What if the most important battlefield in insurgency isn't a battlefield at all? What if it's a marketplace — one where states and armed challengers compete not over territory, but over who gets to govern?

In this episode, we walk through The War Marketplace Framework: Insurgency as Competitive Governance, a contributing article by Moe Gyo that originally appeared on The Resistance Hub as a three-part series. The framework reframes insurgency as competitive governance provision under conditions of institutional failure, arguing that armed groups endure not because they fight well, but because they outcompete the state in delivering security, justice, public goods, and legitimacy to populations operating under coercion and uncertainty.

Part One establishes the core model. Civilians are not spectators — they are constrained consumers allocating compliance based on which provider governs more credibly. Insurgents operate less like rebels and more like disruptive startups entering a stagnant monopoly, bundling violence within a broader governance offering. Part Two applies Porter's Five Forces to the war marketplace, examining how entry barriers, civilian bargaining power, supplier networks, substitute governance providers, and rivalry among armed actors create structural conditions that explain why some insurgencies regenerate endlessly, why others fragment into warlordism, and why certain conflicts resist decisive resolution regardless of military effort. Part Three gets into strategy — how states and insurgents manipulate the same five forces from opposite positions, why fragmentation prevents defeat but rarely produces victory, and why the most durable insurgent groups often face a brutal internal choice between governing well and surviving long.

Whether you work in defense, security, conflict analysis, or policy, this episode challenges conventional thinking about why counterinsurgency campaigns fail and what it actually takes to collapse a rival governance market.