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I. Introduction
Signaling resolve, or the willingness to incur costs for disputed goods, is a central
element of counter-insurgency policy. Target governments try hard to signal resolve to
insurgent groups in the belief that doing so will make the governments more likely to
triumph over insurgent movements. America’s counter-insurgency strategy in Iraq is rife
with attempts to signal resolve. One example of many comes from a speech that
American President George W. Bush delivered in June 2004 “[y]ou see, these terrorists
will fail…. They will fail because the resolve of America and our allies will not be
shaken.”
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Given the asymmetry in power between target governments and insurgent
groups a reasonable conclusion is that insurgents facing a target government with high
resolve will not achieve their objectives and may be eliminated. We also know that
insurgent groups take resolve very seriously, often going out of their way to make
statements about the state of the target government’s resolve. Given the importance of
resolve for target governments and insurgents it is striking that there has been little
scholarly study of the subject to date. While much ink has been spilt studying resolve in
interstate relations, very little has been written on signaling resolve to non-state actors.
This paper sets out to provide a preliminary look at target governments’ attempts to
signal resolve to insurgent groups.
I define resolve as an actor’s willingness to incur costs for a disputed good, or as
Steven Rosen put it “the willingness to suffer.”
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The more willing an actor is to incur
1
White House, “President Bush Salutes Soldiers in Fort Lewis, Washington,”
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/06/print/20040618-1.html (accessed June 25, 2004).
2
Steven Rosen, “War Power and the Willingness to Suffer,” in Bruce M. Russett ed., Peace, War, and
Numbers (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1972): 167-83. For the use of this definition in a broader theoretical
argument see Jason W. Davidson, “The Roots of Revisionism: Fascist Italy, 1922-39,” Security Studies 11,
no. 4 (Summer 2002), 132.
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