Out of the Mountains (24 page)

In a similar vein, in a December
1964
lecture at the U.S. Naval War College, the classical counterinsurgency theorist Bernard Fall had this to say about insurgent control:

Any sound revolutionary warfare operator (the French underground, the Norwegian underground, or any other anti-Nazi European underground) most of the time used small-war tactics—not to destroy the German army, of which they were thoroughly incapable, but to establish
a competitive system of control over the population
. Of course, in order to do this, here and there they had to kill some of the occupying forces and attack some of the military targets. But above all they had to kill their own people who collaborated with the enemy.
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[Italics added]

Fall was talking of the coercive end of a spectrum of incentives—the application of lethal force against those who collaborate with an insurgent's rivals. Any sensible guerrilla, terrorist, or organized criminal network will of course attack soft targets (the unarmed civilian population that supports a government) in preference to attacking the government itself. Besides being a less risky target than the police or the military, the civilian population is more numerous and easily accessible than are government installations and officials.

But Fall's point here is larger than simply a comment on the mechanics of violence. Note his language: a
competitive system of control
. Fall never developed his concept fully—he was killed in February
1967
while accompanying a U.S. Marine Corps patrol near Hue, South Vietnam. But his later writings give a series of examples of this idea of competitive control—an idea that's not spatial (“insurgent-controlled” or “contested” areas) or structural (“networks” and “movements”) but rather functional. It implies the presence of a range of incentives and disincentives, all of which are used to generate control over population groups—the individual strands of a networked system of control that attracts and then corrals a population, much as a fish trap cages fish. It also implies a competition among several actors who are all trying to control the population in a violent and contested environment.

Normative Systems

I find it helpful to locate Fall's “system of competitive control” within the broader theoretical discourse of normative systems. The notion of normative systems is long established in sociology and legal theory and, increasingly, in computer science, where developers have found it useful in agent-based modeling (where researchers assign behavioral rules to computer-generated “bots” and then watch how they behave in complex systems).
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For our purposes, we can define a normative system as
a set of rules that is correlated with a set of consequences
.
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In essence, it's a system of norms (behavioral rules) that is paired with a set of sanctions (costs and punishments for breaking those rules). This system of norms and sanctions defines the boundaries of permissible behavior for a population. It makes the behavioral space inside its boundaries a safe zone for those who follow its rules, while the space that lies outside the boundaries becomes deeply unsafe. Implicit in this idea is the notion of an actor (an “owner” or proponent of the normative system) who sets the rules, bestows benefits for following them, and inflicts punishments for breaking them, and is thereby able to control a population. According to this theory, the owner of a normative system becomes the dominant actor in a given area (or over a given population) precisely to the extent to which people in that area or population abide by its rules. This applies equally to a wide range of actors: the don of a Jamaican district enforcing his “System,” the leader of a Somali militia, a Taliban court dispensing justice, and a Honduran gang enforcing an extortion racket are all applying variants of the same norms-based approach.

This actor may be a government or a nonstate group; it may be benevolent or malevolent, legally recognized or illicit, formal or informal. But two characteristics must always be present: the actor must always be
armed
(that is, it must have the capacity to inflict violence as part of its spectrum of sanctions) and it must always be a
group
(some form of collective entity), not just an individual. An unarmed actor lacks the capacity both to enforce its own normative system and to resist predation from other armed actors in the violent ecosystem we've just described. And enforcing a normative system is fundamentally a group activity, since it involves regulating people's behavior over a wide area of time and space, a task that lies beyond the capacity of any one individual (as we saw in the Tivoli Gardens example in Chapter
2
).

In an environment with only one dominant actor possessing a monopoly on the use of armed violence, we would expect to see an extremely high degree of control over a population or area. This, indeed, is demonstrably the case in areas that are fully controlled by governments. But in the examples we've been examining in this book—insurgencies, urban street gangs, informal periurban settlements beyond the direct reach of the state, diasporas subjected to a protection racket by gangs who dominate their town of origin, and so on—we are looking not at
uncontested
control but rather at a pattern of contested space and at a competition for control among several actors. Each actor tries to create a normative system of competitive control, and the better it does this, the more likely it is to dominate the contested space. Thus we are talking here of competition among organized, armed groups seeking to control populations through normative systems—a construct that applies equally well to insurgency and crime, to state and nonstate actors, and indeed to the actions of states and those of governments.

Within the behavioral space bounded by its rule set, an actor can apply a spectrum of means ranging from persuasion through administration to coercion. At the persuasive end of this spectrum are arguments and inducements to support the dominant rule set. These include propaganda, political and ideological mobilization, social pressure, and identity manipulation. But as we've seen, often the most persuasive element is the feeling of security, predictability, order and cohesion (closely related to Ibn Khaldun's idea of
asabiyya
, discussed in the Mogadishu example) that comes with adherence to a dominant actor's norms. In the middle of the spectrum, administrative tools—justice systems, mediation and dispute resolution mechanisms, essential services, social and economic institutions—make it easier for people to follow the rules, and give them tangible benefits for doing so. At the coercive end of the spectrum are punishments that impose costs on people who break the rules. These include punitive violence—up to and including death—as well as expropriation (fines, penalties, or seizure of assets), expulsion and exile, or imprisonment.

Max Weber, of course, famously defined the state as a political organization that “upholds a claim to a monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force in the enforcement of its order.”
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We might reformulate this, in the context of our discussion of competitive control, to say that a government is a political organization that has successfully outcompeted its rivals across the full coercion-persuasion spectrum, allowing it to establish an uncontested normative system over a given population or territory.

The coercive end of the spectrum is critical, because it supports and enables the rest of the system: the persuasive and administrative parts of a normative system work (as Weber noted) only because they rest on the ultimate sanction of force, which a dominant actor can apply against those who break its rules. From the insurgent standpoint, Mao Zedong explained this fundamental truth in
1938
:

Every Communist must grasp the truth, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” Our principle is that the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party. Yet, [by] having guns, we can create Party organizations . . . We can also create cadres, create schools, create culture, create mass movements. Everything in Yenan has been created by having guns. All things grow out of the barrel of a gun.
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Clearly, however, the resilience of an armed group also depends on the capabilities it can bring to bear across the full spectrum of a competitive control system. As we'll see shortly, groups that can only apply coercion may achieve temporary dominance over a population. But their control will be brittle, lacking resilience, because it depends on fear alone—in normative systems terms, it covers only a narrow band of the persuasion-coercion spectrum. A purely coercive actor can cast a spell of fear over a population, but as soon as this spell is broken, the population will turn on its tormentor with incredible speed and violence. By contrast, a group that applies a range of coercive, administrative, and persuasive means has a much stronger and more resilient control system. Such a group can respond to a setback in one part of the spectrum by increasing its efforts in another, and can therefore maintain greater and more flexible control over time.

As we saw in the Afghan example with which we began, the creation of safe behavioral space, as part of a wide-spectrum normative system, has an attraction effect on an at-risk population, who tend to flock to it, drawn by the persuasive inducements and administrative benefits of the system, as well as by the fear of what may happen to them in the unsafe space outside it. This, I suspect, is one of the primary mechanisms for the support-follows-strength pattern that Stathis Kalyvas observed. Once in the system, however, people are corralled and prevented from leaving by the threat of coercion. We might call this the “fish trap effect,” since it induces people to enter a system which they then find extremely difficult and painful to leave. Thus, Fall's “competitive system of control” can be seen as just one type of normative system, and its application to insurgencies as but one example among many, in which state and nonstate armed groups of all kinds compete to control population groups. To illustrate this in a way that might be closer to home for many readers, let's consider the everyday example of road rules in a large city.

Rules of the Road as a Normative System

Think about the last time you drove your car in a large urban area. You may have been driving to work, or going into the city for a meeting or to go shopping. As you got behind the steering wheel of your car and drove onto the road, you entered a violent, dangerous, and unpredictable environment—across the United States in 2010, for example, roughly 33,000 people died in road traffic accidents; someone was killed on average every sixteen minutes.
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What makes you willing to commit yourself and your family to such a risky activity on a daily basis? Among other things, it seems to me, one reason is that the rules of the road give you a degree of order and predictability, and this sense of predictability gives you the confidence to function in a dangerous environment (with, perhaps, little conscious perception of risk).

This is because, thanks to the rules, the driving environment—though it's undoubtedly dangerous—is far from chaotic. There's a designated side of the road on which all vehicles have to drive. There's an approved speed limit. There are road signs, in a standardized format, that warn of hazards and prompt certain key behaviors—braking, yielding, or stopping. There are traffic lights that regulate intersections, and lines marked on the road that ensure each vehicle keeps within its own lane. There are television, radio, and billboard advertisements that publicize these rules, seeking to persuade motorists of the benefits of following them, and warning of the consequences (death and injury, speeding fines, loss of license) that follow from breaking the rules.

And sitting behind this system, underpinning it though often not directly visible, is a government, with a traffic authority or transportation department that sets the rules, a police force or highway patrol that enforces them, a court system that tries those who violate the rules, a system of fines and penalties, and, ultimately, a prison system. People follow the rules (norms) for a variety of reasons—because they fear the punishments (sanctions) that correlate with breaking the rules, because they're persuaded of the risks of speeding or driving drunk, because they fear public opinion (the embarrassment of having to catch the bus because of a suspended license, or a spouse's disapproval because of speeding fines), or because they value the ease and convenience of efficient road transport that would be impossible without rules to tame the chaos. Even in a less formal system of road traffic control, where some of these visual cues and formal traffic control measures (signs, lane markings, and so on) may be missing, the cooperative behavior of motorists moving on a busy road is underpinned by the presumed or actual presence of an enforcer, in the form of police or a locally dominant group.

What we're describing here is of course a normative system, one that's owned by the government, enforced by the police, and seeks to control the population of road users within a given territory. This normative system embodies rules and sanctions that create a safe area of behavioral space within which people can go about their business with a basic expectation of safety, and indeed without a great deal of conscious thought. This barely noticed system of control, however, rests ultimately on the power of an armed actor—the police—and on the coercive sanction of the courts and the correctional system.

It seems to me that this is probably what Joseph Conrad meant in his novel
Heart of Darkness
when he described the ordinary citizen as living within a control system of which he or she is barely aware, with the police at one end of the spectrum and public opinion at the other. Kurtz, the novel's antihero, finds himself wielding immense power, alone and unsupervised, in a jungle outpost: