The Development of ‘Classic’ Counterinsurgency (COIN) 1954-1970: A conceptual analysis

Thursday, March 12, 2015
3:30 PM - 5:00 PM
(Pacific)

Encina Hall (2nd floor)

Speaker: 

Abstract: The presentation is concerned with the intellectual history and analysis of the emergence of ‘classic COIN’. Between 1954 and 1961, French, British and US counterinsurgency practitioners repeatedly exchanged field experiences, distilling a corpus of ‘best practices’ for fighting rebellions in the Third World. These were not apart from a certain interpretative framework of the problem they dealt with. As they were standardized and assembled into a more structured whole, a shared counterinsurgency ‘paradigm’ emerged, intended not only in the Kuhnian sense of a set of conceptual assumptions, but also of a theoretical model serving as the basic pattern for a segment of military operations. This was to manifest itself in a sequence of works of military art elaborated between 1962 and 1970, the COIN ‘classics’, which distinguished themselves for expounding a structural grievances-based understanding of insurgency, for outlining an integrated operational model focused on persuasive and administrative rather than coercive means and, last but not least, for adopting a ‘psycho-culturalist’ analytical framework radically different from that of the mainstream strategic thought of the time.

 

About the Speaker: Niccolò Petrelli is a postdoctoral fellow at CISAC. Before joining CISAC in 2013, Niccolò was a military research fellow at the Military Center for Strategic Studies (Ce.Mi.S.S.) within the Center for Advanced Defense Studies (CASD) at the Italian Ministry of Defense and a visiting scholar at the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT) in Herzliya, Israel.

Niccolò received his Ph.D in Political Science from the University of Roma Tre in 2013 writing a dissertation on the impact of strategic culture on the Israeli approach to counterinsurgency. His works have been published, among others, in the Journal of Strategic Studies and Small Wars & Insurgencies. His research interests include the theory and practice of counterinsurgency, strategy development and implementation, defense and strategic analysis, cultural approach to IR and modern military thought.