Know Thy Enemy? Generating, Negotiating and Codifying Knowledge of Insurgencies into U.S. Counterinsurgency Doctrine, 2004-2006
Worrall, J.
Worrall, J.
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2025
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© 2025 The Authors. Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
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2025-03-27
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Abstract
Building on existing works which conceptualise doctrine writing as a form of social construction, this article theorises the messy, negotiated processes through which specific forms of knowledge – in this case specific knowledge of insurgencies – are generated, negotiated and codified into doctrine. It illustrates these processes using novel interview data and documentary analysis of drafts and feedback rounds throughout the writing of FM 3-24 Counterinsurgency (2006). This process tracing reveals that far from a linear, objective process of gathering and incorporating knowledge of insurgencies, the codification of knowledge is instead a negotiated, nonlinear process shaped by stakeholder politics and time constraints.
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Waterman A and Worrall J (2025) Know Thy Enemy? Generating, Negotiating and Codifying Knowledge of Insurgencies into U.S. Counterinsurgency Doctrine, 2004-2006. Journal of Strategic Studies. 48(5): 1015-1048.
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