Winning hearts and minds

Winning hearts and minds is a concept occasionally expressed in the resolution of war, insurgency, and other conflicts, in which one side seeks to prevail not by the use of superior force, but by making emotional or intellectual appeals to sway supporters of the other side.The use of the term "hearts and minds" to reference a method of bringing a subjugated population on side, was first used by French general and colonial administrator Hubert Lyautey as part of his strategy to counter the Black Flags rebellion during the Tonkin campaign in 1895.

[8] Other scholars, such as David French, Ashley Jackson, Hew Strachan, Paul Dixon, Alex Marshall, Brendon Piers and Caroline Elkins, have subsequently echoed Newsinger's arguments.

It has done so because it supported a Whiggish view of decolonisation that portrayed the way in which the British left their empire as having been an orderly and dignified process of planned withdrawal.

It rested upon a highly selective range of sources, the accounts of senior officers and officials who were intent on sanitising the experience of fighting wars of decolonisation.

[12][13] According to an assessment by University of Michigan political scientist Yuri Zhukov, Russia has responded to insurgent movements and large-scale insurrections since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 with a counterinsurgency model diametrically opposed to the "hearts and minds" approach.

Zhukov concluded that "Despite serious setbacks in Afghanistan and the first Chechen War, Russia has one of the most successful track records of any modern counterinsurgent.