Approaches to Modeling Insurgency

For the purposes of this paper, we define insurgency as an organized movement that uses armed violence to overthrow a country’s government while often hiding within the civilian population and using civilians to perform combat support functions. The use of civilian population differentiates insurgency from the regular warfare where such an exploitation of civilians would constitute a war crime. Similarly, a rebellion where anti-government forces do not disguise themselves as civilians and fight as a regular, identifiable military is different from insurgency. The significant involvement of civilian population also distinguishes insurgency from a purely terrorist movement, which relies primarily on a tight network of professional terrorists. Although our definition, like any other (e.g., US DoD, 2007), leaves room for gray areas, it serves to emphasize the key feature of insurgency—its reliance upon, and exploitation of civilian population. Because the literature on modeling, simulation, and analysis of regular warfare is vast and readily available, and because insurgencies are often associated with interventions, in this paper we limit our discussion to insurgencies.