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The term “counterinsurgency” is typically associated with the disastrous US wars in Vietnam or Iraq. But is counterinsurgency always doomed to fail and insurgency guaranteed to succeed? This course will give students an overview of key literature in counterinsurgency and internal security, as well as representative literature produced by and for insurgents, revolutionaries, and guerrillas/terrorists. A central task will be to define these vexed terms and track their shifting meaning over time, including the importance of cultural, racial, and gendered significations to those definitions. The course will also include a large-scale simulation of an insurgency and efforts to control or extinguish it, comprising the student assignments and requiring active participation of every student in the course. Each student will be assigned roles that will require specific creative actions.