Civil Society and Counterinsurgency– II
Civil Society and Counterinsurgency– II:
Recruiting Citizen Armies for COIN
by A. Lawrence Chickering
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In their recent SWJ article, "Stabilization and Reconstruction of Nations", Carol E. H. Choksy and Jamsheed K. Choksy implicitly highlight why a strong civil society strategy is important not only in current theaters of conflict, Iraq and Afghanistan, but in many other countries threatened by potential insurgencies. In reminding us that we cannot intervene everywhere, they highlight the unpleasant reality that we may face insurgency threats in more countries than we can possibly handle. This makes it important that we need to be clear about the subtitle of their article: where, when, and why should the U.S. intervene.
They leave out "how"—a critical omission. The authors assume that current COIN strategy will continue unaltered. They assume, as most people do, that there are no underutilized resources that could be brought into play, expanding our capacity to intervene.
This paper will argue that expanding our capacity is an important reason for developing a powerful civil society strategy—empowering citizens, who are a greatly underutilized resource, to become active participants in COIN. A common statement of this objective would be to say this will greatly increase "our capacity" to resist insurgencies, but the real point is to increase "the societies' capacity" to resist.
The idea is to empower the people of a country to take much greater, active responsibility for security, empowering them to play an active role in COIN much more quickly than is happening now in response to current programs aimed at recruiting them. We have, right now, the knowledge and resources to activate them to play this role. Although research and experimentation are needed to refine the strategy, there are good reasons for believing we could recruit armies of citizens to play this active role—and we could do it at very, very low costs. (The strategy for activation has been developed for purposes other than security; it will need to be refined to add security as an objective.)
Download the Full Article: Civil Society and CounterInsurgency II
A. Lawrence Chickering is a social entrepreneur and writer who designs and implements civil society strategies in public policy. He is founder and President of Educate Girls Globally (EGG), which has developed a powerful program for promoting girls' education and empowering traditional communities by reforming government schools, partnering with the government of the very tribal state of Rajasthan in India. Before that, he founded the International Center for Economic Growth, which was headquartered in Panama and played a major role in promoting economic reform in the more than fifty countries over ten years. He is coauthor of Strategic Foreign Assistance: Civil Society in International Security (2006).
