They allow government forces to leverage their advantage in technology and equipment in order to effectively pursue insurgents who could otherwise vanish into the population. 1 Those tips from civilians raise the government's chances of controlling the village. Preparations for these insurgent actions are likely to be observed by civilians, community members who could anonymously report the insurgents to government forces. Imagine a typical environment faced by government forces (or their allies) in a modern insurgency, perhaps a village in Afghanistan or the Philippines, where rebels ambush government patrols or deploy improvised explosive devices (IEDs) to attack them. We position these findings in the literature and highlight directions for future research, including legal aspects of countering insurgency. The framework may enable better conceived and implemented interventions, including foreign engagements with and without troop deployment, depending on the type of insurgency and mindful of political limitations. The design of interventions matters: Some key evidence comes from measuring the effects of misguided policies. The new research provides guidance on intervention design, including governance improvement, development programs, and rules of engagement. It provides a general framework describing “irregular” insurgencies (where government capacity exceeds rebel capacity), which is analytically cohesive and empirically tested using subnational data from multiple conflicts. This “empiricists' insurgency” reinforces a classic literature on the essential role of civilians while challenging older theories about how they affect conflict outcomes. Research on insurgency has been invigorated during this past decade by better data, improved methods, and the urgency of understanding active engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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