This chapter concludes the book and considers its major theoretical and practical implications. It begins by exploring how the book pushes us to think about fake news and factual misperceptions as an important “layer” of war – a layer that has been largely neglected despite the burgeoning attention to these issues in other domains. This final chapter then examines what the book’s findings tell us about such topics as the psychology and behavior of civilian populations, the duration of armed conflicts, the feasibility of prevailing counterinsurgency models, and the depths and limits of misperceptions more broadly in social and political life. It also engages with the practical implications of the book for policymakers, journalists, activists, and ordinary politically engaged citizens in greater depth, exploring how the problems outlined in the research might also be their own solutions. Ultimately, this chapter shows how the book has something to offer to anyone who is interested in the dynamics of truth and falsehood in violent conflicts (and beyond) – and perhaps the beginnings of a framework for those who would like to cultivate more truth.

The Ugandan government was the first to engage with the International Criminal Court and did so via the then-unexpected mechanism of self-referral when it requested an investigation into its conflict with the Lord’s Resistance Army in the country’s north. While this seems like evidence of the government accepting global norms of accountability for atrocities in wartime, it entailed significant risk for the Museveni regime. The Uganda People’s Defence Force, essentially fused to the ruling regime, has committed acts within that conflict that may have amounted to war crimes and crimes against humanity. Moreover, these are bound to occur whenever the UPDF is deployed – as it usually is – since its function as a vessel for distribution of patronage makes it a blunt instrument strongly tending towards indiscriminate use of force. Yet Museveni was able to use the country’s centrally managed illegibility to help control the process of ICC scrutiny and gained further leverage through a strong asymmetrically interdependent relationship to the brand new court. This allowed Uganda to emerge better than unscathed, not only with warrants only issued for LRA high command, but with newfound international support for a military solution to the Northern crisis where once he found only criticism due to the rights violations it invariably generated.

An epilogue explores several topics regarding the future of modern air warfare. The first section offers recommendations for how the United States can better prepare for modern air warfare. The second considers air power in counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operations. The third anticipates the role of air power in extending deterrence to allies. The fourth demonstrates how TAP theory can assess the potential effectiveness of air power by analyzing the Russian Air Force in the Battle of Kyiv. The final section considers additional challenges facing the United States during an emerging era of great power competition.

The history of Central America during the Age of Atlantic Revolutions poses a conundrum. Between 1808 and 1821, the kingdom of Guatemala failed to display any sustained or widespread opposition to the Spanish colonial order. This apparent lack of engagement with the Atlantic revolutionary experience suggests that the colony was an anomaly in an empire that witnessed multiple examples of revolutionary sentiment. However, like the majority of the Spanish Empire, the isthmus did not confront the political chaos produced by the collapse of the Bourbon monarchy with either equanimity or unanimity. Here, as elsewhere, peninsular authorities hunkered down in a defensive stance, fearing both foreign subversion and creole pretensions. Here, as elsewhere, local grievances flared into ill-defined uprisings and regional interests gained ground against the metropolitan and colonial capitals. Here, as elsewhere, opportunists manipulated the crisis to advance personal agendas, while idealists sought to sow the seeds of real revolution among the wider population. Yet, here, as elsewhere, a popular majority failed to mobilize against the established order and preferred to either keep faith with colonial institutions or hold out hope for the possibility of imperial reform until independence became the only viable option.

After 2011, the Syrian opposition took on the Assad government directly through military means and indirectly by establishing pockets of rule beyond the government’s reach. As rebels took control of many government-held locations, they sparked the establishment of insurgent governing institutions in hundreds of communities. Local opposition-run institutions in the form of civilian-led local councils proliferated, dotting the provinces of Aleppo, Idlib, rural Damascus, Raqqa, Hama, and Homs. They worked to deliver basic relief and restore public services, sometimes in collaboration with, but often operating separately from, their armed counterparts. The boundaries of this “political marketplace”1 grew increasingly porous as a number of foreign states and private actors directly championed clients of their choosing, bolstering their favorites with financial and military support.2

The very project of counter-state-building, as conceived in twenty-first-century international relations, required Syria’s opposition leaders to convince prospective foreign patrons of the worthiness of the revolutionary endeavor. For those institutions that became clients of the West, they worked, as Clifford Bob would have it, to market their rebellion with agility.1 To make their case, they attended, paradoxically, to an outward-facing politics at the expense of cultivating an authoritative closeness from within. Still, both donor and recipient engaged one another “as if” the introduction of limited foreign support could do the work of connecting an aspiring commanding heights to the revolutionary grassroots. As such, we interpret this performance of counter-statehood not merely as a product of Syrian opposition politics but rather as a collaboration between the opposition and its foreign patrons.

Chapter 6 turns to the case of Nicaragua’s land tenure institutions, analyzing the emergence of new land titling rules that stoked insecurity and corruption. It argues that the Contra War (1980–1990) remade the rules of agrarian reform and land titling in ways that subverted the state’s ability to regulate property ownership and opened up a property rights gap. As the perceived threat posed by the insurgency deepened and large numbers of peasant producers defected to the rebels’ side, the increasingly narrow and highly centralized FSLN coalition in power implemented a series of alternative rules that permitted the individual and provisional titling of unregistered lands, which generated greater peasant dependence on the incumbent regime but also heightened corruption and conflict.

Chapter 2 presents the book’s theory of wartime institutional change, which accounts for why civil war is a site of institutional transformation, conceptualizes different wartime institutional logics, and elaborates the causal process through which undermining rules evolve amid conflict. It argues that the perceived escalation of the insurgent threat within civil war unsettles prevailing institutional arrangements and empowers political and military elites who, as the architects of counterinsurgency, possess high levels of decision-making discretion. Under the pretext of combatting the “internal enemy,” this counterinsurgent elite introduces alternative rules of the game, which correspond to its narrow interests. The latter half of the chapter tackles why undermining rules persist within and beyond conflict. Where counterinsurgent leaders can knit together a broader set of interests with a stake in the wartime procedures and successfully co-opt new peacetime political and economic spaces, the undermining rules are more likely to survive. By contrast, shifting postwar elite alignments generate chronic instability, disrupting the institutional status quo.

Chapter 4 traces the wartime emergence of undermining rules within Guatemala’s customs apparatus by the Moreno Network. It analyzes how the Moreno Network was forged by an elite clique of military intelligence officers granted extraordinary discretion while infiltrating the state apparatus to combat Guatemala’s insurgent groups in the 1970s and 1980s. Amid the heightened sense of threat, this counterinsurgent elite introduced a series of predatory institutional arrangements to capture customs revenues. The chapter also examines how the illicit customs procedures were enforced by the Moreno Network, both through the use of violent and nonviolent coercion and through the co-optation of security forces and other state agencies.

Chapter 5 examines the wartime origins of undermining rules governing extrajudicial killing by Guatemala’s National Police (PN). It argues that the development of such procedures is rooted in the specialization of the police force and the broad discretion granted to concentrated groups of police elites amid the late 1960s period of perceived threat escalation. Specifically, with the creation of highly insulated elite investigative units like the Detective Corps [Cuerpo de Detectives], previous extralegal violence waged by right-wing death squads was institutionalized as routine state activity. The new rules were sanctioned by top military intelligence officials, who devised clear procedures for how to frame the resulting killings to the public.

This chapter treats the early modern roots counterrevolutionary war, in Johann Ewald’s (1785) Treatise on Partisan War and (1790) Treatise on the Duties of Light Troops. A Hessian (German) mercenary officer, Ewald served in of one of the earliest and most consequential modern counter-insurrectionary conflicts: the American Revolutionary War. I locate Ewald’s ideas in the intellectual and political context of early modern, absolutist central Europe. He believed in military honor and duty, linked to premodern socio-political hierarchies. In America, he confronted modern ideological warfare, backed by a mobilized populace, for the first time. Gradually, he came to empathize with his opponents and distain the English officers he served. In his diaries, he advocated emulating insurgent tactics—transposing the tools of revolutionary warfare into the military-ideological project of counterrevolution. The two manuals he wrote on returning to Europe alloyed his European and American experiences. They resonated well into the nineteenth century, influencing Clausewitz and informing British conduct of the Peninsular War.

This chapter briefly surveys the intellectual history of modern, western counterinsurgency theory, as conservative, high modernist utopianism. It sets out concise and synoptic evidence for the argument, which serves as context for the later case chapters. I focus on counterinsurgency manuals—applied theoretical texts written by counterinsurgency practitioners, aiming to shape battlefield and political conduct. Manuals link theory and practice, connecting idealized military and political theory to the history of on-the-ground conduct. My approach is primarily contextualist. Proceeding chronologically, I draw connections and contrasts between canonical manuals, from the early modern period to the present. While small wars or counterinsurgency manuals were conservative from early on, high modernism and utopianism emerged only gradually and incidentally, taking multiple forms. I show how ideas cross-pollinated across texts, accumulating scattershot political idealizations and military practices alike. In so doing, I link micro-level individual intellectual change with larger historical processes, at the global level.

The concluding chapter reviews the book’s findings, then considers implications for ongoing conflicts globally. Counterinsurgency and cognate ideas, I argue, are likely to persist, whatever their past failures and ambivalent reception. I consider potential future developments, in a period of reactionary politics and “the empire come home.” Alternatives are nonetheless possible.

This chapter introduces the study and sets out a framework for investigating counterinsurgency’s intellectual history. I argue late twentieth and early twenty-first century counterinsurgency is a form of conservative, high modern utopianism. It is conservative in aiming to protect a given status quo against revolution or other transformative change. Counterinsurgency is “high modernist” in James C. Scott’s sense: it imagines a linear, schematized world, effacing local difference and resistance—in line with modern ideologies of progress. It is utopian in aiming to (re)make not actually existing systems and practices, but instead the idealized preferences of their elites, shorn of compromise, incidental variation, and historical specificity. Counterinsurgencies are thus conservative worldmaking projects: attempts to reimagine and reorder the world, in response to insurrection. The book’s purpose is the explain how this configuration of armed politics arose. To do so, it focuses on counterinsurgency manuals: the military theoretical and instructional texts designed to make counterinsurgency doable in practice.

“The Bureaucratic Toolkit of Emergency” tracks how the bureaucratic toolkit of emergency developed between the two world wars. Focusing on India as the central case, it follows the making of blacklists and suspect lists, the proliferation of disturbed areas and closed zones, exit permits, mobility regimes, and registration practices of foreigners. It then traces how these practices diffused through the horizontal circuits of empire to Palestine and Cyprus, in times of crises, forming a conceptual grid of bureaucratic classifications of mobility according to suspicion, and differentiated practices to manage the fluid and changing categories of those designated as “dangerous populations.”

More than a decade after the Persian Gulf War, the United States went to war against Iraq for the second time. This conflict grew out of fear and distrust of Saddam Hussein’s suspected chemical and nuclear weapons of mass destruction. A highly inaccurate intelligence assessment contributed to the fear of Iraq’s phantom WMD. Except for Britain, the permanent members of the Security Council opposed the war. George W. Bush put together a coalition of the willing to invade Iraq in 2003. The opening, conventional phase of the intervention went well with Baghdad seized in three weeks. But soon the Pentagon faced a raging insurgency in much of the country, which was divided along sectarian lines of the Sunni and Shiite Islamic sects fighting each other while attacking the US and allied forces. The intractable insurgency proved complex and deeply rooted. By 2006, the Pentagon looked as it was headed toward defeat. Three factors contributed to a turnaround in its fortunes. Chief among these was the Awakening movement in which Sunni Arab tribal leaders crossed over to the American side because of their resentment of Salafi-jihadi militants. The Bush White House adopted a finely-tuned counterinsurgency strategy and surged 28,500 more troops into the fray. During the intense fighting, Bush pushed several elections and a constitution to entrench democracy. Gun battles and street bombings greatly subsided by the time Barack Obama withdrew all US combat troops in 2011.

Chapter 5 shows that, while community responses to the violence were widespread, the Naparama militia formed at a strategic moment in time, when “community-empowering military stalemates” emerged. Tracing the process of how Naparama formed over time, the chapter shows that local stalemates shaped community residents’ and local elites preferences and gave rise to windows of opportunity for militia formation. Community residents were willing to engage in armed responses to insurgent violence, as other options appeared inviable. Local administrative elites complained about insufficient support from the provincial government and supported alternative military solutions such as the Naparama. This chapter draws on evidence from an over-time analysis of Naparama’s formation in Zambézia province in Mozambique.