Steven Metz
ABSTRACT: States and their security forces often assume future insurgency will be versions of Mao Zedong’s “people’s war,” and counterinsurgency remains backward looking without a theoretical foundation to situate it within broader global security environment and armed-conflict trends. Next-gen insurgency will be networked, swarming, global, and focused on narrative-centric conflict and integrated cost imposition, and social media and the virtual world will be its central battlespaces. No nation has fully grasped that the “people’s war” reflected the military, economic, political, informational, technological, and social conditions of its time. Through an examination of insurgency’s nature, character, patterns, and trends and a thought experiment about next-gen insurgency, states and their security and intelligence services can think about what insurgency will be (rather than what it has been) and prepare.
Keywords: insurgency, Cold War, people’s war, Mao Zedong, social media, al-Qaeda
Insurgency, or something like it, has existed for as long as weak organizations have used protracted violence against power structures. While insurgency is often portrayed as a type of war or organization, it is more useful to think of it as a strategy. During the Cold War, enough successful insurgencies existed for some security experts to consider them unstoppable when skillfully executed. This inaccurate perception did not consider that most insurgencies never take root, grow strong, or attain their objectives. People become insurgents when they have no other viable options or because “the myth of the guerrilla” skews their assessment of their chance for success. People who succumb to this misperception and survive often abandon insurgency once they discover its dangers and inefficacy.1
States and their security forces also often fall into an equally dangerous trap by assuming one variant of insurgency defines it, namely Mao Zedong’s “people’s war” concept of an armed struggle for public support. Counterinsurgency doctrine worldwide focuses on containing or defeating contemporary people’s war variants and defines the “population” as the center of gravity. This peculiar focus differs from conventional war-fighting doctrine, which does not fixate on enemies utilizing twentieth-century organizations, concepts, and methods. Counterinsurgency remains backward looking without a theoretical foundation to situate it within a broader global security environment and armed-conflict trends. Security experts and strategists thinking about insurgency and counterinsurgency assume the future will resemble the past and that what worked before will work again.2
Insurgency, like war, has an enduring nature but a changing character. Today, it is evolving, propelled by powerful forces in technology, politics, economics, security, information ecosystems, and social structures. Next-gen insurgency will be networked, swarming, global, and focused on narrative-centric conflict and integrated cost imposition. Social media and the virtual world will be its central battlespaces. Failing to grasp this fact— to think about what is coming rather than what happened in the past— is dangerous.3
Insurgency’s Enduring Nature
Highly motivated but desperate, often non-state organizations unable to attain objectives through political means or conventional military action use insurgency. Like all coherent strategies, insurgency has a unifying and defining logic. It is asymmetric at the strategic level by design since the insurgents are weaker than the state and would face dim prospects in a symmetric conflict. Insurgents also exploit ethical asymmetry for an advantage over the state, which must hew closer to legality to sustain legitimacy and support.4
Insurgents exploit and amplify existing grievances and schisms to weaken the power structure. Anything will do, whether economic inequity, ethnicity, race, religion or sect, culture, regional inequities, injustice, incompetence, or corruption. In the Maoist idea of the people’s war, subtracting power from the state and adding it to the insurgency would eventually allow the insurgents to become an alternative, more effective state. In other forms of insurgency, the insurgents might pursue that goal in emulation of Mao (which is common among insurgents) but cannot and, thus, concentrate on the negative dimension of weakening the state for the regime to implode and a power vacuum to arise.5
Violence is part of insurgency’s enduring nature, but insurgencies vary in their emphasis on violence and its many forms. Often, early-stage insurgencies struggling to survive, aggregate power, establish identities, and gain attention will use low-level violence for symbolic purposes by necessity. These insurgencies commonly employ ambushes, attacks on relatively weak targets (like isolated police or military outposts) or other power structure symbols, and assassinations. This mode of violence is “armed theater.” Like stage actors, insurgents interact with each other, but their primary objective is to send a message to an audience. At its heart, insurgency is strategic communication—a violent battle of narratives.6
Mature insurgencies that have accumulated power and resources may shift to a more violence-centric approach. Conventional battlefield victories— not guerrilla or terrorist actions—resulted in the Chinese and Vietnamese Maoist insurgencies’ end game. The insurgents designed irregular operations for psychological purposes and to shift the power balance, not for a conventional decisive victory. Other insurgencies never reached this stage and relied on guerrilla operations and terrorism throughout their lifespans. This method only worked against deeply flawed power structures, like the Batista regime in Cuba, the Portuguese colonial governments in Angola and Mozambique, or the White minority regimes in Rhodesia and South Africa.7
To survive and remediate the power imbalance, insurgents structure the conflict so the domains where they have an advantage become important and possibly decisive. With rare exceptions, such as the last stage of a Maoist protostate insurgency, the military domain is significant but not decisive for insurgents. Skillful insurgents avoid military defeat and win in the political and psychological realms. Insurgents and counterinsurgents seek different meta-level structures of the conflict. The advantage goes to the most successful manipulator.8
Insurgency also involves temporal asymmetry. Insurgents believe they have superior ethics, will, and patience. They want to extend the conflict’s length, believing the power imbalance will gradually shift. Insurgency is a strategy of the weak, and astute insurgents therefore expect the regime to grow weaker through a protracted rather than short-term conflict. Insurgency requires great faith and a positive trend projection reflecting the perception that their cause is just and ethically superior. Insurgents must believe that what they see as justice will eventually trump tangible weaknesses. Otherwise, they might be tempted to pursue resolution or success before the power imbalance has shifted in their favor—and impatience is often deadly for insurgents.9
Insurgency’s Changing Character
Insurgency’s character changes in multiple ways, reflecting broad strategic environment trends and insurgents’ and counterinsurgents’ decisions. For example, insurgencies’ strategic objectives vary. The Maoist insurgencies of the twentieth century and al-Qaeda’s transnational jihadist insurgency exemplify the most expansive objectives: to become states, inspire emulators, and thus engineer revolutionary change in the transnational power structure. Individual insurgencies were considered vanguards of global communism or a revived caliphate. Other insurgencies have more limited objectives—for example, regional autonomy, the replacement of one elite by another, or integration into the national power structure.
Insurgencies also vary in organizational formality and size. Maoist insurgencies wanted to become the state, so they organized like states once they coalesced and acquired power and resources. They had identifiable leaders, specialization among subordinate organizations, and a chain of command governed in the areas they controlled. By the twenty-first century, states had become more adept at counterinsurgency, and by the end of the Cold War, the use of insurgency for proxy or surrogate conflicts had diminished. This change pushed insurgents toward a less formal organization that relied more on cellular networks and swarming (for example, in the Iraq insurgency). Each cell or network might have had some organizational formality with a chain of command and specialization, but the insurgency as a whole did not. Insurgencies based on swarming cellular networks are more resilient and harder to eradicate than protostate insurgencies but have difficulty mobilizing enough power and resources to attain their strategic objectives, particularly state replacement. They adopt this organization out of necessity when facing adept counterinsurgents.10
While all insurgencies use violence, they vary in reliance on it and the form it takes. Some were violence-centric, like the Islamic State, more focused on generating fear and publicity than winning support. In South Africa, the paramilitary wings of the African National Congress and the Pan-Africanist Congress used targeted terrorism for psychological and political reasons, recognizing they could not defeat the apartheid state’s military in open combat.11
Insurgencies vary in their linkage to specific geographic areas. Some are inextricably tied to their home regions. These insurgencies reflect the long history of armed movements resisting outside control from nations, kingdoms, or empires. Twentieth-century insurgencies developed a transnational ideological component often melded with local grievances and resistance. Modern jihadist insurgencies expanded that component with committed extremists flowing from conflict to conflict and joining forces with fighters motivated by local grievances. For example, ISIS has little grounding in a specific geographic location and swarms anywhere in the Islamic world where conditions are ripe. It uses a “franchising” tactic in which local extremist movements claim affiliation with their brand even when no formal relationship exists.12
Insurgencies vary by the extent, type, and importance of their alliances and support networks. Maoist insurgencies relied on popular support in their operating areas for resources, information, and recruits. They often had external support since insurgency was used for proxy warfare between ideological blocs. Movements like the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam or Tamil Tigers exploited the global Tamil diaspora for support. Al-Qaeda and some other jihadist movements obtained resources and recruits from all over the Islamic world.13
Maoist insurgencies often began as “united fronts,” with the Communist Party eventually taking full control. Some insurgencies remained coalitions or networks, however, such as the Iraqi insurgency and the Afghan insurgency, which included the Taliban and the Haqqani network. Ideological movements often formed alliances of convenience with warlords, criminal organizations, or ethnic or religious militias. In all these cases, there is variance along a spectrum from a unitary insurgency to coalitions or networks.14
Along similar lines, insurgencies vary in their reliance on foreign fighters. This old phenomenon is not limited to insurgency—consider, for example, the Marquis de Lafayette, Baron von Steuben, and Tadeusz Kościuszko in the American Revolution or the Abraham Lincoln Battalion in the Spanish Civil War. Insurgencies vary along a spectrum in the degree to which their motivational structure is based on local grievances or broader ideological motives, normally centered on the concept of justice. Ideology-based insurgencies tend to attract foreign fighters, which often leads to a greater reliance on terrorism since that tactic requires less training than guerrilla or conventional military operations. Moreover, insurgent leaders have weaker bonds with foreign fighters and consider them expendable, making those fighters useful for suicide attacks.15
Insurgencies also vary in resourcing. External support, voluntary contributions, involuntary contributions through extortion, theft, smuggling, poaching, narcotics production and trafficking, and other crimes are common. Some insurgencies attempt to avoid involvement in crime; others embrace it and effectively become criminal organizations with ideological or political veneers. Arms can be provided by outside supporters, taken from security forces, manufactured or fabricated by the insurgents, or purchased on the global market, if the insurgents have a dependable funding flow.16
Patterns and Trends
Insurgency can be portrayed as a series of continuums. Specific insurgencies fall at different places along these continuums depending on local, regional, and global conditions; the counterinsurgents’ actions and effectiveness at forcing insurgents into higher-risk, less strategically effective methods; and insurgent leaders’ decisions. For insurgency as a global phenomenon, however, there have been aggregate or meta-level trends. In figure 1 (below), the arrows indicate a discernible direction of evolution in insurgency.
Direction of Evolution in Insurgency |
![Arrow Pointing Right Arrow Pointing Right](/Portals/121/Images/USAWC Press/Parameters/2024-Autumn/1_Metz_Arrow.png?ver=mMxFFGI-dRGaIGlfY5kHpw%3d%3d) |
Formal or hierarchical |
Franchised |
Networked |
![Arrow Pointing Right Arrow Pointing Right](/Portals/121/Images/USAWC Press/Parameters/2024-Autumn/1_Metz_Arrow.png?ver=mMxFFGI-dRGaIGlfY5kHpw%3d%3d) |
Externally funded |
|
Self-funded |
![Arrow Pointing Right Arrow Pointing Right](/Portals/121/Images/USAWC Press/Parameters/2024-Autumn/1_Metz_Arrow.png?ver=mMxFFGI-dRGaIGlfY5kHpw%3d%3d) |
Populist |
|
Parasitic |
![Arrow Pointing Right Arrow Pointing Right](/Portals/121/Images/USAWC Press/Parameters/2024-Autumn/1_Metz_Arrow.png?ver=mMxFFGI-dRGaIGlfY5kHpw%3d%3d) |
Externally armed |
|
Self-armed |
![Arrow Pointing Right Arrow Pointing Right](/Portals/121/Images/USAWC Press/Parameters/2024-Autumn/1_Metz_Arrow.png?ver=mMxFFGI-dRGaIGlfY5kHpw%3d%3d) |
Localistic |
|
Transnational |
![Arrow Pointing Right Arrow Pointing Right](/Portals/121/Images/USAWC Press/Parameters/2024-Autumn/1_Metz_Arrow.png?ver=mMxFFGI-dRGaIGlfY5kHpw%3d%3d) |
Unitary |
Semi-unitary |
Coalition or polyglot |
![Arrow Pointing Right Arrow Pointing Right](/Portals/121/Images/USAWC Press/Parameters/2024-Autumn/1_Metz_Arrow.png?ver=mMxFFGI-dRGaIGlfY5kHpw%3d%3d) |
Parallel |
|
Sequential |
![Arrow Pointing Right Arrow Pointing Right](/Portals/121/Images/USAWC Press/Parameters/2024-Autumn/1_Metz_Arrow.png?ver=mMxFFGI-dRGaIGlfY5kHpw%3d%3d) |
Emulative |
|
Innovative |
![Arrow Pointing Right Arrow Pointing Right](/Portals/121/Images/USAWC Press/Parameters/2024-Autumn/1_Metz_Arrow.png?ver=mMxFFGI-dRGaIGlfY5kHpw%3d%3d) |
Armed action-centric |
|
Armed action-secondary |
Note: A semi-unitary movement has one important element with other secondary allies. A parallel insurgency simultaneously weakens and destroys the existing power structure and constructs a replacement or alternative. Maoist insurgencies are the clearest example. Sequential insurgencies face such an asymmetry that they focus heavily, or exclusively, on weakening and destroying existing power structures with the idea that they will construct replacements or alternatives at some time in the future. The Iraqi insurgency is an example. |
Figure 1. Direction of evolution in insurgency
(Source: Created by author)
What Comes Next?
Since insurgency is a component of the global strategic environment, next-gen insurgency will be shaped by broad forces and trends in this environment. While it is impossible to predict the precise form of next-gen insurgency, it is useful to model its feasibility, as the following section will demonstrate.
First, a fissure or schism arises that produces and sustains an insurgency. The foundational conflict in past insurgencies was some combination of economic class, ethnicity, regionalism, or sectarianism, often fueled and focused by an ideology. What then might the foundational conflict for future insurgency be? One possibility is generational antagonism, an escalating problem worldwide. Like class, ethnic, or sectarian conflict, generational antagonism does not often rise to the level of organized violence but can when combined with a mobilizing ideology and a sclerotic power structure. As with all effective insurgencies, the pursuit of justice will form a primary component of the unifying ideology of next-gen insurgencies.
Organizationally successful future insurgencies will not replicate the now-obsolete Maoist protostate model, which worked only in agrarian states with inequitable land distribution and no capacity or will to govern economically nonvital hinterlands linked to the national elite—a rare situation today. Maoist insurgencies augmented their power while degrading the state’s power to win popular support. Jihadist insurgencies largely abandoned that tactic. So, too, will next-gen ones. They will focus on the conflict’s negative dimension to degrade the state’s power and delegitimize its power structure rather than win popular support. Next-gen insurgency will not be a contest for “hearts and minds.” Reflecting the contemporary information ecosystem, negativity—specifically, an emphasis on attacking and delegitimizing opponents—increasingly dominates politics and will also characterize insurgency.
Next-gen insurgencies will also mirror the broader emergence of narrative-centric warfare in the contemporary security environment. The political and psychological domains have always been paramount in insurgency, but al-Qaeda and ISIS, capitalizing on virtual global connectivity, signaled that the narrative war in next-gen insurgency will be global rather than localized. Worldwide insurgencies will likely occur, just as there were worldwide conventional wars.
Next-gen insurgencies will be organized as networks with few concentrations of political or military power that the state can target. This organization will be a survival mechanism as states develop more effective technology-based (and, in the future, artificial intelligence–based) intelligence capabilities. Swarming and rapid adaptation will dominate. Next-gen insurgencies will be heavily virtual. The economic element of insurgency—the need to fundraise to support fighters and buy weapons—will be less important than it was for twentieth-century insurgents. Anyone with local or global Internet access will be able to participate in the struggle. Commercial technology, rather than manufactured arms, will dominate. Fundraising will be through dark web contributions (a nefarious mirror of GoFundMe) and cybercrime.
Insurgency will pose the greatest threat to states developed enough to be dependent on global connectivity and technology but unable to eradicate the insurgents, whether through an aggregate shortage of security resources or, most often, because security forces are optimized for other threat types. This factor is important: throughout history, insurgents have succeeded when states were unable or unwilling to reconfigure their security services. Insurgency will remain a deadly adaptation contest with the advantage going to the more effective side. Within this framework, it is possible to imagine a feasible next-gen insurgency.
The Insurgency in Nation A
Imagine that in the year 2028 Nation A has devolved from sclerosis to a raging crisis. Nearly all citizens have Internet access, and most, particularly the youth, are linked to virtual global communities of people who share their perspectives and priorities. Nation A, though connected to the global economy, suffers from significant internal inequity. The opportunities the country provides its younger citizens cannot meet connectivity-fueled expectations. While not abjectly poor, it suffers perceived relative deprivation. Older generations hold the political and economic power almost exclusively. The youth are increasingly frustrated by the lack of upward mobility and limitations on influence. Many have concluded that the economic and political power structure is irredeemably repressive, corrupt, and unjust.
The youth have coalesced into virtual tribes, many centered on online gaming, politics, popular culture, or, for the adventure seeking and risk tolerant, cybercrime or symbolic vandalism. They are entranced by this environment’s opportunities for perceived empowerment and heroism. Social media provides the milieu for operationalizing discontent that universities and coffee shops did for earlier generations of radicals.17
While, in most cases, they do not know their co-tribalists personally, they believe that through coordinated action, they could attain the opportunities and empowerment they believe their peers in other places have. From this artificial society, where they spend much of their time, they have adopted an ideological worldview that explains the sources of their discontent and the actions needed to ameliorate it. They slowly develop a sense of purpose and meaning that had been missing in their lives, operationalizing their fantasies into a quest.
As the revolution coalesces, the budding insurgents gravitate toward a strategy-based, broad-spectrum cost imposition at minimal personal risk, which they believe the power structure’s corruption and inequity necessitates and justifies. They understand that they know little about direct attacks and that the state has an elaborate security apparatus to defend against those attacks. They focus on their comfortable virtual domain, where they have advantages over the bureaucratized state security apparatus. This domain will be their battlefield. They create and propagate a revolutionary narrative focused on the justness and heroism of their cause, stressing that they, as vanguards, represent repressed and disempowered youth everywhere. Their objective is a revolutionary change in the power structure to give young people a role they feel they deserve and have earned. Their method is the weaponization of everything.18
Knowing the state is adept at decapitating threatening organizations or movements, particularly if supported by the United States or other outsider powers, the insurgents create a virtual leadership committee through deepfake technology to be the global face of their movement. They will be like the Wizard of Oz, controlling, charismatic, but fictional leaders who exist only as 1s and 0s, leaving those “behind the curtain” safe from security forces. They realize that some physical violence is necessary to frighten those in the power structure and attract global attention. They announce their presence with a few urban bombings, acts of sabotage, and assassinations. Most target places where old and rich people congregate, like expensive restaurants, shops, and cultural events. To preserve their personal safety, this targeting is done remotely using commercially acquired technology. The United Parcel Service, DHL, Geopost, SF Holding, Blue Dart, and Federal Express provide logistics. Cryptocurrency exchanges distribute funds.
As word of the insurgency spreads, other angry, disgruntled youth tribes around the world swarm to the cause, inspired by the revolutionary narrative and chance for heroism. Idealists are attracted by generational revolution and youth empowerment, but others join out of boredom or to demonstrate their talents to their peers. A virtual tribe skilled at cyberattacks targets Nation A’s economic infrastructure and government systems, launching a multi-vector attack without officially affiliating with the insurgency. Many claim credit for this attack on social media, leaving Nation A’s security forces confused. Another tribe skilled at cybercrime attacks businesses and government agencies in Nation A, often using the latest forms of ransomware. It splits its cryptocurrency with the insurgents, giving the movement a war chest to buy more sophisticated technology, intelligence, and expertise. One tribe specializes in open-source intelligence, which it shares with the insurgents. Another tribe is adept at belief manipulation using social media, deepfakes, and fabricated news. It has been manipulating beliefs mostly for “LULZ” but now has a cause to justify its actions. Rather than being vandals and criminals, now they can attribute their actions to justice and heroism. This tribe undertakes a swarming campaign to delegitimize Nation A’s government, economic elite, and security forces, portraying them as old, incompetent, sexually deviant, malevolent, or anything else that undercuts their targets’ legitimacy.
None of these assaults alone is enough to bring down the government of Nation A or compel it to accommodate the insurgents’ demands, but the constantly shifting cost imposition begins to grind down national leaders and elites. Security spending increases dramatically, cutting into other funds. New security measures spark massive protests, and Nation A’s international credit and business ratings collapse, imposing costs on all of society. As a result of the cyber delegitimization campaign, Nation A’s political and business leaders find themselves ridiculed or ostracized around the world. Even people disinclined to support the insurgents directly are drawn to what they see as the justness of its cause and its restraints on kinetic violence. Young influencers lionize them, amplifying the insurgents’ carefully constructed perception of righteousness and heroism. In Nation A, virtual tribes without direct links to the original insurgents form and join the conflict, further befuddling the security services.
Eventually, the deliberate and inadvertent multi-vector, multisource costs that the insurgents and their allies imposed on Nation A’s leaders become intolerable. Accommodating the insurgents is the lesser evil. Nation A announces major reforms, including the empowerment of youth councils at all levels of the government and within the economic power structure. The original insurgents see this reform as a victory and triumphantly accept inclusion into the power structure. Meanwhile, addicted to the adrenaline rush, other parts of the distributed insurgency network, whether inside or outside Nation A, continue their attacks. Emulators arise in other nations. The next generation of insurgency has begun.
Conclusion
Imagine the organizational and conceptual challenges the United States would face if asked for assistance in this situation. Existing counterinsurgency doctrine and structure would be unhelpful.
In the future, highly motivated but weak organizations will still be willing to use violence to alter the power distribution. They will, however, reflect very different military, economic, political, informational, technological, and social conditions. Successful organizations capitalize on conditions to find methods that states and their security and intelligence services are unprepared to confront. Hence, next-gen insurgents will sustain the nature of insurgency with a very different character.
State security and intelligence services continue to mistreat Maoist-style insurgencies as paradigmatic. No nation has fully grasped that the “people’s war” reflected the military, economic, political, informational, technological, and social conditions of its time. Security services tend to look backward when considering insurgency, assuming next-gen insurgents will be hinterland guerrillas or urban terrorists. This lack of preparation and foresight allows insurgency to gestate. Sometimes, states innovate and reconfigure quickly enough to defeat insurgents. If they succeed, the time taken to innovate makes the conflict more dangerous and destructive than it could have been with better preparation. Imagine the difficulty traditionally configured security and intelligence services would have with this hypothetical insurgency’s global swarming and adaptation of new technology and modes of conflict.
Next-gen insurgency is coming, even if it does not closely resemble this hypothetical scenario. Time is short. The strategic environment and the nature of conflict are undergoing rapid change. States and their security and intelligence services must think about what insurgency will be rather than what it has been—and prepare.
Steven Metz
Steven Metz has served on the faculty of the US Army War College, the Air War College, and the US Army Command and General Staff College. He is writing a book on the future of insurgency.
Endnotes
- For an example of scholarship on “unstoppable” insurgencies, see Martin van Creveld, The Transformation of War: The Most Radical Reinterpretation of Armed Conflict since Clausewitz (New York: Free Press, 1991); and J. Bowyer Bell, The Myth of the Guerrilla: Revolutionary Theory and Malpractice (New York: Knopf, 1971). Return to text.
- On the “people’s war,” see, among others Mao Zedong, Mao Tse-Tung on Guerrilla Warfare, trans. Samuel B. Griffith II (Baltimore: Nautical & Aviation Publishing Co. of America, 1991); and Bard E. O’Neill, Insurgency and Terrorism: Inside Modern Revolutionary Warfare (Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 1990). For examples of counterinsurgency doctrine, see Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), Counterinsurgency, Joint Publication 3-24 (Washington, DC: JCS, April 2018); Headquarters, Department of the Army (HQDA), Headquarters, Marine Corps Combat Development Command (MCCDC), and Headquarters, United States Marine Corps (HQMC), Insurgencies and Countering Insurgencies, Field Manual 3-24 / Marine Corps Warfighting Publication 3-33.5 (Washington, DC: HQDA / MCDC / HQMC May 2014); Countering Insurgency, British Army Field Manual, vol. 1, part 10, Army Code 71876 (London: British Army, October 2009); and NATO Ministry of Defence, Allied Joint Doctrine for Counter-insurgency, Allied Joint Publication 3-27 (Brussels: NATO Standardization Office, April 2023). Return to text.
- One of the rare efforts to distinguish insurgency’s enduring and changing aspects was Thomas X. Hammes, “Countering Evolved Insurgency Networks,” Military Review (July-August 2006): 18–26. See Andreas Krieg, Subversion: The Strategic Weaponization of Narratives (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2023). Return to text.
- Contemporary Iran is an example of a nation using insurgency in its regional and global national security strategy. Insurgents occasionally undertake symmetric activities at a tactical or operational level when they are able to attain more or less equal power to the state and its security forces. Strategic asymmetry can be deliberate or inadvertent. See Steven Metz and Douglas V. Johnson II, Asymmetry and U.S. Military Strategy: Definition, Background, and Strategic Concepts (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, January 2001), https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/121/; and Rod Thornton, Asymmetric Warfare: Threat and Response in the 21st Century (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2007). Return to text.
- On insurgents’ use of ethnicity, see James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin, “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War,” American Political Science Review 97, no. 1 (February 2003): 75–90. Return to text.
- Some scholars consider nonviolent movements or organizations like the civil rights movements insurgencies. For example, see Mark Grimsley, “Why the Civil Rights Movement Was an Insurgency,” History.net (website), June 3, 2020, https://www.historynet.com/why-the-civil-rights-movement-was-an-insurgency/. It is more accurate, however, to consider them proto- or semi-insurgencies, since excluding violence from the definition broadens the concept of insurgency to the point that it becomes analytically unwieldy and possibly useless, at least for security practitioners. Return to text.
- Insurgencies that are unable to accumulate resources and power and, following the Maoist model, become a protostate may succeed against an inherently weak and flawed power structure, particularly one unable to attract and sustain external support. After all, power is relative. Only a resource-rich, protostate insurgency might be able to defeat a competent and resilient regime, while a weaker or more amorphous insurgency might have success against an incompetent and ossified power structure. Return to text.
- Allowing the armed conflict domain to be central or decisive either by strategic choice or by allowing the state to structure the conflict in this way is often a fatal flaw for insurgencies, as Che Guevara discovered. Return to text.
- It is very common for there to be weak rump insurgencies long after an insurgency-based conflict has been decided. For example, the Communist Party of Malaya theoretically continued its insurgency until 1989, though the issue was settled by 1959. In the recent era when insurgency melds with organized crime, insurgent leaders often transition to warlords or criminal leaders even after their movement has lost any chance of attaining its original political objectives. The current communist insurgency in the Philippines began in the late 1960s. See “The Communist Insurgency in the Philippines: A ‘Protracted People’s War’ Continues,” Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (website), July 13, 2023, https://acleddata.com/2023/07/13/the-communist-insurgency-in-the-philippines-a-protracted-peoples-war-continues/. The most rigorous treatment of the ethical dimension is Michael L. Gross, The Ethics of Insurgency: A Critical Guide to Just Guerrilla War (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Return to text.
- Although surrogate warfare has changed, it remains a major element of strategy. See Andreas Krieg and Jean-Mark Rickli, Surrogate Warfare: The Transformation of War in the Twenty-First Century (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2019). See Chad C. Serena, It Takes More Than a Network: The Iraqi Insurgency and Organizational Adaptation (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014); and Stanley McChrystal, My Share of the Task: A Memoir (New York: Portfolio, 2013). Return to text.
- See Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou, A Theory of ISIS: Political Violence and the Transformation of the Global Order (London: Pluto Press, 2018). I explore the challenges of a South African– style insurgency in Steven Metz, “How Insurgents Could Beat the United States,” World Politics Review (website), September 1, 2017, https://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/how-insurgents-could-beat-the-united-states/. Return to text.
- Guerrilla resistance to outside control can been seen as a form of proto-insurgency, which, unlike modern insurgency, did not include a holistic political strategy and incorporate an ideological component. David Kilcullen, The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009). See Daniel Byman, “ISIS Goes Global: Fight the Islamic State by Targeting Its Affiliates,” Foreign Affairs 95, no. 2 (March/April 2016): 76–85; Vincent Foucher, “The Islamic State Franchises in Africa: Lessons from Lake Chad,” International Crisis Group (website), October 29, 2020, https://www.crisisgroup.org/africa/west-africa/nigeria/islamic-state-franchises-africa-lessons-lake-chad; Jason Warner et al., The Islamic State in Africa: The Emergence, Evolution, and Future of the Next Jihadist Battlefront (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2022); and Colin P. Clarke, After the Caliphate: The Islamic State & the Future Terrorist Diaspora (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2019). Return to text.
- See Rohan Gunaratna, “Sri Lanka: Feeding the Tamil Tigers,” The Political Economy of Armed Conflict: Beyond Greed and Grievance, ed. Karen Ballentine and Jake Sherman (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2003); and Niel A. Smith, “Understanding Sri Lanka’s Defeat of the Tamil Tigers,” Joint Force Quarterly 59, no. 4 (2010): 40–46. See Tricia Bacon, “Hurdles to International Terrorist Alliances: Lessons from al-Qaeda’s Experience,” Terrorism and Political Violence 29, no. 1 (2017): 79–101. Return to text.
- See Marvin G. Weinbaum and Meher Babbar, The Tenacious, Toxic Haqqani Network (Washington, DC: Middle East Institute, September 2016). Return to text.
- In some instances, locals were also used as suicide terrorists. See Riaz Hassan, “Global Rise of Suicide Terrorism: An Overview,” Asian Journal of Social Sciences 36, no. 2 (January 2008): 271–91. Return to text.
- The concept of criminal insurgency is widely used today, particularly in the context of Latin America. See, for instance, Robert J. Bunker, Criminal Insurgencies in Mexico and the Americas: The Gangs and Cartels Wage War (New York: Routledge, 2013). Its genesis was Steven Metz, The Future of Insurgency (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, 1993), https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/275/. Return to text.
- ISIS is considered the pioneering extremist group in the use of social media, but next-gen ones are likely to be more adept. See Laura Courchesne and Brian McQuinn, “After the Islamic State: Social Media and Armed Groups,” War on the Rocks (website), April 9, 2021, https://warontherocks.com/2021/04/after-the-islamic-state-social-media-and-armed-groups/. Return to text.
- On this concept, see Mark Galeotti, The Weaponisation of Everything: A Field Guide to the New Way of War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022). Return to text.
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