Introduction: Complexity, Resilience and the “Local Turn” in Counterinsurgency

This chapter offers a detailed discussion of existing approaches to contemporary counter-insurgency, highlighting emerging discursive and practical shifts in counter-insurgency-related intervention rationales that move contemporary counter-insurgency toward logics of reflexive adaptation, complexity and resilience. In introducing and contextualizing these shifts in empirical and conceptual terms, we demonstrate how the increasing emphasis on the everyday, ‘the local’ and ‘the social’ as the key sites and objects of interventionary counter-insurgency contribute to a deepening convergence between liberal peace building, humanitarianism and counter-insurgent warfare that stand at the center of what we refer to as the ‘local turn’ in counter-insurgent warfare.