What do past wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and the ongoing conflict in Mali all have in common? They are all examples of the failures of counter-insurgency strategies. In seeking to rebuild state institutions and the legitimacy of unpopular governments, these controversial doctrines have often paradoxically contributed to even greater ethnic and communal fragmentation and opened the way to endless and destructive fighting.
Despite having been discredited after the 2001 war in Afghanistan, counter-insurgencies strategies are once again being used in conflicts across the globe. The war that has been raging in Mali since 2012 is one such example. In the fight against insurgents in the Sahel, the French-led Operation Barkhane has revived anti-guerilla tactics first used in the second half of the 20th century.
Since 2000, the number of counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism interventions by Western states has increased substantially. Even multilateral international institutions are now affected by this shift; in 2013, UN-led peacekeeping operations openly designated specific political groups to target in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and in the Central African Republic.
