Policing Insurgencies: Cops as Counterinsurgents

The importance of police forces in combating insurgencies is receiving increasing attention from policymakers and national leaders, but there is little academic work addressing the question of how police forces should be trained and deployed in such conflicts. This edited volume sets out to correct this imbalance through a series of case studies, drawn from Central, South, and Southeast Asia, as also Africa and the Middle East, which examine the circumstances under which police forces have failed to quell insurgencies-or even worsened internal security-as well as when they have proved themselves an essential part of the solution. Each case study covers the history of the insurgency, attempts to reform the police forces to confront it, and the success or failure of those attempts, concluding by presenting lessons learned for future counterinsurgent governments. Each chapter is written by a well-established scholar who has spent considerable time in the country under study.