This chapter describes the importance of studying wartime displacement, outlines several key questions that motivate the book, and summarizes the main arguments. It also briefly defines strategic wartime displacement and specifies the scope of the study, explaining why it confines the analysis to civil wars and why it focuses on displacement perpetuated by state combatants. It then describes what we know about displacement in war. This includes outlining existing explanations and discussing their limitations. It concludes by describing the methods and sources used in the book, summarizing its main findings, and outlining the structure of the rest of the book.

This chapter explores whether the arguments in this book can extend to the third type of strategic displacement – depopulation – and not just forced relocation. To do so, it examines the use of displacement by pro-government forces during the civil war in Syria. This chapter analyzes quantitative and qualitative data from a range of sources, including media reports, human rights records, data on violence and displacement collected by nongovernmental organizations, and interviews with activists, journalists, combatants, and regime defectors that were conducted in Syria, Turkey, and Lebanon. The findings question the common characterization of state-induced displacement in Syria as ethno-sectarian cleansing and challenge the notion that these tactics have been intended solely, or even primarily, to achieve demographic change. The regime induced displacement to separate and differentiate the loyal from the disloyal, improve the “legibility” of local communities, and extract much-needed revenues, military recruits, and symbolic benefits from the population – showing that strategies of depopulation can also exhibit the sorting logic of strategic displacement, similar to strategies of forced relocation.

This chapter develops the main argument of the book. It posits that some displacement strategies – namely, forced relocation – act as a mechanism for sorting the population in wartime. The argument focuses on how the territorialization of political identity in civil wars and the tendency for combatants to utilize informational shortcuts impels them to use relocation to identify opponents through “guilt by location.” It also shows that relocation can create “zones of appropriation” that facilitate the mobilization of the population into the war effort, without requiring combatants to invest in resource-intensive methods of territorial occupation. To demonstrate the logic and plausibility of each aspect of the "assortative" theory of displacement and illustrate its central causal claims, the chapter provides empirical examples from a wide range of civil wars, from the Revolt of the Camisards in eighteenth-century France, to colonial wars in British, French, Japanese, and Portuguese territories, to modern conflicts in Angola, Bangladesh, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Guatemala, India, Nicaragua, Peru, the Philippines, Rwanda, and Sri Lanka. The chapter also discusses a set of hypotheses and observable implications of the theory.

This chapter provides additional evidence for the sorting theory in a broader set of contexts. In order to demonstrate that the findings from Chapter 5 generalize beyond Uganda – and can account for the empirical associations found in Chapter 4 – it conducts “shadow” case studies of three civil wars from the Strategic Displacement in Civil Conflict dataset that experienced forced relocation. The three case studies are Burundian Civil War (1991–2005), the Aceh conflict in Indonesia (1999–2005), and the Vietnam War (1960–1975). These cases were selected for both methodological and practical reasons. Using process-tracing of secondary sources, the chapter finds that in all three cases, perpetrators used forced relocation to overcome identification problems posed by guerrilla insurgencies, specifically by drawing inferences about the identities and allegiances of the local population based on civilian flight patterns and physical locations. State authorities also used relocation to extract economic and military resources, notably recruits, from the displaced, which in some instances helped fill critical resource gaps. The evidence suggests that the theory and its underlying mechanisms are generalizable beyond Uganda and travel to other diverse contexts.

At the prompting of the Nixon White House, President Nguyen Van Thieu sent South Vietnamese forces into Laos in February 1971, seeking to cut North Vietnamese supply lines to the battlefields in the South. Lam Son 719 was a bloody failure, and it shaped the final phase of America’s Vietnam War. Convinced that the South Vietnamese could never withstand a full-scale offensive, the North Vietnamese leadership committed to a nation-wide attack in early 1972, designed to bring a decisive end to the war. The Easter Offensive, as it is remembered in the West, broke on three fronts in late March 1972, initially with a series of victories by the NVA. President Richard Nixon and his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, viewed this offensive as a threat to their political and diplomatic objectives, and ordered a massive deployment of US air and naval forces to reinforce the South Vietnamese. In May 1972, Nixon ordered an air offensive against North Vietnam code-named Linebacker to deny resupply to the North Vietnamese forces. The NVA offensive stagnated in late June, setting the stage for negotiations between the US and Hanoi to end the war. Kissinger and Le Duc Tho reached a settlement in early October, but it was rejected by Thieu, forcing the US to renegotiate the treaty. In the end, Nixon directed the most violent air campaign of the war, sending B-52 heavy bombers over Hanoi to coerce the North Vietnamese into accepting the minor changes required for a settlement.

The American War in Vietnam is often described as a struggle for the “hearts and minds” of the Vietamese people, a fundamentally political conflict in which “pacification,” the push to uproot the adversarys hold on the villages, became a primary mechanism in fighting the war. This chapter opens with an inquiry into the meaning of the terms of art, not just pacification but “counterinsurgency,” “civic action,” “nation-building,” and others. It observes this schema applies to an essential problem, the degree of South Vietnamese commitment to pacification, which remained problematic. To show this I start with a description of how pacification evolved under Ngo Dinh Diem and his successors. On the American side we see presidents, from Dwight D. Eisenhower, who took a conventional view, to John F. Kennedy, who applied counterinsurgency, to Lyndon B. Johnson, who championed the “other war,” one that privileged economic and social development. LBJ became the first to create an organizational structure to conduct pacification programs. The late-war innovations to these efforts, including measures of village loyalty, the Phoenix program attacking the National Liberation Fronts infrastructure, and the emphasis on elections from national to village level, were products of the Johnson administration. From the beginning, American pacification policy oscillated between emphasizing security versus social development before settling on security.

This chapter concludes the book and considers its major theoretical and practical implications. It begins by exploring how the book pushes us to think about fake news and factual misperceptions as an important “layer” of war – a layer that has been largely neglected despite the burgeoning attention to these issues in other domains. This final chapter then examines what the book’s findings tell us about such topics as the psychology and behavior of civilian populations, the duration of armed conflicts, the feasibility of prevailing counterinsurgency models, and the depths and limits of misperceptions more broadly in social and political life. It also engages with the practical implications of the book for policymakers, journalists, activists, and ordinary politically engaged citizens in greater depth, exploring how the problems outlined in the research might also be their own solutions. Ultimately, this chapter shows how the book has something to offer to anyone who is interested in the dynamics of truth and falsehood in violent conflicts (and beyond) – and perhaps the beginnings of a framework for those who would like to cultivate more truth.

The Ugandan government was the first to engage with the International Criminal Court and did so via the then-unexpected mechanism of self-referral when it requested an investigation into its conflict with the Lord’s Resistance Army in the country’s north. While this seems like evidence of the government accepting global norms of accountability for atrocities in wartime, it entailed significant risk for the Museveni regime. The Uganda People’s Defence Force, essentially fused to the ruling regime, has committed acts within that conflict that may have amounted to war crimes and crimes against humanity. Moreover, these are bound to occur whenever the UPDF is deployed – as it usually is – since its function as a vessel for distribution of patronage makes it a blunt instrument strongly tending towards indiscriminate use of force. Yet Museveni was able to use the country’s centrally managed illegibility to help control the process of ICC scrutiny and gained further leverage through a strong asymmetrically interdependent relationship to the brand new court. This allowed Uganda to emerge better than unscathed, not only with warrants only issued for LRA high command, but with newfound international support for a military solution to the Northern crisis where once he found only criticism due to the rights violations it invariably generated.

An epilogue explores several topics regarding the future of modern air warfare. The first section offers recommendations for how the United States can better prepare for modern air warfare. The second considers air power in counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operations. The third anticipates the role of air power in extending deterrence to allies. The fourth demonstrates how TAP theory can assess the potential effectiveness of air power by analyzing the Russian Air Force in the Battle of Kyiv. The final section considers additional challenges facing the United States during an emerging era of great power competition.

The history of Central America during the Age of Atlantic Revolutions poses a conundrum. Between 1808 and 1821, the kingdom of Guatemala failed to display any sustained or widespread opposition to the Spanish colonial order. This apparent lack of engagement with the Atlantic revolutionary experience suggests that the colony was an anomaly in an empire that witnessed multiple examples of revolutionary sentiment. However, like the majority of the Spanish Empire, the isthmus did not confront the political chaos produced by the collapse of the Bourbon monarchy with either equanimity or unanimity. Here, as elsewhere, peninsular authorities hunkered down in a defensive stance, fearing both foreign subversion and creole pretensions. Here, as elsewhere, local grievances flared into ill-defined uprisings and regional interests gained ground against the metropolitan and colonial capitals. Here, as elsewhere, opportunists manipulated the crisis to advance personal agendas, while idealists sought to sow the seeds of real revolution among the wider population. Yet, here, as elsewhere, a popular majority failed to mobilize against the established order and preferred to either keep faith with colonial institutions or hold out hope for the possibility of imperial reform until independence became the only viable option.

After 2011, the Syrian opposition took on the Assad government directly through military means and indirectly by establishing pockets of rule beyond the government’s reach. As rebels took control of many government-held locations, they sparked the establishment of insurgent governing institutions in hundreds of communities. Local opposition-run institutions in the form of civilian-led local councils proliferated, dotting the provinces of Aleppo, Idlib, rural Damascus, Raqqa, Hama, and Homs. They worked to deliver basic relief and restore public services, sometimes in collaboration with, but often operating separately from, their armed counterparts. The boundaries of this “political marketplace”1 grew increasingly porous as a number of foreign states and private actors directly championed clients of their choosing, bolstering their favorites with financial and military support.2

The very project of counter-state-building, as conceived in twenty-first-century international relations, required Syria’s opposition leaders to convince prospective foreign patrons of the worthiness of the revolutionary endeavor. For those institutions that became clients of the West, they worked, as Clifford Bob would have it, to market their rebellion with agility.1 To make their case, they attended, paradoxically, to an outward-facing politics at the expense of cultivating an authoritative closeness from within. Still, both donor and recipient engaged one another “as if” the introduction of limited foreign support could do the work of connecting an aspiring commanding heights to the revolutionary grassroots. As such, we interpret this performance of counter-statehood not merely as a product of Syrian opposition politics but rather as a collaboration between the opposition and its foreign patrons.

Chapter 6 turns to the case of Nicaragua’s land tenure institutions, analyzing the emergence of new land titling rules that stoked insecurity and corruption. It argues that the Contra War (1980–1990) remade the rules of agrarian reform and land titling in ways that subverted the state’s ability to regulate property ownership and opened up a property rights gap. As the perceived threat posed by the insurgency deepened and large numbers of peasant producers defected to the rebels’ side, the increasingly narrow and highly centralized FSLN coalition in power implemented a series of alternative rules that permitted the individual and provisional titling of unregistered lands, which generated greater peasant dependence on the incumbent regime but also heightened corruption and conflict.

Chapter 2 presents the book’s theory of wartime institutional change, which accounts for why civil war is a site of institutional transformation, conceptualizes different wartime institutional logics, and elaborates the causal process through which undermining rules evolve amid conflict. It argues that the perceived escalation of the insurgent threat within civil war unsettles prevailing institutional arrangements and empowers political and military elites who, as the architects of counterinsurgency, possess high levels of decision-making discretion. Under the pretext of combatting the “internal enemy,” this counterinsurgent elite introduces alternative rules of the game, which correspond to its narrow interests. The latter half of the chapter tackles why undermining rules persist within and beyond conflict. Where counterinsurgent leaders can knit together a broader set of interests with a stake in the wartime procedures and successfully co-opt new peacetime political and economic spaces, the undermining rules are more likely to survive. By contrast, shifting postwar elite alignments generate chronic instability, disrupting the institutional status quo.

Chapter 4 traces the wartime emergence of undermining rules within Guatemala’s customs apparatus by the Moreno Network. It analyzes how the Moreno Network was forged by an elite clique of military intelligence officers granted extraordinary discretion while infiltrating the state apparatus to combat Guatemala’s insurgent groups in the 1970s and 1980s. Amid the heightened sense of threat, this counterinsurgent elite introduced a series of predatory institutional arrangements to capture customs revenues. The chapter also examines how the illicit customs procedures were enforced by the Moreno Network, both through the use of violent and nonviolent coercion and through the co-optation of security forces and other state agencies.

Chapter 5 examines the wartime origins of undermining rules governing extrajudicial killing by Guatemala’s National Police (PN). It argues that the development of such procedures is rooted in the specialization of the police force and the broad discretion granted to concentrated groups of police elites amid the late 1960s period of perceived threat escalation. Specifically, with the creation of highly insulated elite investigative units like the Detective Corps [Cuerpo de Detectives], previous extralegal violence waged by right-wing death squads was institutionalized as routine state activity. The new rules were sanctioned by top military intelligence officials, who devised clear procedures for how to frame the resulting killings to the public.