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Winning ‘Hearts and Minds’? A Critical Analysis of Counter-Insurgency Operations in Afghanistan
Abstract
This article conducts a critical analysis of the historical lessons, the assumptions and the conduct of ‘hearts and minds’ approaches to counter-insurgency. This results in challenges. Theoretically the ‘hearts and minds’ approach is rooted in modernisation theory and a normative Western approach to legitimacy that fails to live up to the expectations of the local population. The approach is also based on lessons from past successes such as the British 1950s campaign in Malaya. However, a great contextual shift has taken place since then and the relevance of past experiences is therefore questionable in a context of complex state-building in the wake of intervention. This also has practical consequences as we seek to rectify the often misapplied approaches of today.
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“As the experience of the drawn-out campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq have showed, 'winning hearts and minds' was clearly easier said than done (Egnell 2010).”
From Russia and ‘hybrid warfare’ (2016) · cites this paper as Egnell 2010
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Cited by 87
Metadata
- Authors
- Egnell, R.
- Affiliations
- Swedish Defence University (SE)
- Corresponding author
- Egnell, Robert
- Venue
- Civil Wars
- Publisher
- Informa UK Limited
- Published
- 2010-09
- Volume
- 12
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 282-303
- ISSN
- 1369-8249 (ISSN-L)
- 1743-968X
- OpenAlex
- W1982166880
- Cited by
- 87
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 4 · 2024: 4 · 2023: 3 · 2022: 20 · 2021: 5 · 2020: 8 · 2019: 13 · 2018: 2 · 2017: 3 · 2016: 5 · 2015: 2 · 2014: 4 · 2013: 6 · 2012: 5
- FWCI
- 24.94
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Civil Wars (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › Politics and Conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Middle East
- Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › Military History and Strategy
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Peacebuilding and International Security
- Keywords
- counterinsurgency, hearts and minds, Afghanistan, modernization theory, legitimacy, local population, Malayan Emergency, state building, Western intervention, lessons from history
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- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Winning ‘Hearts and Minds’? A Critical Analysis of Counter-Insurgency Operations in Afghanistan. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1080/13698249.2010.509562
- The paper
- Egnell, R. (2010). Winning ‘Hearts and Minds’? A Critical Analysis of Counter-Insurgency Operations in Afghanistan. Civil Wars. https://doi.org/10.1080/13698249.2010.509562
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
