In Bullets Not Ballots, Jacqueline L. Hazelton challenges the claim that winning "hearts and minds" is critical to successful counterinsurgency campaigns. Good governance, this conventional wisdom holds, gains the besieged government popular support, denies support to the insurgency, and makes military victory possible. Hazelton argues that major counterinsurgent successes since the Second World War have resulted not through dematic reforms but rather through the use of military force against civilians and the cooptation of rival elites.
Hazelton offers new analyses of five historical cases frequently held up as examples of the effectiveness of good governance in ending rebellions-the Malayan Emergency, the Greek Civil War, the Huk Rebellion in the Philippines, the Dhofar rebellion in Oman, and the El Salvadoran Civil War-to show that, although unpalatable, it was really brutal repression and bribery that brought each conflict to an end. By showing...