The Strange Death of the Counter-insurgency Era

By MLR Smith and David Martin Jones

2 April 2015

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The notion of counter-insurgency is an elusive idea that in general terms simply denotes the attempt to confront a challenge to established authority, but which came to function as a synonym for long-term external armed interventions by Western states, most notably in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the mid-2000s, ‘COIN’ was elevated to a position of explicit importance in defence thinking and became a source of endless fascination in analytical circles. The ‘classical’ thinkers of counter-insurgency were resurrected from a largely forgotten past and became an object of reverence. COIN became the defining military practice of the age.