Insurgency as Cultural Production

I wanted to bring this great article, by Alex Verschoor-Kirss over at Small Wars Journal, to everyone's attention. He uses the example of Estonian resistance to Soviet occupation to make the point that insurgency can be about reaching cultural goals as much as it can be about reaching political goals. I want to summarize a bit of his argument (seriously though, go read the whole article, it's really good), and then talk about how it applies outside of Estonia.

Verschoor-Kirss makes an important point about form as function in insurgency. "The form that [the Estonian resistance] took, that of opposition to the hated Soviet or Russian invader" he writes, "was of equal importance to the function of the conflict, regaining independence." The form of their resistance, in other words, was itself a function. As the Soviet occupiers sought to eliminate Estonian culture, carrying on the fight against the Soviets gave the insurgents the power to define Estonian-ness for themselves. Not only that, they were able to give Estonian-ness a distinctly insurgent character. Quoting Verschoor-Kirss again, "To resist Soviet aggression can in many respects be seen as being Estonian, and to be Estonian was something that the Soviet authorities tried to repress. The [Estonian resistance] thus was as much a battle of symbols and cultures as it was about actual fighting."

The literature of insurgency is much quicker to acknowledge the power of the form of a conflict to dictate the culture of those who are involved in or relate to the conflict than that of the counterinsurgent. Frantz Fanon, for example, extolled the culturally transformative power of violence. Perhaps an even better example is Martin Luther King Jr, who used non-violent resistance as a cultural touchstone, creating a cultural space for African Americans between the separatism of Malcolm X and the gradualism of the NAACP (to oversimplify the matter massively). That character of that cultural space was a key component in the political victories King eventually won, and the segregationists failure to define that space away as "communist" and "un-American" was a major factor in their political defeat. Counterinsurgent thinkers, as Verschoor-Kirss point out, have tended to focus more narrowly on political measures as indicators of success or failure in insurgency.

Quoth Paul Yingling (and really everyone else who's given it any thought from Clausewitz on down), "there is no such thing as winning militarily and losing politically." I'm certainly not prepared to say that there's no such thing as winning a war politically and losing it culturally, but I do think that counterinsurgents tend to discount both the cultural impact of insurgency and the potential for that cultural impact to transform into political impact down the road. The form of counterinsurgency matters in the cultural aspect as much as the form of insurgency does, and it seems a mistake to leave that out of the counterinsurgency discussion.

Peter J. Munson, the new editor over at Small Wars Journal, made a similar point in his introduction to Verschoor-Kirss's article. "This [culture, in Verschoor-Kirss's usage] is not meant in the simple dimensions of culture that the U.S. too often placates itself by exploring: right hand/left hand, soles of feet, hand on heart, simple linguistics." These are more the rudiments of etiquette than an understanding of culture. The US military has largely failed in constructing systems to delve more deeply than those rudiments, but I believe we should continue trying. Culture, if we actually study it, can tell us more than how to conduct a meeting. It can tell us why it seems that some combatants continue to fight for the sake of fighting, why some (IRA hardliners come to mind) would rather continue to fight with no promise of political victory rather than accept political compromise. It can help us, in Director Petraeus's parlance, separate the reconcilables and the irreconcilables. Most of all, it can tell us if our near-term political gains or losses are likely to stand the tests of time or if a war's effect on culture will eventually undermine its effect on politics.