Counterinsurgent strategy selection– that is, the factors that influence governments’ approach to fighting rebellions within their territory– has received less attention than counterinsurgent effectiveness. While important theoretical advances have been made, cross-national, quantitative studies on African governments’ choice of counterinsurgency strategy are lacking. This paper aims to bridge that gap. It creates a novel dataset of African insurgencies from 1991 onward, coding a variety of variables that help give the full picture of an insurgency’s threat. It proposes two hypotheses on counterinsurgent strategy selection– one of which varies the correlation between state strength depending on the threat posed by the insurgency, and the other of which suggests that indiscriminately repressive strategies dominate initially, while containment is prevalent later on in the course of insurgencies. It finds no evidence for the first hypothesis and some for the second, broadly concluding that repressive strategy varies positively with state strength. It also documents a series of correlations to explore: among them, that cooptative responses are far more common against insurgencies with strong connections to governments, that very ideologically incompatible insurgencies may be harder to coopt, and that state strength positively correlates with selective repression. Lastly, it examines international assistance, finding that it is very strongly correlated with jihadist insurgent ideology.