Does Counterinsurgency as State-Building Work?
Does Counterinsurgency as State-Building Work?
Maria Costigan asks Jill Hazelton, Research Fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center, in a recent interview.
BLUF We have a conventional wisdom on counterinsurgency right now, which is counterinsurgency as state-building - the development of healthy, participatory, well-governed states will defeat insurgency. But this process is very long term and it has actually never been done. It’s an ideal. The ideal involves building the civil arm of the state to serve popular interest, to gain the broad allegiance of the populace, including instituting broad reforms that affect the lives of the people the state in fundamental ways. And it involves limiting the use of military force in order to prevent the alienation of civilians by causing unintentional causalities. And all of those things are powerfully appealing to us. They make sense normatively as what we want and what we like and what we think states should do for their citizens. But, as I said, this model has never actually been put into effect. And that’s important because the United States is shaping a great deal of its foreign policy around this type of counterinsurgency – in Afghanistan particularly right now, but also in some other weaker states, where jihadi violence or support for jihadi violence has been a problem- Yemen and Somalia, for example.
Much more at the Belfer Center.
