The Social Dilemma? Counterinsurgent Ethnicity Engineering & Wartime Outcomes

• In Event: Conflict Processes 2 Virtual Poster Session

Abstract

How do states states socially engineer the ethnicity of their counterinsurgent populations in response to civil war, and are some recruitment strategies more effective than others? State attempts at forming alliances with coethnics of insurgents have been a prominent feature across conflict settings historically, given their perceived effectiveness at the tactical, political and symbolic levels. Local allies are uniquely positioned to overcome personnel shortages, gather information about insurgent whereabouts, and impart legitimacy to counterinsurgent states by undercutting insurgent bases. At the same time, such alliances have the potential to threaten the internal stability of the states that employ them, and to undermine implementation of COIN programs. In some cases, local allies are known to be especially violent, indisciplined and corrupt; using coercive abilities to settle personal scores and set in motion escalatory cycles of retaliation. Given such a setup, the question is not just whether coethnics are useful as counterinsurgents, but the conditions that inform the diversity in their employment and success.
In order to capture this range of options, I develop a typology of social engineering opportunities available to counterinsurgents in response to civil war. States can choose to deploy insurgent coethnics, out-groups of insurgents, or a mix of the two. Empirically, I leverage archival data from British counterinsurgency strategies in response to anti-colonial uprisings at the peak of World War II to show that counterinsurgent states make strategic decisions about which groups to deploy against insurgent threats, and that these strategies vary cross-sectionally and over time. In order to test for differential effectiveness, I conduct statistical analysis using data on pro-government militias to show that the use of coethnics for counterinsurgency is associated with higher incumbent victories compared to the use of out-groups, even while controlling for a variety of state and insurgent-level characteristics.
These findings are in line with recent scholarship that has drawn a neat link from the use of coethnic counterinsurgents to decisive wartime coethnicity advantages, more cooperative wartime attitudes, and lower violence against civilians. Such returns to employing coethnics, however, are likely to be endogenous to underlying wartime dynamics and conditions under which coethnics are employed as counterinsurgents in the first place. I analyze counterinsurgent recruitment ethnicity as a dependent variable to find that coethnics are more likely to be deployed in the security apparatus in states with high coercive capacities and in response to conflicts with low levels of insurgent cohesion.

Author

• Dipin Kaur, Yale University