Description
Large-scale Western counter-insurgency efforts in the developing world have seen practically no success since the former Western empires surrendered political control.
The most successful repressions of insurgency and restorations of a colony or former colony back solidly into the liberal sphere all occurred before the colonial overlords left. Malaya is t a frequently cited large-scale success story, but since then, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq have all ended in failure. Somalia doesn't look hopeful either. Even in an attenuated form, trying to take control doesn’t really work: Iraq under the Americans or the disputes after the UN left Timor-Leste come to mind.
Even if it were somehow acceptable to reinvade independent states in the wake of Iraq 2003 and Ukraine 2022, as the tide of climate change destruction rises this century, with Africa, and the Indian Subcontinent drying to dust, parched for water, various island groups disappearing below the waves, (not to mention putting cities from Miami to London on the chopping block) and extreme weather events repeatedly making Hurricane Katrina look small, forces will be needed closer to home.
What other options exist? Other alternative approaches to political organisation include the local alternative, seen in Iraq with the Al-Sahwa, the “Sunni Awakening,” from 2006, and the local Hawiye risings in southern Somalia from late 2022; some kind of approach that draws on “hybrid” thinking – the strengths present in “”real everyday human orders” liberal, illiberal, state, and non-state - or maximum possible disengagement and withdrawal. This study will examine the dominant liberal imperial paradigm and why it appears impractical; the local and hybrid approaches; then discuss how counter-insurgency and local approaches have borne little fruit for southern Somalia. Ahead, thus, maximum possible disengagement increasingly appears to be the most feasible course of action. Nothing else really works.
