The Rule of Law: A Definition in Socio-Political Terms

The Rule of Law: A Definition in Socio-Political Terms

Max Massa

Abstract

The US Army / Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual previously stated that Rule of Law (ROL) is the end state of counterinsurgency (COIN) operations, in spite of the lack of consensus on what constitutes ROL.  The manual is now being re-written and it is important to define this term if it is to be included or rejected from doctrine.  Previous attempts have focused on the formal nature of the law and institutions of the state: it is shown that this is not the appropriate direction from which to attack the problem – the focus of inquiry should instead be on the social impact of punitive action and not the law itself.  ROL, accordingly, has to do with the threat or application of force within society and is best understood in socio-political terms, not legal ones.  In short, when government has achieved a monopoly on the use of force within an area and the people retain the ability to form associations freely, the ROL exists within that space.  An exposition of the implications of this approach follows.  Given this definition, discussion may proceed regarding the place that ROL is to play within COIN operations, though this issue itself is not discussed.

Thesis

The Counterinsurgency Field Manual (FM 3-24) is being rewritten.^[i]  In the original, 2006 version of the document, the Rule of Law (ROL) was given central position as being “the key goal and end state [of counterinsurgency operations]”.^[ii]  This was done in spite of the fact that the term has never been well defined, as the DoD Center for Law and Military Operations (CLAMO) openly acknowledged five years later in its 2011 Rule of Law Handbook, which owned that “[t]here is no widespread agreement on exactly what constitutes the ROL”.^[iii]  As the rewrite proceeds, it is clear that the status of this concept within the framework of counterinsurgency (COIN) operations must be reevaluated, but this is not possible as long as a meaningful definition is lacking.  This paper seeks to address that issue by stating in concrete, practical terms exactly what ROL is, though it will not take the next step of declaring what role it should play in the field manual’s upcoming second edition.

Discussion surrounding the definition has been hampered by the sense that the concept is of a legal nature and best described in such terms.  This is emphatically not the case.  The view presented in this paper is that ROL is instead a socio-political phenomenon and that its nucleus is found in the interaction between society and the threat or use of force -- not in the structure of a state’s code, courts, or constitution, but achieved and sustained by their action.  In short, the rule of law can be said to exist in any area where government has achieved a monopoly on the use of force and citizen association is uninhibited.  The condition may be conceived of as a sense of mutual trust wherein the people, having either rendered or been stripped of their ability to legitimately commit violence among themselves, are given free rein to self-organize as the regime does not view this behavior as threatening.

This paper will begin by showing that structural definitions of the term are fundamentally flawed and then progress to treat the implications of state monopoly of force and freedom of association separately.

Structural Definitions: Unsatisfactory

The previous attempts at defining ROL have focused on the procedural or structural aspect of law, i. e. they are not interested in the social effects of legal action, only in the mechanics of it (the language of the laws, the composition of courts, etc.).  Definitions that are based on this principle tend to produce what are often described as “laundry lists” where researchers observe societies or states where they feel the phenomenon is present and then attempt to isolate the vital structures.  Two of the better-known illustrations of this school can be found in Harvard law professor Lon Fuller’s 1964 work The Morality of Law^[iv] and in Carnegie Endowment for International Peace vice president Thomas Carother’s 1998 essay “Rule of Law Revival”^[v] (their respective “laundry lists” are included in the footnotes).  This formalism is, however, the unfortunate root of the behavior Rajiv Chandrasekaran lampooned in his book Imperial Life in the Emerald City, wherein he describes one man’s futile efforts to write a traffic code for Iraq, because “[m]any in the Emerald City assumed that, if you wanted to change something, you changed the law...”^[vi]

This approach also runs into problems at a theoretical level: focusing simply on form makes it difficult to determine when ROL in a particular area has collapsed, and it also creates confusion in gauging how wide is the coverage of the rule of law.  These two issues are explored below:

Collapse: People are imperfect, justice is miscarried, and procedure is not always properly followed, even in the best-run countries.  But when theorists, like Carothers, insist that “the law must be applied equally to everyone”, it becomes very hard to decide when the system has failed.  Is one man getting away with murder enough to subvert ROL?  Does it matter if there’s media attention?  If he’s rich or poor?  What about the victim?  What if it’s ten men?  And what if it’s not murder, but tax fraud?  In their insistence on mechanical justice, these definitions run up against the old and well-established legal principle known as Blackstone’s Formulation, which states that “...the law holds it better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent party suffer”.^[vii]  His Formulation or Ratio (as it is also called) is fundamental to both the British and American schools of thought on the subject of law, and if his views cannot be made to tally with an ROL definition, then the Rule of Law certainly cannot be said to exist in the United States.

If it is permissible for crime to go occasionally unpunished, how can that be written into the form of the State?  How to account for clemency?  How does the rule of law collapse?

Coverage: the question of how far ROL extends is difficult to answer in formal terms.  Most people considering the issue from this perspective of form and enforcement would say that in a place where the law is applied unevenly, it does not reach.  But this mindset fails to take into account the fact that law (and its application) frequently reflects local needs, as in republican systems of government, so a man can living in Kansas City, MO can function under a different code from his neighbor down the street in Kansas City, KS.  It also permits no allowance for concepts such as affirmative action and diplomatic immunity, which cannot permit universal coverage, but are intended to address the needs of the history and political business.  In essence, theorists who insist that even, regular application of the law across all conditions and regions within a state will run hard up against a legal maxim of Cicero’s from more than 2,000 years ago, which ran summum jus, summa injuria,^[viii] i. e. law taken to its extreme is the greatest injustice.  But a theory that demands equal application of legal procedure and penalties in all cases, regardless of the local scene, neglects this important maxim.  And what about in those places where the people do not violate the law per se, but simply choose not to take their business to court very often?  This has occurred famously in Shasta County, CA.^[ix]  Does the rule of law exist in such places?  The author believes that it very easily could.  California is not an ungoverned wilderness.

The nature of both of the above issues were addressed by one of the Presidents of the United States, John Adams, in his comments in the case Rex v. Wemms where he defended a group of British soldiers following the Boston Massacre:

We are to look upon it as more beneficial, that many guilty persons should escape unpunished, than one innocent person should suffer. The reason is, because it’s of more importance to community that innocence should be protected, than it is that guilt should be punished; for guilt and crimes are so frequent in the world that all of them cannot be punished; and many times they happen in such a manner that it is not of much consequence to the public whether they are punished or not. But when innocence itself is brought to the bar and condemned, especially to die, the subject will exclaim, it is immaterial to me whether I behave well or ill; for virtue itself is no security. And if such a sentiment as this should take place in the mind of the subject, there would be an end to all security whatsoever.^[x]

Adams was obviously interested in discussing the nature of justice, not Rule of Law.  Nevertheless, his insistence that not every guilty party should necessarily be convicted and not every infraction of every law be given similar treatment draws our attention away from the form of the law and its enforcement, and more to its impact.  For this reason it is safe to conclude that the “left of launch” or “in flight” side of the legal process is not where one should focus in seeking a definition.  We must look at the social and political impact of punitive justice to determine what the character of ROL might be.

Monopoly on Force: the Suppression of Mechanical Groups

Example regions struggling with this side of ROL: Egypt, Nigeria, Iraq, Sicily, Mexico, Yemen.

Weber's definition that “...a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of force within a certain territory”^[xi] is one that appears generally accepted in the community of people who would read this paper.  The author accepts it and believes the existence of a state is central to the establishment of Rule of Law.  By denying legitimacy to spontaneous violence taken on the part of the people, the regime not only declares deviant all forms of citizen aggression, it also frustrates their ability to effect judgment upon each other.  To wit, it establishes its court system as the unique dispenser of justice; in a functional, Weberian state, non-government bodies (e. g. churches, secret societies, kinship groups) can have expansive, byzantine executive and legislative organs, but may possess no independent judicial authority – we see this fact expressed in the American instance in the Due Process clause of the Bill of Rights, where it is written in the Fifth Amendment that no person shall “...be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law...”^[xii].  This has important implications where social structure is concerned: specifically, a functional state will provide little to no space for the emergence of mechanical groups/societies in Durkheim's sense as the methods necessary to maintain such a structure will have been criminalized.  For this reason, where mechanical groups exist, ROL is absent -- recognizing them is a great key to determining one form of Rule of Law failure, and some detail will now be provided below to aid in understanding of the concept.

The essence of Durkheim's concept can be reduced to two mutually-informing points: common consciousness and dispersed punishment.  It is fair also to understand this as a situation in which both the concepts of crime and punitive justice are social and work to develop the sense of identity among a group of people.  Durkheim states it thus:

“[t]he totality of beliefs and sentiments common to the average members of a society forms a determinate system with a life of its own.  This can be termed the collective or common consciousness.  Undoubtedly the substratum of this consciousness does not consist of a single organ.  By definition it is diffused over society as a whole, but nonetheless possesses specific characteristics that make it a distinctive reality.  In fact it is independent of the particular conditions in which individuals find themselves.  Individuals pass on, but it abides […] Thus it is something totally different from consciousnesses of individuals, although it is only realized in individuals.  It is the psychological type of society...”^[xiii]

Examples of societies that may display this trait can include tribal groups/clan families of certain types, religious communities that self-identify through ritual practice and tradition, and criminal organizations with developed creeds such as the omerta of the Sicilian mafia or the Russian “thieves in law”.  In such social conditions “...an act is criminal when it offends the strong, well-defined states of the collective consciousness”^[xiv].  Although a certain fraction of the crime recognized by this social awareness will be designed to maintain personal safety and facilitate the meeting of practical needs, there will also be a remaining part that is unrelated to the causing of harm to another and whose enforcement develops identity (e. g. dietary restrictions, gang colors, bans on certain types of speech, performance of ritual, tattoos, endogamous policies, etc.).  Correction of such transgressions “...does not serve, or serves only very incidentally, to correct the guilty person or scare off any possible imitators […]  Its real function is to maintain inviolate the cohesion of society by sustaining the common consciousness in all its vigour”^[xv].

Once such deviance has been identified, enforcement must be correspondingly diffuse and immediate, as the punishment for the crime serves just as much a strengthening function for those who carry out the correction as it does for the perpetrator.  It must also be unavoidable, i. e. the person whose behavior is targeted as illegitimate must have no choice other than accept deprivation “of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law” or go into hiding.  That is to say, it must have the strength of law.  It will be useful to illustrate with an example drawn from the real world, one where the rule of law is, by all sober accounts, nonexistent.  The Pashtuns of Afghanistan maintain an old and well-developed unwritten code of conduct, Pashtunwali, that makes of them an almost textbook example of mechanical solidarity; it also illustrates how their use of force is both vital to their identity and inimical to the development of the state as Weber conceived it.  By looking specifically at the interplay between the key concepts of nang/namus (honor), badal (exchange, and contextually “revenge”), and tureh (fighting spirit, lit. “sword”), we can see how the application of repressive, corrective justice by scattered elements within society forms and is necessary to the Pashtun identity.^[xvi]

Nang and namus form the central hub of the Pashtun identity: the former deals in a general way with the sense of individual and tribal honor and the latter with those who are dependent upon a Pashtun man, generally his wife or wives and daughters.  We may understand them as manifestations of the common consciousness of the people in Durkheim’s sense as the violation of either of the two generates a socially compelling call to extract justice from the perpetrator.  This justice does not need to be violent – many issues are resolved through mediation and the exchange of money, goods, or women – but it may be.  Badal here comes into play: the concept is broader than the English word for “revenge” as it can also be used to describe an obligation to good behavior in the future after one is treated well.  But it is important that in the context of crime it demands the extraction of a certain penalty, either by the person wronged or one of his family and not necessarily upon the individual who originally violated the nang or namus of the injured party, since a relative among the aggressor’s kin may be used as a fair substitute.  Given the need of a private person to tend of the satisfaction of badal, the value of tureh becomes obvious, since where violence is needed to mollify obligation, the individual must exert it as there is no court to provide a hangman for him.  And since the one who applies this repressive action need not be the one who was originally wronged, violent corrective behavior becomes the potential responsibility of all members of Pashtun society.  Of course tureh, like badal, has broader applications in terms of the protection of the Pashtun people from external aggression, but it implies that the legitimate use of violence must lie with the people, not an administrative body.  This arrangement creates bloodfeuds that can persist for decades, but without it there would be no Pashtunwali and, through that, no Pashtun identity.  The salient point remains that violence taken in the name of nang or namus will be accepted as just by members of the Pashtun identity, and their common sense of this acceptance is what gives their group-sense its form.

Speaking to the supremacy of his person and decisions to the law, James I of England said that “kings are properly judges”^[xvii] and so we may understand that Pashtun society is, in a way, composed wholly of kings and tiny family kingdoms, all sovereign in their way but united by common values and judgment.  The result is that Durkheim’s below statement applies very cleanly to the Pashto, as among them...

...a social cohesion exists whose cause can be traced to a certain conformity of each individual consciousness to a common type, which is none other than the psychological type of society.  Indeed under these conditions all members of the group are not only individually attracted to one another because they resemble one another, but they are also linked to what is the condition for the existence of this collective type, that is, to the society that they form by coming together.^[xviii]

In a state where the monopoly on force is strong, such groupings have no legal space to exist because meting out justice of the sort described above requires a use of punitive action that is, per se, valid only in the hands of official enforcers.^[xix]  This means that such social phenomena as tribalism, clan identity/family justice, secret societies of the sort that maintain tribunals, and religious criminal courts are incompatible with the Rule of Law as they dispense independent justice.  I point out to the reader that I have nowhere made the normative declaration that rule of law is positive or desirable.  But we can see traces of this initiative in the US where religious courts are permitted to take on procedural but not criminal duties, thereby offering citizens the opportunity to willingly engage with manifestations of their cultural/religious identity without jeopardizing the monopoly of the state's dominance of force.  The interesting implication is that, if we accept Weber’s other statement that

In so far as there is at all a common object lying behind the obviously ambiguous term ‘nation,’ it is apparently located in the field of politics.  One might well define the concept in the following way: a nation is a community of sentiment which would adequately manifest itself in a state of its own; hence, a nation is a community which normally tends to produce a state of its own.^[xx]

and pursue the implication that a developed sense of nation is key to the development of a functional state, it follows that nationalism in its sense of an idea of what signifies or is signified by the state can play a vital role in the development of Rule of Law.  For this reason, acceptance of state philosophies such as the pancasila of Indonesia and the symbols therewith associated should not be dismissed as unimportant in this context.  It is beyond the scope of this paper to consider such implications, but they should be noted as of potentially great importance.  But it should also further be noted that Pasthtunwali as described above does not permit the development of a judicial structure that holds control of violent action, so we cannot understand there to exist a Pashtun nation in the strict sense.

If the administrators of a state are truly interested in encouraging this condition, they will find that their efforts – if successful – will create friction with parties such as those listed above and ultimately erode their mechanical nature.  This does not mean that cultural, religious, or other identities may not persist, but that they made find expression only in free associations.

Free Association

Example regions struggling with this side of ROL: Iran, China (PEC), Russian Federation, DPRK.

When men are not permitted to group themselves into mechanical units, they will still seek to form social organizations for a host of purposes, from political advocacy to recreation.  Such is free association.  But governments will often strive to disrupt this bonding for the purpose of maintaining regime security.  This truth follows de Tocqueville's statement that “[d]espotism, which, by its nature, is fearful, sees in the isolation of men the most certain guarantee of its own duration, and it ordinarily puts all its efforts into dividing them.”^[xxi]  When the citizens of a country encounter resistance to their efforts to band into free associations, there can be no Rule of Law as this necessitates the use or threat of force for the purpose of keeping the populace isolated.  The goal of such a regime will be to keep citizen association limited to official channels or accessible only through official sanction / with official oversight in places where the legitimacy of its force prevails.  As they form the second half of this definition of Rule of Law, space will now be devoted to describing their basic characteristics.

Associations are infinitely varied and it is difficult to study them directly as there is almost no task one cannot imagine them taking on, nor any form they could not take.  Fortunately, “freedom of association” has become a formal term, and we can learn something about the concept by investigating its violations, thereby describing a social phenomenon through its legal manifestation.  The idea is simply enough defined, but rather vague: it is protected in Article 22 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and ICCPR materials state “the freedom of association permits persons formally to join together in groups to pursue common interests”^[xxii].  Such groupings can obviously be of any sort: NGOs, church congregations, labor unions, political parties, academic journals, etc.  The concept itself arose from a 1958 US Supreme Court case, NAACP v. Alabama ex rel. Patterson, wherein the plaintiff had refused to hand over its membership lists to state representatives when ordered to do so because publicly acknowledging affiliation would put those involved at risk of retribution and thwart the group in the furtherance of its cause.  Justice Harlan in his summation of the trial wrote:

Effective advocacy of both public and private points of view, particularly controversial ones, is undeniably advanced by group association, as this Court has more than once recognized by remarking upon the close nexus between the freedoms of speech and assembly [...]  Of course, it is immaterial whether the beliefs sought to be advanced by association pertain to political, economic, religious, or cultural matters, and state action which may have the effect of curtailing the freedom to associate is subject to the closest scrutiny.^[xxiii]

In that writing, the first to this author's knowledge to state explicitly the existence of such a freedom, the essential component of “purpose” is implied, as a group of individuals who come together without an agenda cannot properly be termed an association.  Two conclusions follow: 1) that families and other purely private groupings do not qualify as associations,^[xxiv] and 2) that forced inclusion by outside forces of unwilling / unwanted members in an association hampers or negates the ability of an association to communicate its message or act in concert, thereby invalidating the group's nature.^[xxv]  A final feature must be appended, which is implied in the earlier discussion of force and deprivation of the sort of social space that could produce a mechanical grouping: that associations are not permitted to wield force or provide their own justice.^[xxvi]

Closer investigation shows that this is not itself a single right, but rather a complex of rights (assembly, speech, religion, the press, etc.) that must be simultaneously enjoyed to function, and it is unsurprising that legal experts have described freedom of association as occupying the space where both civil and political rights overlap.^[xxvii]  But the key is that, as above stated, associations are of their nature active, communicative, or both, and potentially in the political arena. It follows that when a regime or elements therein view the prospect of agitation against policy to be dangerous to its continued existence, association is vulnerable to suppression.  This condition is obviously more common in autocratic states where party and government are largely identical, meaning that a challenge to the legitimacy of the ruler or his practices is a challenge to the legitimacy of the state, but it is also not unusual in nominally pluralistic countries with politically disenfranchised populations (as illustrated in the original Alabama example).  Such governments, regardless of their structural character, would qualify as “despotisms” in de Tocqueville's sense, as they will “easily pardon the governed for not loving [them], provided that they do not love each other”^[xxviii] and pin their continued tenure on keeping the population – in whole or in part – disorganized, fragmented, unassociated.

It is obvious that countries where violent action is used to keep the people out of union with each other lack rule of law: mowing down unarmed civilians and imprisoning the survivors is usually a sign of political problems of some sort.  But it is worth remembering Judge Harlan's point that although the state of Alabama had “taken no direct action... to restrict the right of petitioner's members to associate freely”, its decision to put the NAACP in a position where its members were in a state of fear was sufficient to strip them of their ability to associate.^[xxix]  There are yet more pacific means of achieving such an end: this helps explain why most ruling regimes that have a firm grasp on force but weak rule of law tend to have very poor relations with the free media.  There are two reasons for this, the first of which is that an unofficial media organization is itself a free association of a type and a potential hazard.  But the second and more interesting one is that ready access to news gives the citizenry a greater number of causes to organize around as its awareness of the condition of its environs grows.  It is a fair truth that I have found nowhere else written that oppressive information control is designed to prevent the emergence of free associations.  To exemplify abstractly: if all the laborers in factories A, B, C, and D are dissatisfied with working conditions, the situation is ripe for them to form some sort of union.  But if the flow of information is restricted by official interference, it becomes highly unlikely that they will ever do so because their awareness of a shared interest outside their own quarters will be faint.  Furthermore, unaligned individuals from outside the area will be incapable of joining in their efforts if they are completely unaware that they exist.

All this is best illustrated with an example, one drawn from recent events and involving a state about which only very few potential readers will have strong personal feelings.  Given the general sense of what constitutes “rule of law”, the author posits that most people when confronted with the scenario below, drawn from the high politics of Kazakhstan, will decline to say that it is being expressed, protected, fostered there:

The presidential hand has been heavy of late, leaving a firm mark on Kazakhstan's opposition and its independent media.  The crackdown began a year ago.  On December 16^th 2011, the country's independence day, police fired on protesters in the western oil town of Zhanaozen, killing at least 15.  In the year since then, secret police have rounded up activists, including some with only tenuous links to the strike protests.  Courts have ignored claims of torture in custody.  More than a dozen have been jailed, including Vladimir Kozlov, an opposition figure sentenced in October to seven-and-a-half years in prison for allegedly attempting to overthrow the government by encouraging the strikers.  Freedom House, a watchdog, said prosecutors presented no evidence to justify this conviction…

 

Mr. Nazabayev's sights have since been shifted to independent media.  In December courts ordered two television stations to close and began proceedings against two newspapers for “inciting social discord”.  All four had reported critically on the violence.  Human Rights Watch, an American NGO, has called the campaign “a blatant attempt by the government to muzzle critical voices”.  Five police officers were imprisoned for their role in the Zhanaozen shootings.  The regional governor was also fired, but later made Mr Nazarbayev's adviser.^[xxx]

Every action here taken that strikes the reader in an immediate sense as being “against the rule of law” will also be designed to reduce free association.  Police firing on protesters (themselves free associators, and here being punished for it) would potentially spurn further free association as citizens bind into groups to express their grievances and take action against what they view as a miscarriage of justice.  Placing activists in jail penalizes people for associating and sends a message that this behavior is intolerable.  Imprisoning the opposition leader and muzzling the media also have the further effect of blocking the channels whereby further potentially galvanizing information could be distributed.  The acceptance of the provincial governor after his firing is a particularly shrewd maneuver if one's goal is to keep the locals as loosely bound as possible: letting him go first helps soothe scorched nerves and dissuades people from gravitating to his continued stay in office as a contentious issue, but then taking the man on as an advisor plugs his mouth with satisfaction and eliminates him as a possible organizer.

A final observation: the Internet and social media, are tools that increase contact between citizens and make finding like-minded individuals (the seed of association) significantly easier.  As such, observing a Weberian state's emergence into the Information Age is illuminating as to the condition of the its pre-IT nature.  This is the reason why countries/regions where the rule of law was already firmly established have limited reaction to the introduction of service like Facebook and Twitter, but those societies where there is a rooted interest in keeping the people “like a sheet of loose sand” as Sun Yat-sen would have it, respond with monitoring, oppression, and violence.  General wisdom is that the Green Movement of Iran would not have occurred without social networking, and there is consensus that the Arab Spring would not have developed in the manner it did without the additional associational boost provided by the Web.  On the spectrum's opposite end, China's election to erect its famous “Great Firewall” is specifically stifling to PRC natives' ability to access information that might spur them into organization, while the much touted “real name” registration system that would eradicate online anonymity would have the exact same effect on association that Alabama wanted to have on the NAACP.

Conclusion

The entire spirit of this definition is summed up in Book 8 of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, where he (rightly) points out “...it seems that it is amity that holds the polis together, and that lawmakers show more concern for it than for justice”.^[xxxi]  But this important idea has been seemingly lost.  Instead, discourse surrounding ROL from the second half of the twentieth century to the current day has oddly mirrored that surrounding the different, earlier concept of “fundamental law” in Britain in the 1600s:

When we examine [fundamental law] more closely, we shall see that is it is impossible to pin seventeenth century writers down to any one meaning, and that the phrase was very vague and ill-defined.  There were in fact a few who were sceptical about the existence of fundamental laws at all, and when, as happened occasionally, fundamental laws formed a focal point of dispute, we sometimes find pamphleteers and other attempting a reasoned defence of them; but the majority of writers and speakers seem to have taken their existence for granted, and to have treated their meaning as so obvious and familiar as to present no problems.^[xxxii]

Given this state of affairs, it is not surprising that while at the same time the Counterinsurgency Field Manual as the final stage of its operations, there is another school of thought famously described by the late Harvard political theorist Judith Shklar that holds “...no intellectual effort need be wasted on this bit of ruling-class chatter.”^[xxxiii]

Then how to determine if the above definition is correct, given the profusion of views and haziness of its object?  We must fall back on another Justice of the United States Supreme Court, Potter Stewart, who is known for nothing if not his views on hard-core pornography: “I know it when I see it” he said.^[xxxiv]  And so it often is with the Rule of Law: presented with it or its absence, most people can recognize the thing for itself, even if the have trouble describing or defining it.  And when it is seen and noted, it is to be held for comparison against this effort to give it simple description.  If this is established as the standard for what constitutes ROL, then discussion surrounding the status of the concept within the greater framework of COIN may proceed.  Until then, the issue will remain difficult to debate.

The views expressed in this paper are the personal ones of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the U. S. Government, the Department of Defense, or any of its components.

End Notes