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Civilt skydd vid upprorsbekämpning
Swedish National Defence College.
2015 (Swedish)Independent thesis Basic level (professional degree), 10 credits / 15 HE creditsStudent thesis
Abstract [en]

Counterinsurgency (COIN) has made a comeback during the early 21-century since the majority of western countries have been involved in peace enforcement in the middle-east. Since its comeback the concept of COIN have been wildly debated but also undergone some chances since its early days, today the majority of COIN theories claims that the local population is the key to winning a COIN campaign. If you gain their trust the insurgency will lose their support and recruiting base, this is the reason why collateral damage resulting in in civilian deaths are contra-productive, it creates more insurgents. This is the incitement to further examine how civilian deaths occur and can be avoided during COIN campaigns. This essay studies the American COIN campaign in Iraq between 2004 and 2009 and aims to investigate whether there is a trilemma-like relationship between the key goals of COIN: protecting civilians, protecting one’s own forces and neutralizing the enemy. Each different goal has been operationalized to something measurable – death statistics. The yearly death toll for coalition troops, Iraqi civilians and insurgents provide the empirical material necessary to answer the question if the main goals can be achieved at the same time or if it’s impossible. The essay is broken down into two parts, the first examines whether an actual people-centric COIN strategy saves civilian lives or if it’s all just in theory. The second part examines the relationship between the key goals. The result in this essay shows that a people-centric COIN strategy, as the one employed by General Petraeus in Iraq during operation Iraqi freedom, actually saves civilian lives. But it also establishes that the key goals can’t be achieved at the same time and that each strategy will come with a consequence.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2015. , p. 27
Keywords [sv]
upprorsbekämpning COIN Irak civila dödsoffer force protection
National Category
Other Social Sciences not elsewhere specified
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:fhs:diva-5479OAI: oai:DiVA.org:fhs-5479DiVA, id: diva2:825605
Subject / course
War Studies Thesis
Educational program
Officersprogrammet (OP)
Supervisors
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Available from: 2015-07-02 Created: 2015-06-23 Last updated: 2015-08-04Bibliographically approved

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CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

Direct link
Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • harvard-cite-them-right
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf