The Israel-Hamas conflict, and its possible turn toward direct urban warfare, reminded me of an old article I published in 2010 (link to ungated PDF) in Comparative Political Studies on urban insurgency. I’m honestly not sure how relevant it is to what is currently happening, but it may provide a useful framework and set of possible comparison cases for understanding conflict dynamics in an urbanized setting.
The argument highlights a balance between the social network/mobilization capacity of the insurgent movement and the political constraints (or lack thereof) of the counterinsurgent. When urban rebels lack a meaningful social base, urban COIN tends to be effective (and often policing preempts any real insurgency). When states are largely unconstrained in their use of violence, even comparatively robust insurgents can be defeated by brute military force (think Grozny, Mosul, etc). The latter is what Israeli security elites have signaled is coming in Gaza (already the air campaign has highlighted “damage” rather than “accuracy”) but it remains to be seen whether that kind of intense, comprehensive ground invasion will occur, much less how it will play out.
It’s at the intersection of a robust insurgent movement with some degree of political constraint on state violence that enduring urban insurgency can emerge and persist. This tends to be rare compared to classical rural insurgencies or to “militia-ized”/conventional-esque urban conflicts (i.e. 1980s Beirut), or rapid urban revolutions, but when it happens it can be quite politically important. It seems pretty easy to imagine a political-military world in which Israeli forces conquer some/much/all of Gaza but are not able to fully defeat Hamas and then face ongoing insurgency short of Israel’s declared war aims.
A fundamental political difference is that Israel – unlike states trying to control Karachi or Belfast or for that matter the West Bank – does not seem to want to govern Gaza, which complicates the comparison to most other cases. The main constraints on state violence here seem – to the extent they exist – largely to be external/international, as well as perhaps to some extent domestic risk assessments (i.e. Netanyahu has always been relatively cautious about large-scale warfare). This recent Good Authority roundtable is very useful for trying to articulate what exactly this form of rule is and isn’t, as well as the logics of violence at play.
Excerpts from the 2010 article for whatever it may or may not be worth:
“Some urban areas are marked by robust, resilient ethnic and religious networks that link ethno-religious groups to cities and provide the underpinning for high-risk violent collective action. These communities and networks can both motivate and facilitate violence. In some cases it is certainly true that “in the city, anonymous denunciation is easier to get away with, giving the government an advantage in its counterinsurgent efforts” (Fearon & Laitin, 2003, p. 80), but it is unclear that this can be justified as a blanket assertion. . . .
There is a simple, grim way to decisively shatter an urban rebellion that has escalated into an insurgent challenge—using conventional firepower to annihilate the city or cities in which it is based. Cities present easier targets to conventional military forces than the pacification of vast swathes of rural terrain, regardless of their social characteristics . . .
I argue that political considerations can lead a militarily capable government to avoid the massive application of violence in its response to urban mobilization. Even when a state has high capacity for organized violence, it can choose to avoid embracing this option. Although urban community structure determines where rebellion is possible, state policy determines when it occurs . . .
These types of political constraints may be particularly severe in semidemocratic political systems, which some scholars argue are more likely to face civil wars (Hegre, Ellingsen, Gates, & Gleditsch, 2001; Snyder, 2000), or in peripheral regions of democracies where these conditions hold.3 These regimes often have politicized local security forces, both rely on and are threatened by mass contention, and lack reliable institutions of governance . . .
Political constraints can thus force even militarily capable governments to engage in coercive governance—a mix of large-scale military or police activity with continued governance of the affected area. The government has powerful incentives to maintain control of major population centers and is unwilling to abandon them to armed, mobilized insurgents, yet its elites calculate that they cannot afford to decisively destroy them. The need to both fight and govern makes state security forces vulnerable to attack and harassment because they cannot deploy the levels of firepower and force protection that bring victory in conventional battle. This results in a long sequence of urban warfare encounters rather than a quick and clean law enforcement operation or conventional assault”
Paul Staniland 