The Goldilocks Problem of Counterinsurgency: Institutional Design between Police and Military

Abstract

How do states allocate coercive authority across distinct security institutions when confronting socially embedded insurgencies? Existing scholarship treats the counterinsurgent state as a unitary actor or focuses on coup-proofing dynamics tied to regime survival, leaving unanswered the question of how states distribute frontline responsibilities across organizationally distinct coercive institutions. This article develops an institutional substitution framework, conceptualizing the state as a portfolio of coercive organizations whose deployment is structured by three jointly necessary but imperfectly aligned imperatives: information acquisition, coercive survivability, and institutional coherence. Where these imperatives collide under embedded insurgent threat, states do not simply militarize—they reallocate frontline exposure across institutions, drawing in particular on hybrid forces such as gendarmeries that bridge police and military mandates. We test this argument using a novel micro-level geocoded dataset of police and gendarmerie installations across Turkish provinces during the conflict with the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). Consistent with the framework, Kurdish-majority jurisdictions exhibit lower police station density, with remaining stations situated disproportionately in peripheral rather than central urban locations, while gendarmerie presence is comparatively higher and police fatality exposure is correspondingly reduced in high-threat areas. These findings move counterinsurgency scholarship beyond the binary of policing versus militarization and offer a portfolio-based account of internal security governance, with implications for civil–military relations, security sector reform, and the post-conflict durability of state–society relations.