This study examines how, when, and why the religious identity of guerrilla groups affects the strategic decision making of counterinsurgent forces. To date, attention has overwhelmingly focused on how religion shapes insurgent behavior at the expense of exploring how it shapes state-level civilian and military decision making. The proposed project addresses the gap by leveraging new quantitative and qualitative data from the British, Cypriot, and Israeli national archives to evaluate cross-national and within-case variation in British counterinsurgent response towards secular and religious insurgents. Particular attention is given to insurgencies during the early postwar period in British Malaya, Palestine, Cyprus, Northern Ireland and the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya. Through detailed process tracing of the decisions and actions of civilian and military strategists, this study provides new insight into how the religious identity of irregular forces can provoke a counterinsurgent response that is distinct from strategies adopted to fight secular combatants. It clarifies the conditions under which such a treatment effect is most likely, and identifies the reasons for this systematic bias. Specifically, it suggests that the British Armed Forces were characterized by a strategic culture that construed religious rebels as irrational and identified the most effective form of response as one of overwhelming force, not containment or negotiated settlement.
The intellectual merit of the proposed research lies in its relevance to contemporary debates on the relationship between religion and armed conflict. It will broaden and deepen the literatures on civil war, conflict resolution, and religious violence in five ways. First, it will draw attention to an outcome underexplored in previous analysis, namely variation in counterinsurgency strategy. Second, it will collect, analyze, and disseminate original data on British counterinsurgency operations against insurgents with religious identities. Third, it will examine insurgent groups from religious traditions understudied in past analyses, such as Judaism and Eastern Orthodoxy. Fourth, this study will challenge the widespread claim that identity-based civil wars, especially religious ones, last longer, involve more casualties, and remain more difficult to resolve due to the demanding and uncompromising nature of combatants' beliefs and identities. Instead, this approach suggests that counterinsurgent perceptions of their opponents' religious identity may be as important, if not more, as the identities themselves. Finally, this project will add to recent work by historians who have challenged the conventional wisdom that British counterinsurgency operations adhered to a single, uniform doctrine of minimal force during the early postwar period. The proposed study offers an explanation for episodes of excessive force based on civilian and military leaders' assumptions concerning the nature of religious insurgents and the threat they pose.
This study also stands to make several broader impacts in the form of significant policy recommendations as the U.S. military continues to support counterinsurgency operations against religious, and secular, insurgent groups across the globe. A study of the British counterinsurgency experience will elicit concrete suggestions for managing contemporary religious conflicts to improve the probability of success, enable U.S. counterinsurgent forces to better contain religiously motivated insurgencies to the initial conflict environment, and reduce the opportunities for extreme acts of terrorism by limiting blowback in response to repressive tactics. Such a project is all the more important today as the number of and consequences of religious insurgencies continues to grow.
