Managing Insurgency

Managing Insurgency Synopsis

Counterinsurgencies are often framed as a process of restoring or imposing the 'order' or rules of the state. Yet these campaigns are rarely all-consuming total wars, frequently involving 'armed orders' of coexistence, containment, or cooperation between warring parties and wartime orders of governance with civilians. How do counterinsurgents try to shape order in these complex conflicts?

In Managing Insurgency, Alex Waterman brings the counterinsurgent state back into wider discussions of order in civil wars. Waterman argues that counterinsurgencies do not simply restore or impose order, but they set in motion multi-layered processes of order negotiation that preserve, modify, or destabilise the formal and informal rules governing social and political relations. The book presents an original typology of 'order negotiation' processes in counterinsurgency operations, opening up the black box of state COIN strategy and offering a new framework for mapping ordering processes in civil wars more broadly.

The book illustrates these ordering processes by drawing on original fieldwork from Assam and Nagaland, two understudied counterinsurgency campaigns in Northeast India. Its novel fieldwork data generates distinctive insights into the workings of counterinsurgency command structures; the careful management and 'probing' of the rules of local violence management; and the exploitation of intra-level cleavages, filling gaps in the histories of both conflicts.

Managing Insurgency shows that these myriad, criss-crossing processes of order negotiation have managed insurgencies into decades of long-term, but imperfect, uneven, and uncertain, forms of decline. The complex and political picture that the book presents forces a rethinking of conventional assumptions across the Indian and wider counterinsurgency literatures, and it offers a conceptual reimagining of civil war processes more broadly.