Securitization of Corruption: Corruption as a Driver of Insurgency
Scott Collins
19 Nov 2015
All states suffer from corruption. All forms of corruption cause instability. The more pervasive
and the more arbitrary the corruption, the greater the instability. In this paper, I am concerned
only with the kind of instability that leads to insurgency. Systemic corruption is corruption that
completely dominates a state: a better term for it is kleptocracy. Kleptocracies do not occur in
developed, democratic states; they occur only in autocratic, developing states. As a result of the
end of the Cold War and the effects of globalisation, weak developing states became even
weaker and therefore vulnerable to exploitation by local predatory elites. These elites transform
the economies of these states to enrich themselves and also to pay their small coalitions of
supporters. Such states will have little legitimacy amongst their citizens. While this might cause
instability in the form of protests, strikes and spontaneous rebellion, the loss of legitimacy in the
minds of the citizenry is not very relevant for the creation of an insurgency. Rather, what matters
is the loss of legitimacy in the minds of members of the elite. Insurgencies arise in kleptocracies
because of competition between elites. Leaders of insurgencies must find a cause to win over the
population. Corruption is not only more prevalent since the end of the Cold War, it has unique
effects at the individual psychological level – it causes moral outrage. Moral outrage can be
exploited by an insurgency leader through effective information operations aimed at winning
over the population (and others). This often happens where, based around pre-existing ethnic
divisions, corruption benefits one ethnic group over another; it can also happen in its own right
in Marxist/revolutionary insurgencies; and now it can be used in political-religious
demodernisation insurgencies. Hence, given the prevalence of corruption of this kind in the
developing world, corruption is an increasingly important driver of insurgency.
Definitions of insurgency
Galula, writing in 1960 and drawing on his experience of insurgencies in Greece, Algeria and
Vietnam, sought to distinguish insurgency from conventional warfare. He observes that an
1 insurgency commences well before any actual fighting breaks out; often, it is difficult to say
when an insurgency started. He emphasises the asymmetrical nature of the conflict based on
relative access to resources and relative strength. The insurgent is not interested in winning
territory so much as winning the population. Therefore, it is a political war:1
The insurgent cannot seriously embark on an insurgency unless he has a well-grounded
cause with which to attract supporters among the population … How can the insurgent
ever hope to pry the population away from the counterinsurgent, to control it, and to
mobilize it? By finding supporters among the population, people whose support will range
from active participation in the struggle to passive approval. The first basic need for an
insurgent who aims at more than simply making trouble is an attractive cause, particularly
in view of the risks involved and in view of the fact that the early supporters and the active
supporters – not necessarily the same persons – have to be recruited by persuasion. With a
cause, the insurgent has a formidable, if intangible, asset that he can progressively
transform into concrete strength.
Therefore, the best cause for the insurgent’s purpose is one that can attract the largest number of
supporters and repel the minimum of opponents. The insurgent must be able to identify himself
totally with the cause and the majority of the population must be able to identify with it. There
must therefore be a pre-existing political problem:
In other words, where there is no problem, there is no cause, but there are always
problems in any country. What makes one country more vulnerable than another to
insurgency is the depth and the acuity of its existing problems.
A country fortunate enough to know no problems, he says, is obviously immune from
insurgency. A country with a “secure national consensus” is also unlikely to fall into
insurgency.2
1
D Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice, 1964, Praeger Security International, Westport, p. 10.
2
Che Guevera, Guerilla Warfare, 1997 Bowman and Littlefield NY, pp. 60–61:
Where a government has come into power through some form of popular vote, fraudulent or not, and maintains at least an appearance of
constitutional legality, the guerrilla outbreak cannot be promoted, since the possibilities of peaceful struggle have not yet been
exhausted.
2 It was appropriate in 1960 to define insurgency in terms of its differences from conventional war.
As a general rule, regardless of their inchoate beginnings and protracted nature, insurgencies
during that period often took the style of conventional war as they came to a close. However,
contemporary insurgencies, as Kilcullen argues, have become even more fluid and amorphous in
their structure and organisation; also, their aims are sometimes so generalised as to be almost
mystical. If it was important to distinguish insurgencies from conventional war in 1960, then, in
the post-classical, post-Cold War era, the important distinction today appears to be between
insurgency and terrorism. Hence, Kilcullen’s interest in the effects of globalisation on jihadist
insurgencies and his annotation of Galula’s concept that the aim of an insurgency is the seizure
of power over a population; Kilcullen observes that contemporary insurgencies merely seek the
destruction of a state and not much more.3 This is his idea of “resistance” insurgency rather than
“revolutionary” insurgency. This makes insurgencies of this kind sound more like terrorism,
particularly when insurgents have tended to be willing to use terrorist tactics. Terrorism is
different from a contemporary insurgency in these ways: First, there have been some “classical”
revolutionary insurgencies in the modern, post-Cold War era. Secondly, there will always be
significant differences in scale and organisation between a terrorist movement and an
insurgency. Thirdly, while the aims of a terrorist organisation might be similar to a contemporary
jihadi insurgency, they are not quite the same. Unlike insurgents, terrorists are not necessarily
concerned with regime change. Insurgents use a cause to attack governments; terrorists target
governments (and entire countries and even civilisations) to promote their cause. 4 Finally, it
might be argued that the kind of vague post-classical insurgency Kilcullen observed in the mid2000s has since coalesced into a more or less classical, state-capture kind of insurgency, a
nascent form of Islamic State which is clearly dedicated to creating a state and capturing territory
and uses covert as well as overt military action to do so.
I adopt Fearon and Laiton’s argument that Cold War politics and ethnic differences are not
necessarily the most important causes in themselves of insurgency.5 The word cause can be used
3
Counter-Insurgency Redux, Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, vol. 48, 2006, pp. 111–130.
4
US Military Academy Training Document, DOD, Feb 28, 2007, “Insurgents vs. Guerillas vs. Terrorists”.
5
“Ethnicity, Insurgency and Civil War,” American Political Science Review, vol. 97, 2003, pp. 7 - 90.
3 as pre-condition for an event and also as a motivation for it: poverty could be said to be a cause
of insurgency, in the sense of being one of several conditions from which an insurgency may
arise, but this does not mean that it motivates an insurgency. When Galula writes that, if an
insurgent needs a cause, then, he has to find a problem, he is referring to cause as a motivator of
insurgency. Therefore, over the period of between 1920 and 1975, the main problem in the
developing world was independence from the West. Most insurgencies during that period were
motivated by anti-colonial politics. Since the aimed was freedom from Western colonialisation,
then, in the “either/or” politics of the Cold War era, insurgencies of this period usually took on a
revolutionary/Marxist flavor. Then, following decolonisation, developing state borders were
fixed in often wholly artificial and arbitrary ways, where there was a significant overlap between
different ethnic populations. Therefore, most insurgencies after roughly 1970, were increasingly
about liberation from ethnic-based oppression and discrimination: rather than fighting the West,
citizens of developing states fought each other.
Many contemporary insurgencies revolve around ethnic differences; many do not. They all take
place in certain kinds of developing states; these states are now weaker than ever; they are
vulnerable to exploitation by predatory elites; their political and economic institutions are
unstable; and they all suffer from corruption. Corruption causes income inequality, poverty,
impedes economic growth, is wasteful;6 however, what matters when thinking about motivations
of insurgency is the political effects of corruption. In political terms, corruption has unique
psychological effects which, if effectively exploited by insurgency leaders, can galvanise a
discontented population into support.
Definitions of corruption
Legal definitions of corruption are unhelpful for the purposes of this paper: they range across a
variety of kinds of corrupt conduct and they are necessary focused on the domestic criminal
liability of individuals. They are also sometimes unrealistic, stigmatising conduct that might be
illegal but widely tolerated and accepted as normal and so unlikely to cause instability. In
international security terms, the broadest sense of the term is to be preferred - the abuse of a
6
P Mauro, “Corruption and Growth,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 110, 1995, pp. 681–712; S Ackerman, “Corruption,
Inefficiency and Economic Growth,” Nordic Journal of Political Economy, vol. 245, 1997, pp. 3–20.
4 public position for a private benefit.7 Corruption is divided into three kinds, depending on the
degree of prevalence and arbitrariness: petty, grand, and systemic corruption. Petty corruption
occurs at a smaller scale and often within established social frameworks and governing norms:
examples include the exchange of small improper gifts or use of personal connections to obtain
favours. It might be pervasive but it is not necessarily arbitrary as most people in a particular
society might tolerate and accept it.8 Grand corruption is corruption occurring at the higher levels
of government involving significant subversion of the political, legal and economic systems. It is
arbitrary but it may not necessarily be pervasive: it occurs in all states including strong,
developed states where, ideally, it is exposed and condemned. If grand corruption is pervasive, as
is often the case in weak, developing states, then it is better described as systemic corruption.
That is, it is corruption which arises primarily due to the weaknesses of an organisation or
processes of the entire system – politically, an entire state. When grand corruption reaches that
level, it is sometimes described as “policy corruption”, 9 “legal corruption”, 10 or, at its most
extreme, state capture or kleptocracy, where the entire state and its economy is exploited by its
elite.11
Ackerman defines the ideal kleptocrat as a private monopolist striving for productive efficiency
but restricting output of the economy to maximise profits.12 They run a brutal and efficient state
limited only by the leader’s inability to make credible commitments. However, in reality,
kleptocracies are poorly governed states with inefficient and intrusive bureaucracies, dedicated to
extracting bribes from the population and the business community to benefit not just the state’s
7
World Bank 1997, Helping Countries Combat Corruption, p. 13.
8
For example, the Wontok system in Papa New Guinea.
9
P Larmour, Interpreting Corruption, 2012, University of Hawaii Press, p. 46.
10
D Kaufmann, P. Vicente, “Legal Corruption,” World Bank 2005.
11
Trujillo I the Dominican Republic, the Duvaliers in Haiti, the Somozas in Nicaragua, Amin in Uganda, Mobutu in Zaire,
Bokassa in CAR, Shah of Iran, Marcos in the Phillipines, Ceaucescu in Romaina. For example, Stroessner’s Paraguay:
The public sector was viewed as Stroessner’s personal fiefdom. The administration of state assets revealed a lack of differentiation
between the economic and the political sphere and the absence of any clearly defined boundary between public and private property.
The result was that Stroessner and his retinue of military and civilian acolytes disposed of public sector resources as if they were their
own.
A Nickson, “Democratisation and Institutional Corruption in Paraguay” in W Little and E Posada-Carbo, eds., Political
Corruption in Europe and Latin America, New York, 1996, St Martin’s Press.
12
Corruption and Government: Causes, Consequences and Reform, 1999, Cambridge University Press.
5 leadership but members of the leadership’s entourage and network of supporters. Further, no
ruler controls all of the state’s resources: officials may have the power to expand the resources
under their control and the higher the official’s rank, the greater their power to increase the
state’s reach and exploit it. Expectations are created among state officials that they will share in
the wealth. Petty and grand corruption will flourish in a kleptocratic state because its leaders are
unable or, more frequently, unwilling to create the conditions needed for an honest state. Hence,
aside from its wider political consequences, corruption becomes a daily experience of all the
state’s citizens.
Kleptocratic states, Lundhal writes, create poorly functioning systems which do not provide
incentives for productive activities. Rulers who use political power for enrichment make all the
decisions and citizens have no say. He identifies the methods of kleptocratic rulers as essentially
rent-seeking – through taxation of foreign trade, tax farming, sale of public officers, debasing the
currency, outright confiscation, foreign and domestic loans, aid blackmail and embezzlement,
bribery, milking state enterprises and exploiting government contracts and procurement. What
these techniques have in common is that they use resources to redistribute income and wealth
without creating any goods and services that are demanded by citizens. 13 Kleptocratic states fall
into three categories. First, there are those where the corruption is spread across a single network
of associated cliques which control government institutions completely; secondly, there are those
in which the corruption is more diffuse with fragmented, sometimes competing networks and
little coordination. 14 A third category might be authoritarian regimes with high levels of
corruption, even to the level of kleptocracy, but which manage to survive for many years, even
generations. Ackerman says that leaders in such states enrich themselves and their supporters but
do not push rent-generating programmes so far as to undermine growth; there may also be fewer
static inefficiencies; the leaders may constrain uncoordinated rent-seeking so that long-term
goals are maximised. Such states can be found in East Asia where there are institutional
mechanisms – political and cultural – designed to cut back on uncoordinated rent-seeking.
13
M Lundhal, “Inside the Predatory State: The Rationale, Methods, and Economic Consequences of Kleptocratic Regimes,”
Nordic Journal of Political Economy, vol. 24, 1997, pp. 31–50.
14
An example of the former is Mubarak’s Egypt or the Ukraine under Yanukoyvich. An example of the latter might be South
Sudan or Mexico: Working Group on Corruption, Corruption: the Unrecognised Threat to International Security, Carnegie
Foundation for International Peace, 2014.
6 Similarly, even in failing states of Africa, leaders can expect a degree of longevity if they are
able to recruit more elites into their coalitions. However, it is a risky strategy because increasing
the coalition reduces the amount of distributable state benefits and allows possible opponents an
effective foothold in government.
Systemic corruption and state development
According to modernisation theory, corruption in developing states was the result of
anachronistic tradition operating in spite of the development of the modern processes of a state.
Huntington saw corruption in developing states as necessary and beneficial consequence of
modernisation, a way of smoothing out the rougher edges of political and social instability
caused by development.15 This might be an accurate way of describing petty corruption in a
developing society but not grand or systemic corruption. In contrast, dependency theorists saw
corruption as a manifestation of colonisation and development. 16 However, neither theory
explains the prevalence of systemic corruption in contemporary developing world; and I argue
that, in any case, both theories were overtaken by the two great shifts in the international order
over the last 30 years – the end of the Cold War and the rise of globalisation.
It is my argument that the more pervasive forms of corruption including kleptocracy have arisen
in developing states because developing states are weak and vulnerable to exploitation by
predatory elites. They are weak and vulnerable because of conditions following the end of the
Cold War and the effects of globalisation. With the end of the Cold War, the US and Russia lost
interest in propping up their client states in the developing world so that those states had to rely
upon their own domestic capacity.17 Globalisation’s adverse effects on developing states include:
unprecedented levels of income inequality, secure and secret international transfers of funds,
increases in natural resource rents, growth of transnational crime and illicit revenues, funding
15
“A welcome lubricant on the path to modernization”, in ‘Moderinisation and Corruption’ in A Heidenheimer and M Johnston,
eds., Political Corruption: Concepts and Contexts. 2002, Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, at page 261
16
G Harrison, “Corruption, Development Theory and the Boundaries of Social Change,” Contemporary Politics, vol. 5(3), 1999,
pp. 207–220.
17
S Kalyvas, L Balcells, “International System and Technologies of Rebellion: How the End of the Cold War Shaped Internal
Conflict,” American Political Science Review, vol. 104(3), 2010, 415–429;
Security and Democracy in Africa, I B Taurus, London, pp. 1–12.
7 W Hale and E Kienle, After the Cold War:
and bail-outs by international organisations conditional upon privatisation, and neoliberal
internal market reforms, commercialisation of military capacity. Moore writes that because of the
opportunities provided by late 20th century globalisation, power in weak states now lies in the
hands of elites who often have strong incentives and extensive opportunities to harvest political
revenues and lack motives to nurture or build institutions that might promote sources of stability
such as ensuring peace and the rule of law, or encouraging political participation, accountable
government or collecting revenue for public purpose.18 A particular consequence of neoliberal
market reforms in developing states is the weakening of the state’s regulatory capacity by
removing oversight capabilities.19
Systemic corruption of the kind found in kleptocratic states is not only a consequence of the
activities of its elite; it is the main way in which the elites maintain their privileged position. It
involves maximising opportunities for self-enrichment but also the illegitimate use of state
resources to maintain and increase political power.20 Bueno de Mesquita talks about the logic of
political survival in any state as a question of the size of the winning coalition. The primary goal
of a leader is to remain in power. To remain in power, leaders must maintain their winning
coalition of supporters: this is the set of individuals the support of whom is necessary for leaders
to gain and maintain their power. The selectorate are those persons who choose the leaders; the
winning coalition are those whose support translates into victory. A leader has the greatest
chance of political survival when the selectorate is large and the winning coalition is small –
such as in an autocracy. When the winning coalition is small, as in autocracies, the leader will
use private goods to maintain the coalition. When the winning coalition is large, as in
democracies, the leader will tend to use public goods to satisfy the coalition. In an autocracy,
those who are in a winning coalition can be replaced by other members of the selectorate who
18
M Moore, “Globalisation and Power in Weak States,” Third World Quarterly, vol. 32(10), 2011, pp. 1757–1776.
19
M Szeftel, “African Politics: Corruption and the Governance Agenda,” Review of African Political Economy, vol. 25, 1998, pp.
221–240. At p. 233:
In particular, deregulation has weakened the capacity of a state to control corruption while privatization has created a host of
opportunities for personal accumulation. Deregulation reduces the capacity of a government to tighten governing government-corporate
relations. In Africa, where the rules have traditionally been poorly observed and enforced, deregulation reduces government capacity
still further and makes it particularly difficult to control interactions between private interests and public officials.
20
H Fjedlde and H Hegre, “Political Corruption and Institutional Stability,” Studies in Comparative International Development,
vol. 49, 2014, pp. 267–299.
8 are not in the winning coalition. Therefore, the costs of defection for members of the winning
coalition can be potentially large, the loss of all private goods. Similarly, the chances of a
challenger replacing the leader are similarly smallest in an autocratic system since those in the
winning coalition would be hard pressed to defect. Leaders maintain support by distributing
private goods amongst members of their coalitions; it consolidates political advantages and
reduces opportunities for opponents.
Kleptocratic corruption and instability
I argue that political instability in a kleptocratic state may well be based around a wide-spread
loss of faith in the state by its citizens but insurgencies are activated by intra-elite competition for
control. In autocratic regimes, there are no constraints in the elite’s ability to exploit private
goods from public office to buy political support. Nor are there institutions available to the
general citizenry to control or discipline the elite. The legitimacy of any regime requires a widespread belief that, in spite of the regime’s short-comings and weaknesses, it is better that any
others.21 To avoid legitimacy crises, citizens and leaders must see the state as legitimate which is
conferred to the extent that the state has the capacity to meet citizens’ expectations. Therefore,
Weber’s ideal type of rational-legal legitimacy, where the state is legitimised through
mechanisms it uses to govern, is a useful explanation of what happens in prosperous, stable
developed states. Crises in the legitimacy of a developed, stable state are not likely to be
fundamental and, where they arise, there will be a range of state mechanisms available to citizens
to enforce change: voting, the press, the police and courts, oversight and accountability
mechanisms, special commissions, and so on. However, in non-democratic and also failing
states, political elites wield disproportionate power and often poorly. State institutions are either
too weak or lack independence from the elite: the more extreme the kleptocracy, the greater its
control over government institutions. In kleptocratic states, it is the lack of belief of the elites,
rather than of citizens, in the legitimacy of the state that causes instability, and the elites will use
21
J Linz, The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Crisis, Breakdown and Re-equilibration, 1978, John Hopkins Press,
Baltimore.
9 whatever means that they have at their disposal to assume control of the state. Those who have
greatest possibility of gaining from a revolution will be those in positions of power.22
Arriola argues that in Africa, political instability erupts because members of the elite crave a
larger share of the spoils or because those outside the leader’s coalition of supporters want access
to the resources to which they have been denied.23 He quotes Kofi Anan’s survey on conflict in
Africa: 24
…the nature of political power in many African states, together with the real and perceived
consequences of capturing and maintaining power, is a key source of conflict across the
continent. It is frequently the case that political victory assumes a ‘winner-takes-all’ form
with respect to wealth, patronage and prestige and prerogatives of office.
Manifestations of instability in Africa are “…often a response on the part of communal groups in
national populations to elite instability which either fails to bring about a reapportionment of
ethnic representation in government or a redistribution of other goods”.25 Arriola argues that
overthrowing the chief executive has been the central means for achieving what he calls “recalibration” of the relations that exist among elites, regardless of whether a conflict resulted from
a power grab by factions within a regime or by regional elites seeking greater autonomy from the
centre. This is not to ignore the economic causes of instability. Arriola accepts that the higher
probability of political conflict in Africa takes place against a wider context of economic
deterioration rather than ethnic diversity or colonial legacies. A government of a failing state is
less likely to have the resources needed to pay troops to stay in their barracks. Hence, it is during
22
W Brough and M Kimenyi:
Therefore, for an existing dictator, the foremost threat is that of coup d' etat. Government officials will the principal actors, on one side
or the other, for they cannot sit idly on the sidelines. Their lives will be affected by the outcome of the coup: they must choose to support
the government or join the opposition. The dictator realizes this and must go about a precarious policy of reward and the allocation of
power in order to form a stable coalition with which to govern. It is very difficult to establish such a coalition, for it involves granting
power to others, which in turn leads to the imminent possibility of coup d’etat. Therefore, the dictator must rely on granting rents to
members of the coalition to ensure the stability of the government
‘On the inefficient extraction of rents by dictators’, Public Choice, 48, 1986 pp. 37–48.
23
“Patronage and Political Instability in Africa,” Comparative Political Studies, vol. 42, 2009, pp. 1339–1362.
24
Kofi Anan, The Causes of Conflict and the Promotion of Durable Peace and Sustainable Development in Africa 1998, p. 4.
25
Citing the review of African political crises by Morrison, Mitchell And Paden, Understanding Black Africa: Data and Analysis
of Social Change and Nation Building, 1998, New York Paragon House, at p. 124.
10 an economic downturn, when the government is broke, that a rival can maximise the likelihood
of employing force to renegotiate the re-distribution of the state’s resources. Schlichte argues
that when “neo-patrimonial regimes or any political system in which clientist networks structure
political life”, such as in a kleptocracy, come under serious strain, some members of the political
class will be selectively barred from power. A serious strain will often be caused by some kind of
economic crisis such as an increase of export profits or the loss of international money credits.
Those who are excluded tend to organise armed violence when they find propitious conditions.
To reinforce this, his analysis of leaders of insurgency suggests that they tend to come from the
same class or background as the elite they seek to depose: 23% of insurgency leaders were
members of the ruling political class; 73%, were professional politicians, 62% had an academics
education, 37% were educated abroad and 16% were military professionals. 26
The mobilisation of moral outrage:
A government that is perceived to be corrupt loses legitimacy amongst its citizens. 27 In a
kleptocratic, authoritarian state, loss of legitimacy on the part of citizens in their leaders is
irrelevant since, in kleptocracies, elites control the state’s political and judicial institutions and
mass protests and spontaneous rebellions are quickly and often brutally quashed. Insurgency is
often the only effective means available to the population to effect regime change and, as I argue
above, insurgency leaders are most likely the disaffected members of the elite. If an insurgency
is a fight about control of a population, and the key to this for the insurgency leader, is, as Galula
argues, to find a cause with which the majority of the population must be able to identify, then
the insurgent’s leaders must be able to operationalise the population’s feelings and ideas about
the lack of the regime’s legitimacy. They do this by effective information operations.
Increasingly, I argue, the most relevant cause will be corruption as it has unique psycho-social
26
K Schlichte, “With the State Against the State: The Formation of Armed Groups,” Contemporary Security Policy, vol. 30(2),
2009, pp. 246–264.
27
C Anderson and Y Tverdova, “Corruption, Political Allegiances and Attitudes Toward Government in Contemporary
Democracies,” American Journal of Political Science, vol. 47, 2003, pp. 91–99.
11 effects. It is useful to summarise these effects and then consider how insurgency leaders can
mobilise these emotions and cognitive processes into general support.28
According to the social intuitionist school of social psychology, individuals grasp moral truths
not by careful thought and reflection but by a process more like perception. Moral reasoning is
therefore an ex post facto process used to influence the intuitions and judgments of others.29 A
unique psychological effect of corruption is moral outrage, described as the central mediator of
reactions to perceived injustice.30 Anger is said to be the most likely emotional reaction to events
perceived as unjust, followed by disgust; others argue that is combination of anger and disgust.31
The moral outrage felt by those who see transgressions is a product of both cognitive
interpretations of the event and emotional reactions to it.32 It has been described as a prevalent,
and powerful and even prototypical moral emotion.33
Emotional reactions of individuals when confronted with unfairness are strong predictors of
whether or not they will commit to assisting the disadvantaged. Certain forms of distress such as
moral outrage are important motivators of action. Moral outrage, if shared, is a particular form of
anger at unfairness which can create an identity between a group of individuals. Eidelson argues
that outrage over inequality, for example, can merge the victims of discrimination with those
who find it morally repugnant even if they have never experienced it; moral outrage, he writes, is
an especially potent emotion because of its orientation towards collective action. For Van
Zomeren, people take collective action through two distinct but complementary pathways, the
emotion route and the collective efficacy route, when they feel a relevant group based emotion
28
J McNeill, “A Cognitive Approach to COIN: Countering Dangerous Beliefs,” Defense and Security Analysis, vol. 26, 2011,
pp. 273–288.
29
J Haidt, “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational tale,” Psychological Review, vol. 108, 2001, pp. 814–834.
30
U Athenstadt, G Mikula and K Schere, “The Role of Injustice in the Elicitation of Differential Emotional Reactions”,
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, vol. 25(7), 1998, 769.
31
J Salerno and L Peter-Hagane, “The Interactive Effect of Anger and Disgust on Moral Outrage and Judgements,”
Psychological Science, vol. 24, 2013, pp. 2069–2078.
32
J Darley and T Pitman, “The Pschology of Compensatory and Retributive Justice,” Personality and Social Psychology Review,
vol. 7, 2003, pp. 324–336.
33
J Haidt. “The Moral Emotions” in Handbook of Affective Sciences, K Scherer and H Goldsmith (eds), 2003, Oxford University
Press, New York.
12 and they believe that they can achieve change. 34 People are more likely to participate in
collective social protest the more they feel that a group with which they identify are being
unjustly treated. A sense of injustice arises from moral outrage: efficacy refers to the conviction
that it is possible to force change through collective action; identity means a group that is being
treated unjustly by some external actor. Identification involves depersonalisation as part of the
process of acting as a member of the group and the politicisation of the group identification.35
For a group to mobilise to political action it first needs a common identity.
36
Social embeddedness theory holds that individual moral outrage can be are transformed into
group-based grievances and feelings through social networks. Social capital, according to this
theory, is defined as “the resources embedded in a social structure from which are accessed and
mobilized into purposive actions.”37 It has three components: structural, relational and cognitive.
The structural component is the extent of network of ties between actors; it encourages
cooperative behavior. The relational component concerns the kinds of personal relationships
people have developed through interaction, such as respect, friendship and trust. The cognitive
component are those resources that deal with meaning and representations (“raising
consciousness”), which takes place within social networks: “It is within these networks that
individual processes such as grievance formation, strengthening of efficacy, identification and
group-based emotions all synthesize into a motivational constellation preparing people for
action”.38 The propensity to participate in politics depends on the amount of political discussion
that occurs in social networks and the information that people are able to gather about politics as
a result. Lin writes:39
34
E Thomas and C McGarty, “The Role of Efficacy and Moral Outrage Norms in Creating Potential for International
Development Activism,” British Journal of Psychology, vol. 48, 2009, pp. 115 - 134.
35
B Klandermans, “How Group Identification helps to Overcome the Dilemma of Collective Action”, American Behavioral
Scientist, vol. 45, 2001, pp. 887 – 900.
36
T Gurr, Why Men Rebel, 1970, Princeton University Press.
37
N Lin “Building a Network Theory of Social Capital,” Connections 22 1999, pp. 28–51.
38
J van Stekelenbyrg and B Klandermans, “The Social Psychology of Protest,” Current Sociology Review, vol. 61, 2013, pp. 886
– 90.
39
Li, ibid, p. 43.
13 This is where people talk politics and this where the factuality of the sociopolitical world is
constructed and people are mobilized for protest. Being integrated into a network
increases the chances that one will be targeted with a mobilising message that people are
kept to their promises to participate.
In terrorist studies, it has been observed that shared perceptions of injustice by a group reinforce
identification and allegiance. 40 These perceptions are often based on the belief that group
members receive substandard outcomes, not due to their own inadequacies, but because a more
powerful group has created a biased or rigged system. It is linked to an historical view that
emphasises mistreatment and exploitation at the hands of others. Leaders play a role in
promoting a group’s adoption of the injustice world view. They can persuade the group that their
current situation is unjust and intolerable and that violent change is necessary by defining a
problem and identifying the enemy who is the cause of it. The attribution of liability may also be
accompanied by feelings of vulnerability, threats aimed at the entire group sometimes involving
threats of catastrophe if action is not taken. The group is taught to distrust outsiders and that they
are vulnerable and helpless without action. The “staircase to terrorism” is a metaphor used by
Moghaddam to explain how an individual becomes involved in terrorism.41 On the ground floor,
perceptions of fairness and relative deprivation dominate. Some individuals will climb to the first
floor to look for solutions. If there are none there, they will move to the next floor where they
will perceive injustice and experience anger and frustration and be influenced by leaders who
encourage them to displace their anger onto an enemy. If they proceed to the third floor, they
become involved with the morality of terrorist organisations and begin to see terrorism as a
justified strategy. Recruitment takes place on the next floor where the world is categorised into
“us versus them” and the terrorist organisation is seen as legitimate. On the last floor, they are
selected and habituated and trained in terrorist operations.
40
R Eidelson, and J Eidelson, “Dangerous Ideas: Five Beliefs that Propel Groups Toward Conflict”, American Psychologist, vol.
58, 2003, pp. 182 - 192.
41
“The Staircase to Terrorism: A Psychological Exploration,” American Psychologist, vol. 60, . 2005, pp. 161 – 169; see also R
Lygre, J Eid, G Larsson and M Ranstorp, “‘Terrorism as a Process: a Critical Review of Moghaddam’s Staircase To Terrorism,”
Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, vol. 52, 2001, pp. 609–616.
14 Using the same staircase metaphor, it might be argued that there is a staircase to insurgency.
Moral outrage at corruption drives individuals to look for solutions. In the second stage, they
meet other similarly-minded individuals and become united around a common cause, developing
structural and relational social capital. However, in an autocratic state, their efforts to effect
change will be thwarted or met with a violent response, compounding their moral outrage and
enhancing their unity. Hence, they will move to the next stage where they will encounter
insurgency leaders who will frame their understanding in terms of injustice, vulnerability, and
exploitation using distrust of outgroups and the need for violent change. Having united them they
can then make the transition to the next level, participation, recruitment and support. Having
achieved consensus, they will be prepared to take action. Leaders of insurgencies will do this by
using effective information operations.
Mobilisation – information operations:
Galula writes that about the use of propaganda in these terms: 42
The asymmetrical situation has important effects on propaganda. The insurgent, having no
responsibility, is free to use every trick; if necessary, he can lie, cheat, exaggerate. He is
not obliged to prove; he is judged by what he promises, not by what he does. Consequently,
propaganda is a powerful weapon for him. With no positive policy but with good
propaganda, the insurgent may still win.
It means more than just propaganda. Insurgents frame the way potential members understand
their situation. Ingram argues that an insurgency, especially in its early stages, involves
implementing a system of control over a population and also control over meaning. He refers to
this as “competitive systems of meaning”, which seek to leverage the contested population’s
42
See also, Tachyon’s Psychological Operations in Guerilla Warfare (aka John Kirkpatrick, CIA manual prepared for the
Contras in Nicaragua):
Guerrilla warfare is essentially a political war. Therefore, its area of operations exceeds the territorial limits of conventional warfare, to
penetrate the political entity itself: the "political animal" that Aristotle defined. In effect, the human being should be considered the
priority objective in a political war. And conceived as the military target of guerrilla war, the human being has his most critical point in
his mind. Once his mind has been reached, the "political animal" has been defeated, without necessarily receiving bullets. Guerrilla
warfare is born and grows in the political environment; in the constant combat to dominate that area of political mentality that is
inherent to all human beings and which collectively constitutes the "environment" in which guerrilla warfare moves, and which is where
precisely its victory or failure is defined.
15 identify and perception of crisis in order to shape assessments of the conflict. He talks of modern
insurgents targeting “the identity landscape” of a population, attaching perceptions of crisis to
out-group identities and solutions to themselves as members of an in-group identity. This shapes
and reinforces the same identity paradigms through which perceptions of crisis are farmed and
understood.43
An example of an insurgency motivated by corruption is that which took place in El Salvador.
Wood describes how it was not for material benefits that insurgent campesinos in El Salvador
supported or actively participated in guerrilla groups; in doing so, they faced extraordinarily high
risks without any foreseeable material gains. Rather, they were drawn into networks whose
“values, beliefs, social norms, and political identities” outweighed the risk of disappearance,
torture, and death motivated by deep-seated resentment at exploitation by landowners. 44 An
important factor determining insurgent support for many campesinos was the political worldview
activated by liberation theology and the grassroots organising of lay catechists:45
The guerrilla organizations shaped campesinos’ understandings of liberationist teachings
through their ideological work, interpreting state violence as making armed insurgency
necessary if liberationist aspirations were to be realized.
While the FMLN relied on propaganda in radio and newspapers, they favoured direct
communication with the people wherever possible.
43 C Meyer, Underground Voices: Insurgent Propaganda in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Peru, Rand Note, Rand Corporation,
1991:
In the early stages of a guerilla movement, propaganda is necessary because a group is largely unknown to those it considers to be its
constituents. Late a group may be known all too well as a source of political instability, economic turmoil and a general lack of safety in
a community. When this happens, the guerillas need to transform the havoc that the people perceive to be their fault into activity that is
regarded as beneficial to the population. This does not necessarily mean that they change their actions but rather that they publicise
their particular interpretation of the. Propaganda grants authority to its makers. In the first place, simply by demonstrating its ability to
disseminate information that the government has banned, a guerrilla groups proves it is a viable force. Second, once a group has the
people’s ears and eyes, it can manipulate their minds causing them to act as they might not otherwise; or if it does not work as
effectively as this, its messages at least command the attention of those who read, hear or see them.
44
E Wood, Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador, 2003, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 15. See
also W Wood, “The Social Processes of Civil War: The Wartime Transformation of Social Networks”, Annual Review of
Political Science, vol. 11, 2008, pp. 539 -561.
45
Wood, ibid, p. 120.
16 Similarly, direct contact is a preferred information operation in India for the leaders of the
Naxalite insurgency, a largely political/revolutionary insurgency seeking the establishment of a
Marxist state. India does not have a particularly strong state and, in many areas, especially rural
areas in the east, corruption is wide-spread. 46 The central state in any case is portrayed as
representing a privileged elite with only hostile intentions towards the dalits and tribal people.
Naxalite leaders often come from professional and even privileged backgrounds.47 Mobilisation
of dalit and tribal people in those areas is a central plank of Marxist/Naxalites strategy. It
involves literature and other more traditional propaganda but also political rallies and organised
protests, symbolic violence such as the bombing of the rest houses of forest officers, the
establishment of mobile health clinics and other features of a de facto state. The most important
information operation technique is a deliberate policy of personal contact at the village level
between villages and insurgents.48 In Nigeria, a state where corruption is described as ingrained
and profound,49 Boko Haram, popular with the most marginal members of northern Nigeria,50
espouses a policy of deep hostility to the west and to the corrupt Nigerian state, the cure being
the Islamification of Nigeria or large parts of it, and relies on personal contact and also the
establishment of schools, formal training camps and religious complexes for the purposes of
indoctrination and publicity.51
The Houthi insurgency, on the other hand, started as an insurgency based around ethnic/religious
differences but has settled into one based around corruption. Yemen under Saleh was widely
46
“Naxal beats up foresters on charges of corruption”, Times of India, 25 Feb 2015. There is in particular widespread corruption
and bribery in the timber and logging industries, which amounts to an “institutionalised system” in India: P Robbins, “The Rotten
Institution: Corruption in Natural Resource Management”, Political Geography, vol. 19, 2000, pp. 42 - 443.
47
Kobad Ghandy’s father was a senior finance executive in Glaxo. His parents are part of a wealthy Parsi family in Mumbai. He
attended The Doon School and later St Xavier's College, Mumbai, and then went to England to train as a chartered accountant but
got initiated in radical politics and left England with his course unfinished: “India's unlikely Maoist revolutionary”, BBC News,
23 September 2009.
48
A Shah, “The Intimacy of Insurgency: Beyond Coercion, Greed or Grievance in Maoist India”, Economy and Society, vol. 42,
2013, pp. 480 - 506.
49
A Salaam, “Boko Haram: Beyond Religious Fanaticism”, Journal of Policing, Intelligence and Counter-Terrorism, vol. 7,
2012, pp. 1547 – 1562.
50
51
Boko Haram means “western education is a sin”.
O Osumah, “Boko Haram Insurgency in Northern Nigeria and the Vicious Circle of Internal Security”, Small Wars and
Insurgencies, vol. 24(3) 2013, pp. 536 - 560.
17 condemned as “a government of and by thieves”. 52 The Houthis called for greater political
inclusion and a more equitable distribution of resources. Since 2004, through a mix of military
success and skillful tribal outreach, the Houthis had solidified their position as a mainstream
political actor. 53 Saleh stepped down in 2012 and his vice-president, Hadi, took his place.
However, he allowed Muslim Brotherhood members to control offices of state, aggravating preexisting ethnic tensions. The Houthis captured the capital in early 2015 and began a widelypublicised anti-corruption campaign. 54 They deliberately exploited popular grievances against
economic failures and portrayed themselves as vanguard against corruption.
In Afghanistan, there are a variety of ethnicities but they are historically united against foreign
occupation. Corruption in the coalition-supported government undermined support for the
government and increased support for the insurgents. It was a major reason for support of
Taliban: “The government’s record on corruption was so extraordinarily unjust that people
preferred even bad Taliban when the alternative was the government.”55 Taliban information
operations had two basic messages: eliminate the corrupt Karzai government and expel the
crusader forces.56 They used a wide range of techniques: websites, newspapers in sanctuaries in
Pakistan, 57 to traditional media such as chants 58 and night letters. 59 Taliban information
operations were said to outperform the coalition in the contest to dominate public perceptions of
the war.60 The general perception was that the Taliban had captured the justice market and were
52
V Clark, “Saudi Arabia holds the key to defeating al-Qaida in Yemen”, The Guardian, 31 October 2010.
53
A Baron, Foreign Policy, 26 January 2015.
54
“Diary,” Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, London Review of Books, vol. 37 (10), 2015, pp. 42–43. Head of the Supreme Revolutionary
Committee, Mohammed Ali al-Houthi:
There is an octopus of corruption in the ministries. It’s trying to prevent us from working. But we have an intelligence network that
sends us reports of corruption from inside the ministries themselves. People come to us with their problems. We don’t charge anything:
this is pure volunteer work. We want to solve problems quickly. Those who work in government want to delay in order to make money.
55
S Carter and K Clark, No Shortcut to Stability: Justice Politics and Insurgency in Afghanistan, Chatham House, 2010; J
Nathan, Taliban Propaganda: Winning the War of Words, Asia Report No 158, Asia Report No 158.
56
Joint Paper, Assessment of Factors Contributing to Insecurity in Afghanistan, 2006, p. 3.
57
S Jones, “The Rise of Afghanistan’s Insurgency: State Failure and Jihad”, International Security, vol. 32, 2008, pp. 7 -40.
58
T Johnson and A Waheed, “Analyzing Taliban Taransa: an Effective Propaganda Artifact”, Small Wars and Insurgences, vol.
22, 2011, pp. 3- 31.
59
T Johnson, “The Taliban Insurgency and An Analysis of Shabnamah”, Small Wars and Insurgencies, vol. 18(3), 20107, pp.
317 – 344.
60
G Dorronsoro, The Taliban’s Winning Strategy in Afghanistan, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace 2009.
18 perceived to be reasonably efficient and fair at least compared to formal system which was
neither.61
Islamic State fits the pattern observed by Kilcullen as regards the use of sophisticated multilevel
information operations; but it is more than just a “resistance” insurgency.62 A major cause of the
rise of Islamic State was the corruption of the Malaki government which disadvantaged the
Sunni population. There were said to be “unbelievable” levels of corruption:
Malaki’s method of control was to allocate contracts to supporters wavering friends or
opponents he wants to win over… Beneficiaries of this largesse have been threatened with
investigation and exposure if they step out of line…Under Malaki’s Shia-dominated
government, patronage based on party, family or community determines who gets a job,
contributing further to the political and economic marginalisation of Iraq’s Sunni
population…63
According to Cockburn, many Sunni Arabs concluded that their only realistic option was a
violent conflict increasingly framed in confrontational terms. Corruption had already weakened
the Iraqi state and its army at a time when Islamic State groups and their allies began hijacking
the Syria rebellion. Syria itself was also a kleptocracy,64 although, unlike Iraq, its government
institutions were stronger and more secure. The Islamic State now straddles Iraq and Syria. Many
leaders of Islamic State are former members of the Iraqi government during the Hussein era.
Ingram writes that Islamic State leverages potent psychological dynamics in its audiences by
attaching perceptions of crisis to out-group identities and solutions to in-group identities such as
Islamic State-aligned Sunni Muslims. 65 The use of the internet and new digital technologies
gives it a worldwide audience and instantaneous publicity. It targets local, regional and global
audiences using a broad range of platforms online publications videos, informal communiqués,
and social media forums. 66 It is quick to issue statements about military and non-military
61
S Ladbury, Testing Hypotheses on Radicalisation in Afghanistan, Independent Report for DFID, 2009, p. 24.
62
S Jones and P Johnson, “The Future of Insurgency”, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, vol. 36 2012, pp. 1 – 25.
63
P Cockburn, The Rise of Islamic State, 2014, Verso, London, p. 60.
64
E Kapstein The Economics of the Syrian Crisis, 26 February 2014, US Institute for Peace.
65
H Ingram, “Three Traits of the Islamic State’s Information Warfare”, RUSI Journal, 159, 2014, pp. 4 - 11.
66
J Farwell, “The Media Strategy of ISIS”, Survival, 56, 2014, pp. 49 – 55.
19 successes. Its videos and films are well made and tailored for specific audiences. Speed is
essential; for example, the “mujatweets” containing short videos extolling life in Islamic State
territory.
However, it is not just about the corrupt states of Iraq and Syria; for Islamic State and its
supports, all modern states are corrupt. Islamic State information operations tap into a longstanding element of radical Islamic hostility to modernisation. As early as 1980, Dekmejian
observed what he described as a regeneration of the Islamic ethos born out of a crisis of
legitimacy in Middle East states, the result of corruption and their failure to make good on
promises of development. He wrote that embedded in the Islamic conscience are notions of
social justice such that gross disparities of wealth and privilege are seen to fly in the face of
classical Islamic traditions. Islam, he predicted, could be used as “a potent protest ideology to
oppose the establishment”, comprised of political elites who are seen as perpetrators of socioeconomic injustice. It could become, he said, “a fall-back ideology”, capturing the alienated and
discontented, accommodating the political activist as well as providing an escape from politics in
the ascetic milieu of the mosque.67 By 2006, Loza identified a set of beliefs held by Middle-East
terrorists based around perceptions of inherent corruption of the entire political system, that
political corruption and moral decay were prevalent in the Muslim world, even in 1980, similar
to pre-Islamic Arabia. 68 They spoke of a desire to return to the early years of Islam where
everyone, they believed, was honest and happy. Islamic State may have emerged out of ethnic
divisions and corruption but it is part of a deeper trend based on contempt for modernisation
under which all modern states are corrupt and only their form of theocratic Islam is pure and
incorruptible alternative. The popularity of Islamic State in its captured territories is mixed.69
67
R H Dekmejian, “The Anatomy Of Islamic Revival: Legitimacy Crisis, Ethnic Conflict and the Search for Islamic
Alternatives”, Middle East Journal, vol. 34, 1980, pp 1 - 12.
68
W Loza, “The Psychology of Extremism and Terrorism: A Middle-Eastern Perspective”, Aggression and Violent Behaviour,
vol. 12, 2006, pp. 141 - 155.
69
“Life in Mosul one year on: “Isis with all its brutality is more honest than the Shia government”, The Guardian, 10 June 2015.
Interview with resident of Mosul:
Isis succeeded in winning people’s hearts in Mosul from the first day they liberated the city for being modest, unprejudiced and
cooperative. They restored the dignity and pride of the Sunni man in Mosul after enduring a great deal of humiliation and revenge under
successive Shia governments since the US occupation of Iraq. Corruption was widespread and eroding all the city facilities, which were
like a huge military barracks suffocating people. The city did not witness any reconstruction for the entire last 10 years despite all the
billions that were poured into the city council.
20 However, unlike other more focused insurgencies, it is not interested in capturing a state; rather,
it wants to replace these states with a new proto-state, “the caliphate”, across the entire region,
and beyond. It is therefore necessarily international. This requires sophisticated information
operations based on a variety of media and digital platforms, not just to win over the Sunni
populations of Iraq and Syria but the alienated minority of the Sunni world-wide attracted to its
extreme form of apocalyptic millenarianism.
Conclusion: a model
Most developing and transitional states suffer from grand corruption. There may even be
widespread moral outrage. Yet not all of them are likely to fall into insurgency. It is more likely
to take place in kleptocratic states. In such states, disaffected members of elites will commence
insurgencies by finding a cause likely to win support from most of the population. Historically,
that was anti-colonisation; later, they might have found a cause based around ethnic oppression.
Increasingly, they will use corruption. Anti-corruption discourses are a feature of all
contemporary insurgencies – revolutionary, ethnic and religious political insurgencies.
Corruption, aside from its many adverse economic and political effects, causes moral outrage
which can be easily operationalised by effective information operations by insurgency leaders.
This has some relevance to counter-insurgency strategies and stabilisation. Insurgencies which
exploit moral outrage and are able to frame the insurgency based around a discourse of
corruption are likely to win the information battle. This is because they are based on a
fundamental truth: contemporary insurgencies, for the reasons I have set out above, occur in
deeply corrupt states. An effective counter-insurgency strategy requires more than trying to win
“hearts and minds”; it must be seen to be attempting to eliminate the sources of corruption that
motivated the insurgency in the first place.
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Scott Collins
12 June 2015
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