Can hearts and minds be bought? A metaphorical question posed to ask whether government spending can aid counterinsurgency. In their paper, Berman et al. seek to answer this basic question using current literature, recent data and a model of counterinsurgency.
They chose Iraq for their research because it is presently significant, there is a large amount of data and most importantly, because it is characterised by insurgency and not by ‘conventional warfare’. It is this characteristic, argued by Berman et al. that will be seen more often in future conflicts that is so crucial to understand. Another important facet to note is that current ‘US Army counterinsurgency doctrine’ is not based on any social scientific theory; thereby making the need to understand insurgency more vital to aid spending.
By using current data, Berman et al. find on the whole that the correlation between reconstruction spending and violence across Iraqi districts…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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