Insurgencies Large and Small: Part 1

So the Sri Lankan government announced this week that it had defeated the Tamil Tiger insurgency after decades of various levels of warfare.  But, this prompted me to ask, does one ever really defeat an insurgency?  Has conventional warfare really been effective against guerrilla tactics?  Whether in Southeast Asia, Central America, Iraq, Afghanistan, or elsewhere, it seems as if battles are, on the surface, won, but what really happens behind the scenes is that the venue shifts elsewhere to another place and time.

True, too, for organizational insurgencies.  Many of our clients grapple with an insurgency of one form or another.  Faculty aligned with a former school administration resist collaborating with a new head; a faction of board members agitates for a re-orientation of the school's mission; a group of parents believes the school should more closely resemble a parent cooperative than a true nonprofit institution; a new dean of a dental school promotes an accelerated research agenda that is resisted by a cadre of senior faculty.

The battle may be won for the moment, in each of these instances, but almost invariably the issue surfaces somewhere else at another time.  Sometimes, as in Sri Lanka, the formal or informal leader of the insurgency may be eliminated (by firing, a humane approach as compared with what happened in Sri Lanka), but that only slows down the rebellion.  It rarely stops it.

The reason for this is because the insurgency is usually about an idea (maybe even an ideal), and ideas are impossible to eradicate.  In fact, confronting the idea/ideal head-on is almost a sure way to give it new energy.