Chapter 13: ‘Winning Hearts and Minds’: A Historically Motivated Model for Reactions to Occupation Strategy

Military occupation is an unfortunately common feature of world history, bringing with it a myriad of issues around governance and policing in the ‘occupation zone’. For an occupier, the many dovetailing concerns of governance are the same as they are for a peacetime regime and include policing and military security alongside social and societal welfare, which extends to the economy, public health and more complicated questions of communal good life. Cord Schmelzle notes that legal and moral questions around the justification of specific occupation operations has dominated discourse. Setting these questions aside, the connected (and, often, conflicting) issues of security and community welfare are always more complicated for occupiers because they must impose full government on a foreign population without the ability to appeal to local sovereignty.¹ How such operations may best be affected is a pressing concern today, given that there are currently approximately 20 ongoing occupations around the world resulting from foreign wars, border conflicts and invasion for national expansion (e.g., Crimea and eastern Ukraine), but also from natural disaster and peacekeeping.² And, as the recent US-led occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq show, failing to find the correct strategy that adequately balances security enforcement against social welfare can have disastrous consequences. These problems reveal a pressing need for more nuanced analyses of the history and for development of predictive theories.