How can the United States best assure its interests abroad when a partner state faces an insurgency? The question has vexed policymakers, military officers, and scholars throughout the Cold War and into the post–9/11 era. When the United States finds its military might turned against itself by insurgents, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, thoughts often turn to the small U.S.-supported counterinsurgency campaign in El Salvador from 1979 to 1992.

Good governance reforms are unnecessary for counterinsurgency success. Defeating insurgents instead requires brute force against civilians and the government’s accommodation of rival elites. 

U.S counterinsurgency doctrine assumes that states must make liberalizing reforms that will defeat insurgencies by winning the “hearts and minds” of the population.

For her dissertation, Jacqueline (Jill) Hazelton, a research fellow with the Belfer Center’s International Security Program, compares two models of counterinsurgency (COIN).