We have co-convened two COIN Forums with the Land Warfare Centre, Warminster bringing together practitioners, policy makers, Post Graduate Researchers, Early Career Researchers and more established academics. The following list of recommended reading is just a starting point collated from a recent DRN Twitter hour on the subject of counterinsurgency. Please get in touch if your research falls under the umbrella of COIN as it would be great to make more connections.
From our most recent COIN Forum we have collected the resources mentioned and used by the group.
Alex Waterman(2020)Ceasefires and State Order-Making in Naga Northeast India,International Peacekeeping, DOI: 10.1080/13533312.2020.1821365
Alex Waterman & James Worrall (2020) Spinning Multiple Plates Under Fire: The Importance of Ordering Processes in Civil Wars,Civil Wars,22:4,567-590, DOI: 10.1080/13698249.2020.1858527
Link to PDF version of the Brerton report: https://afghanistaninquiry.defence.gov.au/sites/default/files/2020-11/IGADF-Afghanistan-Inquiry-Public-Release-Version.pdf
van der Vorm, Martijn. (2021). War's Didactics A Theoretical Exploration on how Militaries Learn from Conflict. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349053846_War's_Didactics_A_Theoretical_Exploration_on_how_Militaries_Learn_from_Conflict_A_Theoretical_Exploration_on_how_Militaries_Learn_from_Conflict
Tony Chafer, Ed Stoddard and Sorina Toltica, “Overcoming Area Studies’ Policy-Relevant Research Problem: The Case of the Sahel”, New Area Studies 1:1 (2020), 25-40. https://newareastudies.com/articles/abstract/35/
Hannah West(2021)Camp follower or counterinsurgent? Lady Templer and the forgotten wives,Small Wars & Insurgencies,DOI: 10.1080/09592318.2020.1860373
Podcast
Check out @FightShadePod on Twitter to find out more about a new counterinsurgency podcast and catch up on episodes.
Martyrmade – Fear & Loathing in the New Jerusalem. An outstanding, in depth analysis of the Israel Palestine conflict. Incredibly useful in helping me understand and situate the British campaign in Palestine, but also provides some context to the terrorism inspired by that situation.
Wavell room, contemporary British military thought podcasts
Modern War Institute at West Point Podcasts: Irregular Warfare podcast
Reading
Frank Ledwidge – Losing Small Wars: British Military Failure in Iraq and Afghanistan. A fantastic book in which Ledwidge analyses the reasons behind the failure of the UK’s post-2001 campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Sean McFate – Goliath: Why the West isn’t winning. And what we must do about it. Not about counterinsurgency per se, but an analysis of how warfare is changing and how the West is preparing for the wrong type of war. Makes the argument that insurgency and counterinsurgency will feature prominently in future warfare.
John Newsinger – British Counterinsurgency (Second Edition). A concise work that presents critical narratives of the significant UK COIN campaigns since 1945 (Palestine, Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus, Aden, Oman, Northern Ireland, Afghanistan and Iraq).
(Article) Alexander Alderson – Revising the British Army’s Counter-Insurgency Doctrine. During this article Alderson explores the process that he went through when writing Army Field Manual, Volume One, Part Ten, published in 2009.‘Learning to eat soup with a knife’ by John Nagl
- Kitzen, M, (2020) Operations in Irregular Warfare, In Sookermany, A. Handbook of Military Sciences, Springer
- Staniland, Paul. Networks of Rebellion: Explaining Insurgent Cohesion and Collapse. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014.
- Mike Martin, An Intimate War: An Oral History of the Helmand Conflict. London: Hurst, 2014.
- Kumar, Kuldeep. Police and Counterinsurgency: The Untold Story of Tripura’s COIN Campaign. New Delhi: SAGE, 2016.
- Long, Austin G. The Soul of Armies: Counterinsurgency Doctrine and Military Culture in the US and UK. Cornell Studies in Security Affairs. Ithaca ; London: Cornell University Press, 2016.
- Ucko, David H., and Thomas A. Marks. Crafting Strategy for Irregular Warfare: A Framework for Analysis and Action. Washington, D.C.: National Defense University, 2020. https://ndupress.ndu.edu/Publications-RSS/.
- Drohan, Brian. Brutality in an Age of Human Rights: Activism and Counterinsurgency at the End of the British Empire(Cornell, 2018).
- Khalili, Laleh. ‘Gendered Practices of Counterinsurgency’, Review of International Studies, 37 (2011), 699-716.
- Owens, Patricia. Economy of Force: Counterinsurgency and the Historical Rise of the Social (Cambridge, 2015).
- Gopal, Priyamvada. Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent (Verso, 2019).
- Warlord Survival – By Romain Malejacq
- The Course of Cooption – By Martijn Kitzen, doctoral dissertation available on the net
- The Village – By Bing West
- A Savage War of Peace – by Alistair Horne on the Algerian War‘A bright shining lie’ by Neil Sheehan
- ‘A Feminist Approach to British Counterinsurgency’ by Claire Duncanson and Hilary Cornish
- ‘The New Counter-insurgency Era in Critical Perspective’ ed. by Celeste Ward Gventer, David Martin Jones and MLR Smith
- ‘The Political Impossibility of Modern Counterinsurgency’ by M.L.R Smith and David Jones
- ‘War From the Ground Up: Twenty first century combat as politics’ by Emile Simpson
- ‘Counterinsurgency’ by David Kilcullen
Websites
MBC
