This article explores how current professional military scholarship on insurgency and counterinsurgency (COIN) uses history to frame its arguments. It then attempts to reframe the current historical problematic surrounding insurgency. First, the article shows that the historical narrative of professional military scholarship on insurgency and its theoretical grounding are highly flawed. They are both parochial and profoundly ahistorical. Second, the paper constructs an alternative narrative of insurgency beginning from the ideas of the German legal philosopher Carl Schmitt , returning insurgency to history. This alternative narrative emphasizes the critical role played by the fall of European public law (jus publicum Europaeum). As a consequence of this and other historically contingent events, war in Europe lost its relative autonomy from society during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In turn, insurgency became an increasingly prominent and normatively accepted form of warfare by the mid-twentieth century.The US military is consumed with counterinsurgency today, but not only in its operations. An explosion of articles and monographs on insurgency and counterinsurgency (COIN) has dominated the professional military scholarship of the last six years. This scholarship on COIN includes not only analyses of things past, but predictions of the nature of wars to come. Many writers argue that insurgency will be the dominant form of warfare in the future and some hint that