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

本研究探讨了游击队的宗教身份如何、何时以及为什么会影响反叛乱部队的战略决策。迄今为止，人们的注意力绝大多数集中在宗教如何塑造叛乱行为，而忽视了探索宗教如何塑造国家一级的民事和军事决策。拟议的项目解决差距，利用新的定量和定性数据，从英国，塞浦路斯和以色列国家档案馆，以评估跨国和案件内的变化，英国反叛乱对世俗和宗教叛乱分子的反应。特别注意的是在战后初期在英属马来亚，巴勒斯坦，塞浦路斯，北方爱尔兰和茅茅起义在肯尼亚的叛乱。通过详细的过程跟踪的决定和民事和军事战略家的行动，这项研究提供了新的见解如何的非正规部队的宗教身份可以挑起一个反叛乱的反应，是不同于通过打击世俗战斗人员的战略。它澄清了最有可能产生这种治疗效果的条件，并确定了这种系统性偏差的原因。具体而言，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，并确定最有效的反应形式是压倒性的力量，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与武装冲突之间关系的辩论相关。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，它将提请注意在以前的分析，即在平叛战略的变化，探索不足的结果。其次，它将收集、分析和传播英国对宗教叛乱分子的反叛乱行动的原始数据。第三，它将审查过去分析中未充分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认为，基于身份的内战，特别是宗教的，持续时间更长，涉及更多的伤亡，仍然更难以解决，由于战斗人员的信仰和身份的要求和不妥协的性质。相反，这种方法表明，反叛乱者对其对手宗教身份的看法可能与身份本身一样重要，如果不是更重要的话。最后，这个项目将增加历史学家最近的工作，他们挑战了传统的智慧，即英国的反叛乱行动在战后早期坚持一个单一的，统一的最低限度的武力理论。拟议中的研究提供了一个基于文职和军事领导人对宗教叛乱分子的性质和他们构成的威胁的假设过度使用武力的事件的解释。这项研究还将以重要的政策建议的形式产生几个更广泛的影响，因为美国军方继续支持对宗教和世俗的反叛乱行动，叛乱团体在地球仪。对英国反叛乱经验的研究将为管理当代宗教冲突提出具体建议，以提高成功的可能性，使美国反叛乱部队能够更好地将宗教动机的叛乱控制在最初的冲突环境中，并通过限制对镇压策略的反击来减少极端恐怖主义行为的机会。今天，随着宗教叛乱的数量和后果继续增加，这一项目更加重要。

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.