The goal of this study is to ascertain how Thailand wages counterinsurgency (COIN). Thailand has waged two successful COINs in the past and is currently waging a third on its southern border. The lessons learned from Thailand’s COIN campaigns could result in modern irregular war…
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According to conventional wisdom winning hearts and minds is one of the most important goals for defeating terrorism. However, despite repeated claims about U.S. efforts to build popular support as part of the war on terror during the first seven years after 9/11, a steady strea…
This dissertation is an examination of the UK's counter-terrorism policies and practices that have been adopted since the attacks of 9/11 in the United States. Using a theoretical framework of 'power' and 'hegemony' to guide the research, and an investigative research approach, …
Over the past decade British troops have been stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan as part of what was previously called the 'war on terror'. During this period reports have emerged of British soldiers engaging in sexual abuse against local detainees, the killing of innocent Iraqi …
This PhD thesis examines the status of ‘expert knowledge’ in the history of U.S. asymmetric, or ‘counterinsurgency’ (COIN), warfare during the last century. The historical rise of expert influence has so far been neglected in the study of wars within the field of International R…
This thesis analyses the United States Marine Corps’ counterinsurgency strategy in Vietnam between March 1965 and November 1968, filling a major gap in the existing literature by forensically examining the primary source records maintained by the United States Marines to produce…
This dissertation explores the role of the Guatemalan National Police, from 1954 to 1985, as an institution that in the context of the country’s armed conflict and dirty war, became a key part of the machinery of brutality and violence of the Guatemalan State. The work approache…
The phrase “Americans don’t torture” has never been true, but uttering it is a specific political act. This study integrates institutional, legal, cultural, religious, and military histories in order to more fully analyze the expansion of American executive power since WWII, and…
Do statebuilding activities decrease insurgency? Since 2006 General Petraeus's mantra has been that you cannot kill or capture your way out of a complex insurgency. Instead of bullets money spent on development projects, like those funded by the Commander's Emergency Response Pr…
How do states maintain their authority given that even weak non-state groups are now capable of challenging states by resorting to irregular warfare? In Part I of the dissertation, I propose that one of the ways in which states pursue internal security is by recruiting civilians…
Current research available in the literature explored three main lines of inquiry (political or policy, military, and doctrinal) into the problem of both the lack of implementation and unsuccessful implementation of the U.S.-led Iraqi counterinsurgency campaign. This research wa…
Managing coastal resources is challenging in the best of circumstances. Bringing science and policy together to manage coastal resources effectively for the purpose of orchestrating population-centric counterinsurgency operations in the midst of war is Herculean. From a military…
In this dissertation I examine why some development projects have succeeded while others failed to complete during the post-2001 Afghan insurgency. Through disaggregated statistical analysis, I find that interactions of location, time, ethnic heterogeneity (Cederman et al. 2009)…
Theories of violence against civilians in conflict have tended to view combatants in homogenous terms, as the obedient pawns of military elites, or as uniformly prone to violence due to passionate emotions or economic opportunism. In contrast, this study shows that combatant par…
Losing By Winning: America's Challenge Waging Counterinsurgency Warfare is an analytical study of America's experience waging counterinsurgency warfare in the Philippine- American, Vietnam and Iraq Wars. In each war, counterinsurgency warfare was applied to achieve the strategic…
The United States today defines its greatest security threats as insurgents and terrorists. It is trying to defeat them with a method of counterinsurgency (COIN) known as the population-centric approach. Is the conventional wisdom correct in claiming that the population-centric …
City gangs within the United States have evolved in the past several decades to become sophisticated organizations with clear objectives beyond random crimes and territorial protection. Upon returning from a couple of tours in Iraq, I discovered the manner in which gangs recruit…
The use of a blended composition of resources to develop the internal security forces in both the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts displays a significant divergence of officially declared doctrine by which the U.S. Army Special Forces maintain purview over training and advising of…
Among the most prominent and least understood of campaigns in which the Chinese state is engaged is its war against terrorism. With links to the international jihad, an indigenous insurgency threatened the government's grip on a massive swath of northwestern China known as Xinji…