https://doi.org/10.1177/09670106231159207 Security Dialogue 2023, Vol. 54(3) 272–289 © The Author(s) 2023 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/09670106231159207 journals.sagepub.com/home/sdi Settler colonial counterinsurgency: Indigenous resistance and the more-than-state policing of #NoDAPL Bruno Seraphin Cornell University, USA Abstract In 2016, the US-based private military contractor TigerSwan was denied a license to operate in North Dakota. Nonetheless, it coordinated a counterinsurgency (COIN) campaign employing war-on-terror tactics, brutalizing Indigenous and allied water protectors associated with the Indigenous-led movement to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline (#NoDAPL) on Standing Rock Lakota territory. This article takes COIN as an analytic to show that US settler colonialism is a multilateral, internally conflicted, and anxious mode of power. The settler state both depends upon and disavows anti-Indigenous and anti-Black violence enacted by rogue civilian individuals and organizations, a phenomenon here termed ‘more-than-state policing’. The repression of #NoDAPL was not solely a boomerang by-product of the global war on terror but rather exposes an established infrastructure of settler colonial COIN intrinsic to US normal politics, in which Indigenous resistance and sovereignty are constructed as metastasizing, viral threats to settler colonial legitimacy. As modern COIN warfare has evolved from four centuries of North American settler colonial invasion and governance, settler colonial studies are key to grasping 21st-century topics of war, imperialism, securitization, resource extraction, and climate justice. Keywords Counterinsurgency, critical security studies, environment, Indigenous resistance, colonialism Introduction: Toward a settler colonial counterinsurgency analytic An image circulated on social media in 2018 depicting unidentified US security forces in combat gear, protecting the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) in North Dakota. The caption read ‘Remember when America invaded America for Oil?’ In the image’s implied narrative, the USA’s addiction to fossil fuels and obsessive pursuit of all possible terroristic threats have collapsed the once stable distinctions between military and police and foreign and domestic. The satirical image is problem- atic because it conceals the actuality that America was invading the homelands of the Standing Corresponding author: Bruno Seraphin, Cornell University, 1501 Grove St, San Diego, CA 92102, USA. Email: bs772@cornell.edu 1159207SDI 0 0 10.1177/09670106231159207Security DialogueSeraphin research-article 2023 Article