success or failure of the foreign troops.
The reading for this course is drawn to a great extent from work in political science. As such, a number of the articles or chapters employ statistical methods or formal models. There will undoubtedly be technical passages which you will not fully grasp, but it is important to try and grasp the knowledge claims represented by certain combinations of symbols. Don't simply groan, roll your eyes, and turn the page: many problematic claims are buried in the equations and tables.
There are three kinds of work you will have to do in this course. First, you will have to keep up with the reading each week and be prepared to talk about it in class. Second, you will have to take one of the analytical topics discussed in weeks 2-12 and illuminate it (constructing an argument), in the form of a term paper, for a specific case of counterinsurgency. Here is a representative list; I am open to additional cases:
Students will write a term paper and present some of their ideas about it orally by choosing one of the above topics and applying it to a particular counterinsurgency. Here is an incomplete list:
a. Boer War
b. Philippines annexation
c. Nicaragua (Sandino)
d. Chinese civil war
e. Malaya
f. Greece
g. Indochina
h. Algeria
i. Kenya
j. Angola
k. South Vietnam
l. Cambodia
m. Afghanistan (1980s)
n. El Salvador
o. Iraq
p. Afghanistan (2000s)
Third, during the last fortnight of the course, students will have to make a brief (10 minutes) presentation of their main argument in the term paper, at least as they have been writing the paper to that date.
Syllabus
Week 1. Feb. 23.
Introduction and classification of types of counterinsurgencies
Ian F.W. Beckett, Modern Insurgencies and Counter-insurgencies: Guerrillas and their Opponents Since 1750, London: Routledge 2001, ch. 2.
List of insurgencies in Stata format: http://pantheon.yale.edu/~jml27/YaleWebsite/Research_files/DemoWar_IOrep.zip (per Jason Lyall, Do democracies make inferior counterinsurgents? Reassessing democracy's impact on war outcomes and duration, International Organization 64,1 [2010]: 175n35); converted to Excel format.
Week 2. Mar. 2. [Note: I will be away this week, so we will have to make up the class.]
Escalation to counterinsurgency
Charles W. Gwynn, Imperial Policing, London: Macmillan 1934: chs. 1-2.
D. Scott Bennett, Governments, civilians, and the evolution of insurgency: Modeling the early dynamics of insurgencies, Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation 11,4 (2008).
Steve R. Garrison, Competition, greed, or inertia: The dynamics of civil war escalation, ISA paper 2009.
Week 3. Mar. 9.
Assistance by other states to counterinsurgents
Patrick M. Regan, Choosing to intervene: Outside interventions in internal conflicts, J. of Politics 60,3 (1998): 754-79.
David Sylvan and Stephen Majeski, U.S. Foreign Policy in Perspective: Clients, Enemies and Empire, London: Routledge 2009: ch. 5.
For a reasonable list of "third-party military interventions, for 1900-2006, see the website for the Mullenbach-Dixon database http://faculty.uca.edu/markm/tpi_datasets.htm Although the data for set number 4 are not available at this point, the "dispute narratives" linked to in set number 1 are useful to consult.
Week 4. Mar. 16.
Tactics 1: combatants
Robert A. Doughty, The evolution of US army tactical doctrine, 1946-76, Fort Leavenworth, KS: Leavenworth Papers 1979: 29-40.
T. David Mason and Dale A. Krane, The political economy of death squads: Toward a theory of the impact of state-sanctioned terror, International Studies Quarterly. 33,2 (1989): 175-98.
Patrick Johnston, Negotiated settlements and government strategy in civil war: Evidence from Darfur, Civil Wars 9,4 (2007): 359-77.
Austin Long, Small is beautiful: The counterterrorism option in Afghanistan, Orbis 54,2 (2010): 199-214.
Patrick B. Johnston, Assessing the effectiveness of leadership decapitation in counterinsurgency campaigns, 2010.
Week 5. Mar. 23.
Tactics 2: Civilians
Stathis N. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2006: chs. 4-7.
Matthew Adam Kocher, Thomas B. Pepinsky, and Stathis N. Kalyvas, Aerial bombing and counterinsurgency in the Vietnam war, American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming 2011.
Week 6. Mar. 30.
Tactics 3: Detainees
Neil McMaster, Torture: From Algiers to Abu Ghraib, Race and Class 46,2 (2004): 1-21.
Alfred W. McCoy, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on Terror, New York: Henry Holt 2006: ch. 3.
Alexander B. Downes, Targeting Civilians in War, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 2008: ch. 5.
James B. Brown, Erik W. Goepner, and James M. Clark, Detention operations, behavior modification, and counterinsurgency, Military Review. May-June 2009: 41-7.
Klaus Mühlhahn, The concentration camp in global historical perspective, History Compass 8,6 (2010): 543-61.
Week 7. Apr. 6.
Proxy forces
P.W. Singer, Can't win with 'em, can't go to war without 'em: Private military contractors and counterinsurgency, Policy Paper No. 4, Brookings Foreign Policy, Sep. 2007.
Paul Rexton Kan, Drugs and Contemporary Warfare, Washington: Potomac Books 2009: ch. 2.
Jeremy Scahill, The secret US war in Pakistan, The Nation, 7 December 2009. See also Guardian, WikiLeaks cables: US special forces working inside Pakistan, 30 November 2010.
William E. Rieper, Irregular forces in counterinsurgency operations: Their roles and considerations, Fort Leavenworth, KS: School of Advanced Studies, United States Army Command and General Staff College 2010.
Ariel A. Ahram, Proxy Warriors: The Rise and Fall of State-Sponsored Militias, Stanford: Stanford University Press 2011: chs. 1, 5.
Week 8. Apr. 13.
Protests and public support
Mark Twain, To the person sitting in darkness, North American R., Feb. 1901.
Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night, New York: New American Library 1968, bk. 2.
Doug McAdam and Yang Su, The war at home: Antiwar protests and congressional voting, 1965 to 1973,American Sociological R. 67,5 (2002): 696-721.
Gil Merom, The social origins of the French capitulation in Algeria, Armed Forces and Society 30,4 (2004): 601-28.
William A. Boettcher III and Michael D. Cobb,"Don't let them die in vain": Casualty frames and public tolerance for escalating commitment in Iraq, J. of Conflict Resolution 53,5 (2009): 677-97.
Week 9. Apr. 20.
Effects on the military
James William Gibson, The Perfect War: The War We Couldn't Lose and How We Did, New York: Vintage 1986: 191-224.
Rafael Reuveny and Aseem Prakash, The Afghanistan war and the breakdown of the Soviet Union, R. of International Studies 25,4 (1999): 693-708.
Uzi Ben-Shalom, Zeev Lehrer, and Eyal Ben-Ari, Cohesion during military operations: A field study on combat units in the Al-Aqsa intifada, Armed Forces and Society 32,1 (2005): 63-79.
Paul Rexton Kan, Drugs and Contemporary Warfare: Pentagon Press 2009: ch. 3.
George Lepre, Fragging: Why U.S. Soldiers Assaulted Their Officers in Vietnam, Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press 2011, selections.
Week 10. May 4.
Endings: victory, defeat, withdrawal
Jason Lyall and Isaiah Wilson III, Rage against the machines: Explaining outcomes in counterinsurgency wars, International Organization 63,1 (2009): 67-106.
Jonathan D. Caverley, The myth of military myopia: Democracy, small wars, and Vietnam, International Security 34,3 (2009/10): 119-57.
Jason Lyall, Do democracies make inferior counterinsurgents? Reassessing democracy's impact on war outcomes and duration, International Organization 64, (2010): 167-192.
Patrick Johnston and Brian Urlacher, Explaining the duration of counterinsurgency campaigns, MPSA paper 2010.
Week 11. May 11.
Literary representations
Graham Greene, The Quiet American, London: William Heinemann 1955.
Robert Stone, Dog Soldier, New York: Houghton Mifflin 1974, Vietnam section (Mariner Books paperback edn. pp. 1-57.
Michael Herr, Dispatches, New York: Random House 1977, ch. 1 (Breathing In).
Karl Marlantes, Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War, New York: Atlantic Monthly Press 2010: ch. 1.
Sebastian Junger, War, New York: Twelve 2010: pp. 1-25.
Week 12. May 18.
Lessons learned and doctrinal disputes
John A. Nagl, Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam: Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, Westport, CT: Praeger 2002: chs. 8-9.
Counterinsurgency, Army Field Manual No. 3-24, Marine Corps Warfighting Publication No. 3-33.5, 2006: ch. 1.
Stathis N. Kalyvas, Review of Counterinsurgency Field Manual, Perspectives on Politics 6,2 (2008): 351-3.
David J. Kilcullen, Counterinsurgency, London: Hurst & Company 2010: 1-49.
