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| 1 |
ID:
173815
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| Summary/Abstract |
The belief that U.S. military advisors in South Vietnam did not know how to conduct a counterinsurgency campaign underpins belief that reforms are necessary for counterinsurgency success. However, contemporaneous U.S. documents show that military officers in the advisory period, 1954–1965, believed in the need for reforms and pressed their South Vietnamese counterparts to implement them. If advisors urged their partners to liberalize and democratize, yet the state remained autocratic, repressive, and corrupt, what explains the South Vietnamese failure to reform? I identify the client state’s ability and will to resist reforms as an important overlooked element of counterinsurgency campaigns.
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| 2 |
ID:
151421
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article analyzes the political utility of US drone strikes theoretically and deductively. Placing strikes within the context of the theorized political functions of force and considering how they fit into two grand strategies, restraint and selective engagement, I argue that these strikes buy the United States relatively little in the way of political effects assuring its own security because the terrorism threat they are intended to combat is a limited one within the skein of US global interests. Furthermore, their contribution to counter-terrorism efforts is likely to diminish with the adoption of armed drones by non-state actors. Drone strikes can, however, provide leverage over recalcitrant US client states while reassuring liberal partners and giving them some leverage over US choices. In addition, within the counter-terrorism sphere, drone strikes are less likely to inflame popular opinion than are alternative uses of force. This analysis contributes to an increasingly rigorous examination of the strikes’ role in US foreign and security policy.
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| 3 |
ID:
153632
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| Summary/Abstract |
Debates over how governments can defeat insurgencies ebb and flow with international events, becoming particularly contentious when the United States encounters problems in its efforts to support a counterinsurgent government. Often the United States confronts these problems as a zero-sum game in which the government and the insurgents compete for popular support and cooperation. The U.S. prescription for success has had two main elements: to support liberalizing, democratizing reforms to reduce popular grievances; and to pursue a military strategy that carefully targets insurgents while avoiding harming civilians. An analysis of contemporaneous documents and interviews with participants in three cases held up as models of the governance approach—Malaya, Dhofar, and El Salvador—shows that counterinsurgency success is the result of a violent process of state building in which elites contest for power, popular interests matter little, and the government benefits from uses of force against civilians.
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| 4 |
ID:
171805
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| Summary/Abstract |
The empirical research in this issue explores sources of security and insecurity to reveal paradoxical relationships and dangerous assumptions. Drawing on this research and earlier findings about international and intra-state security, I argue that inclusion can drive insecurity and exclusion can support security. It is normatively appealing to believe that inclusion increases security in ways that benefit humans and polities and that exclusion decreases security. Authors here, however, find that it is not necessarily so. The key to increasing security as a positive good lies in understanding the actors' interests and goals. Some states and non-state actors may want to increase security in ways that do not benefit all. Others may profit by increasing insecurity. Some actors may seek inclusion while others prefer exclusion of self or other. The articles in this issue underline the importance of accurately identifying and examining assumptions in scholarship and policymaking.
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