April 18, 2013 | Republished from Small Wars Journal
Octavian Manea: Why do you talk about variety of insurgencies? Should we see Baghdad, Anbar, and Basra as different insurgencies?
Roger D. Petersen: Different countries and different regions possess certain qualities that form the potential “building blocks” for sustained insurgency. Whether that potential is realized or not depends upon the resources of government and the counterinsurgent and the way those resources are used. In Iraq, those building blocks included remnants of the former Baathist regime such as its bureaucracy and various security forces, tribal groups, clans, ethnic identities and religious and linguistic cleavages. When the combination of “building blocks,” resources, and strategies differ among regions, then those regions are essentially different types of insurgencies. I think the combination and interaction of these elements were very different in 4 different regions of Iraq: Kurdistan and the north, Basra and the south, Baghdad, and Anbar.
OM: In your research you pointed out to a spectrum of conceivable individual roles in an insurgency. What is the methodology behind this typology?
RDP: This methodology comes from my 2001 book (Resistance and Rebellion: Lessons from Eastern Europe) which focused on Lithuanian resistance to Soviets in the 1940’s. Insurgency is a complex phenomenon, especially in how violent organization and networks are created and sustained, and the methodology of that book involved breaking down this complexity into component parts and then building back up into a coherent whole. At the base of this process is the way individuals position themselves relative to the dramatic and violent events of insurgency. Most people may wish to remain neutral and just take care of their families but events push significant numbers of individuals into roles of unarmed support of insurgents, or local armed position of a militia, membership in a mobile non-local organization, or equivalent positions in support of the government. Furthermore, individuals may move back and forth along this spectrum of roles. If one is skeptical of broad and vague theories at a high level of aggregation, as I am, then you need to get down and observe dynamics at a basic level. Observing movement along this spectrum of roles is one way to do that.
OM: What are causal mechanisms? Why are the causal mechanisms important for a social scientist trying to understand an insurgent setting?
RDP: There are different understandings of what defines a causal mechanism among social scientists. My own definition is that a mechanism is a specific causal pattern that explains individual action over a wide range of settings. A mechanism must be specific and causal, on the one hand, but general and able to apply to a wide range of cases. For example, the “tyranny of sunk costs” is a mechanism. There is a specific causal logic—previous heavy investment produces continuation of an action that is no longer optimal. And the mechanism is general in that it can apply over a wide range of settings. Tyranny of sunk costs can apply to car ownership—it might be best to get rid of a problematic car but I may be less likely to do so if I just put some money into fixing the transmission, and also to a bad marriage—maybe my marriage is hopeless but I just paid a lot of money to a marriage counselor so I keep going on. Given the spectrum concept above, with individuals moving back and forth along seven positions, the use of a causal mechanism approach is natural and crucial. The method seeks to understand which causal mechanisms push and pull individuals from one position to another. For example, which causal mechanisms—which small grained causal forces—pull individuals out of neutrality and into unarmed support for insurgents? Which mechanisms pull them the other way into unarmed support for the government? Which mechanisms pull them into armed participation? … MORE
Octavian Manea is pursuing, as a Fulbright student, an M.A. in International Relations with a focus on global security and post-conflict reconstruction at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University.
Roger D. Petersen is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Petersen studies comparative politics with a special focus on conflict and violence, mainly in Eastern Europe, but also in Colombia. He has written three books: Resistance and Rebellion: Lessons from Eastern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2001); Understanding Ethnic Violence: Fear, Hatred, Resentment in Twentieth Century Eastern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Western Intervention in the Balkans: The Strategic Use of Emotion in Conflict (Cambridge University Press, 2011). He is co-author, together with Jon Lindsay of Varieties of Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in Iraq, 2003-2009, US Naval War College, 2012.
