ABSTRACT
Insurgency is a security competition in which a challenger confronts the state’s hegemony within society, where attacks seek to demonstrate the state’s inability to provide this most essential societal good. Popular discussions of the “war of ideas” in media and academic circles have focused on fixed identities, ethnic or religious, and on grievances (usually cultural-historical affairs) as the cause of contemporary low-intensity conflict. Recently new groups of scholars have successfully challenged the previous consensus, finding that varying identities and grievances are present in every society and other factors can better explain contemporary international conflicts.2
