Modern Counter-Insurgency

"Ian Beckett is a British scholar and an older scholar compared to the others, and I think what one has got here is a very mature approach, in which what he is essentially saying is that it is not always the case that insurgency warfare succeeds or doesn’t succeed, and it is not always the case that counter-insurgency warfare succeeds or doesn’t succeed. In other words, one has to do the hard work of looking at why in particular circumstances you get given outcomes. I think in a way that is one of the great values of history . Historians don’t own the past. There are other subjects, such as political science and sociology, which look at the past. And they have their strengths and can be very exciting. But one of their weaknesses is that they are overly prone to present a clear-cut model that explains everything. And what I rather like are books that are open to long-term big issues. The Beckett book covers the last quarter millennium, which is good because he doesn’t just cover one insurgency or do a comparison of two. But at the same time he is referring repeatedly to the specific, whether that be the country or the groups of individuals. And I think that is very important. I would invite anyone thinking about history, who is told that such and such an outcome is inevitable, to look back at the last 30 or 40 years of their own country and think about different outcomes. What would have been the history of Britain if we hadn’t had North Sea oil? These questions are important because history takes on its value if it can encourage you not just to look at the past but also to think carefully about the present and the future."