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In this paper, we argue that the current insurgency and counterinsurgency discourse is dominated by concepts that are too narrow and too isolated from the wider civil war literature within which insurgency and counterinsurgency occur. Rather than accounting for the complex political processes and wide range of forces and actors that shape conflict dynamics, the dominant insurgency and counterinsurgency debate tends to reduce highly messy contexts to a competition between the often false dichotomy of insurgents and counterinsurgents, usually understood as the state versus one or more non-state violent actors. In order to understand civil war contexts like South-Central Somalia, we argue that orthodox reductionist concepts and assumptions underpinning the dominant insurgency and counterinsurgency discourse provide limited value. Building on recent critical literature, the paper proposes a refined conceptualization. Instead of understanding insurgency and counterinsurgency as peculiar forms of war, strategies, or sets of guerilla tactics, we follow Jaqueline Hazelton’s line of thought, suggesting that insurgency and counterinsurgency are mere elements of a broader process of violent order-making. Thus, insurgency and counterinsurgency are, in our view, comprehensive processes of organized challenge to and consolidation of established political order within the context of civil war.

Counterinsurgency as order-making: refining the concepts of insurgency and counterinsurgency in light of the Somali civil war