Countering Insurgency/Terrorism: Severing the Ties between Non-State Armed Actors & Their Constituency

Objective

COUNSTER introduces a novel triadic framework to investigate government strategies for combatting radicalization, insurgency, and terrorism by focusing on the role non-state armed actors’ (NSAAs) constituents play in conflict processes. While the literature extensively addresses military aspects of conflicts, how governments strategically engage with NSAAs’ constituents during a conflict to sever the ties between the two (hereafter referred to as to counster / counstering, a term coined within this project) has been widely neglected despite its prevalence. COUNSTER addresses this gap by arguing that we should turn our focus towards modeling the causes and outcomes of counstering efforts and investigate the mechanisms that render those strategies successful, or not, given that military power is neither the only, nor the most effective tool in governments’ arsenal. By employing a constituency-centered perspective, this novel approach also allows ascertaining the effectiveness of both attractive and repressive strategies targeting NSAAs’ constituents in fight against radicalization, insurgency, and terrorism. COUNSTER aims to offer a theoretical breakthrough to conflict studies by adopting a unique and comprehensive approach that centers on the interactions within the government-NSAA-constituency triad. This will be achieved by embracing a holistic view accounting for triadic actor interactions via mixed-method comparative analyses at both macro and micro levels, complemented by original observational and experimental data. COUNSTER will allow us to reach a systematic understanding revealing the causal pathways behind the success and failure of counterterrorism/insurgency (CT/COIN) strategies, and hence, provide a toolkit for scholars and practitioners to better understand and explain the dynamics of conflict resolution and termination as well as design more effective policies.