Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: State Response to Religious Insurgencies

这项研究考察了游击团体的宗教认同如何、何时以及为什么影响反叛乱部队的战略决策。到目前为止，人们的注意力压倒性地集中在宗教如何塑造叛乱行为上，而不是探索它如何影响州一级的民事和军事决策。拟议项目通过利用来自英国、塞浦路斯和以色列国家档案馆的新的定量和定性数据来弥补这一差距，以评估英国对世俗和宗教叛乱分子的反叛乱反应的跨国家和内部差异。特别关注战后初期英国马来亚、巴勒斯坦、塞浦路斯、北爱尔兰的叛乱和肯尼亚的茅茅起义。通过对文职和军事战略家的决定和行动的详细过程追踪，这项研究为非正规部队的宗教身份如何引发有别于打击世俗战斗人员的战略的反叛乱反应提供了新的见解。它澄清了最有可能产生这种治疗效果的条件，并确定了造成这种系统性偏差的原因。具体地说，它表明，英国武装部队的特点是一种战略文化，认为宗教叛乱分子是非理性的，并确定最有效的回应形式是压倒性的武力，而不是遏制或谈判解决。拟议研究的学术价值在于它与当代关于宗教和武装冲突之间关系的辩论有关。它将从五个方面拓宽和深化关于内战、冲突解决和宗教暴力的文献。首先，它将提请注意先前分析中未探讨的一个结果，即反叛乱战略的变化。其次，它将收集、分析和传播英国打击具有宗教身份的叛乱分子的原始数据。第三，它将审查来自过去分析中未被研究的宗教传统的叛乱团体，如犹太教和东正教。第四，这项研究将挑战普遍的说法，即基于身份的内战，特别是宗教内战，持续时间更长，涉及更多的伤亡，由于战斗人员的信仰和身份的苛刻和不妥协的性质，仍然更难解决。相反，这种方法表明，反叛军对反对者宗教身份的看法可能与身份本身一样重要，甚至更重要。最后，这个项目将增加历史学家最近的工作，他们挑战了传统观点，即英国的反叛乱行动在战后早期坚持单一、统一的最低限度武力原则。这项拟议的研究基于文职和军方领导人对宗教叛乱分子的性质及其构成的威胁的假设，为过度使用武力的事件提供了解释。随着美国军方继续支持打击全球宗教和世俗叛乱组织的反叛乱行动，这项研究还将以重大政策建议的形式产生几个更广泛的影响。对英国反叛乱经验的研究将得出管理当代宗教冲突的具体建议，以提高成功的可能性，使美国反叛乱部队能够更好地将出于宗教动机的叛乱遏制到最初的冲突环境，并通过限制对镇压策略的回击来减少极端恐怖主义行为的机会。随着宗教叛乱的数量和后果继续增加，这一项目在今天变得更加重要。

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.