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COIN at APSA
September 3, 2008 | Posted by Troy - 5:34am | 8 Comments
Instead of jetting off to a Greek isle for the bank holiday week (Americans: think “Labor Day”), Troy was in Boston for the American Political Science Association’s annual conference. Given the attention that has been paid to the role of civilian academics in contributing to US COIN strategy, Troy thought it might be interesting for AM’s readers to see what kinds of research political scientists are actually doing on the subject.
Out of the 57 or so panels in the “security” field, about 10 explicitly dealt with counterinsurgency or counterterrorism. Given the pressing nature of the policy challenges in these areas (not to mention the fact that they have been with us for more than half a decade), one would perhaps hope to see more than 20% of the panels focused on these topics, but 1/5 of a loaf is certainly better than none.
Among the highlights:
Counterinsurgency in Iraq and US counterinsurgency strategy were featured as panels, both of which had some well-known participants.
Strategy in internal conflicts (in various forms) was the subject of no less than five panels: civil war strategy, civilian targeting, effectiveness in asymmetrical warfare, external support to internal conflict, and ethnic conflict in civil wars.
Terrorism and counterterrorism merited a pair of panels and contractors/private security firms even got a shout-out.
For those of you who are interested, most of the papers associated with these presentations are available in the APSA paper archive. Unfortunately, the system that is used to catalog the papers prevents us from directly linking to them, but you can use the search tool to find papers by author or title. Note: even though they are supposed to, not all papers are uploaded to the database.
Among the papers mentioned above, Troy recommends taking a look at Andrew Phillips’ paper on “How Al Qaeda Lost Iraq,” which deals with issues surrounding the Anbar Awakening (which Charlie references below).
Out of the 57 or so panels in the “security” field, about 10 explicitly dealt with counterinsurgency or counterterrorism. Given the pressing nature of the policy challenges in these areas (not to mention the fact that they have been with us for more than half a decade), one would perhaps hope to see more than 20% of the panels focused on these topics, but 1/5 of a loaf is certainly better than none.
Among the highlights:
Counterinsurgency in Iraq and US counterinsurgency strategy were featured as panels, both of which had some well-known participants.
Strategy in internal conflicts (in various forms) was the subject of no less than five panels: civil war strategy, civilian targeting, effectiveness in asymmetrical warfare, external support to internal conflict, and ethnic conflict in civil wars.
Terrorism and counterterrorism merited a pair of panels and contractors/private security firms even got a shout-out.
For those of you who are interested, most of the papers associated with these presentations are available in the APSA paper archive. Unfortunately, the system that is used to catalog the papers prevents us from directly linking to them, but you can use the search tool to find papers by author or title. Note: even though they are supposed to, not all papers are uploaded to the database.
Among the papers mentioned above, Troy recommends taking a look at Andrew Phillips’ paper on “How Al Qaeda Lost Iraq,” which deals with issues surrounding the Anbar Awakening (which Charlie references below).
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