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This study examines the successful consolidation of the Islamic State movement within the Sunni insurgency in Iraq from 2003 to 2014. We rely on insurgent media releases, captured documents, and a declassified U.S. military study of the Sunni insurgency in Anbar to evaluate the Islamic State movement's complex relationship with its Sunni Arab rivals. We found the group moved through sequential stages of cooperative, competitive, and coercive consolidation to achieve hegemony in the insurgent field. Each phase of transition entailed organizational changes, including mergers, re-branding, and new structures. The movement's well-developed ideology and state-building project distinguished it from peers whose political agendas were too diffuse to establish lasting coalitions. The tribal Awakening that worked with the Americans to temporarily defeat the Islamic State of Iraq also badly splintered its rivals and failed to prevent the revitalization of the Islamic State movement, setting the foundation for its short-lived caliphate project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractThe role of ideology in civil wars is particularly contentious, especially when it comes to Jihadi insurgents. Ideology is one of these groups’ defining characteristic, which questions what happens when Jihadis’ ideological commitments contradicts their strategic interests. This article explores these tensions with a particular focus on the issue of foreign support for the Syrian insurgency after 2011. The article argues that ideology matters and has contributed to division and infighting between Syrian insurgents for most of the conflict. But this research also contends that armed groups – including Jihadis – can adapt their ideological positions in line with their strategic interests as long as they manage to implement such changes without jeopardizing their internal cohesion. This careful balance explains the operational strategies of numerous armed groups in competitive environments such as Syria’s. The article draws on extensive interviews with Syrian insurgents over the past few years, including leaders and commanders of Ahrar al-Sham and Jabhat al-Nusra as it transformed into HTS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dominant history of Muslim armed separatism in the Philippines obscures the insurgency's character. Insurgents espouse revolutionary war, even though this mischaracterizes the interests constituted in the insurgent cause. Patricio Abinales' critiques of the orthodoxy are applied to disambiguate the Bangsamoro cause, highlighting the insurgency's concurrent supralocal and local logics. Supralocal-local dissonance is reconciled by recasting the Bangsamoro cause as a supralocal-local bargain through Stathis Kalyvas' concept of alliance, retaining classical counterinsurgency theory's macropolitical locus but imbued with cognizance of the insurgency's micropolitics. This approach challenges the perceived finality of the insurgency after the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past decade a series of events including the outbreak of the Syrian war, drought and tireless insurgencies in sub-Saharan Africa triggered the largest wave of displacement ever seen through and around the Mediterranean. The majority of those bound to Europe through the Mediterranean are smuggled by criminal networks. The proliferation of Trafficking and Smuggling of Human Beings (TSHB) between the Sahel and the Libyan shores feeds into the evolving threats of terrorism, crime and insecurity in the Sahel, West Africa and Europe. This paper explores the involvement of armed groups in TSHB in the Central Sahel and Libya. The author argues that the involvement of armed actors in the TSHB in the Central Sahel and Libya is not uniform and not systematically used for terrorism financing. Criminal networks and armed groups leverage opportunities created by conflict to generate profit and project power. They operate in convergent spaces benefitting from state fragility, and shared social networks. The link between terrorism and migrant smuggling and trafficking, if found, remains localized benefitting individuals rather than organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractMilitant groups delegate operations to contingent, short-term, and freelance agents. Informal and ad-hoc employment patterns have wide-reaching consequences, yet the literature lacks a systematic vocabulary and framework to analyze these practices. Using primary and secondary sources, I introduce a descriptive typology of informal employment patterns in militant groups. This contributes to scholarship and practice by establishing a basis for a systematic comparison of variation in militant employment models, particularly highlighting how these practices can have far-reaching implications for conflict and post-conflict settings. Case studies of informal militant hiring practices in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria support the typology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How is conflict duration affected by female combatants in rebel group? In this study, we advance three possible pathways through which female combatants enhance the resilience of the rebel group, thereby lengthening the conflict. We explore this association using quantitative cross-sectional data on female combatant and conflict duration. The positive relationship between female combatants and civil war duration from quantitative analysis is substantiated by the qualitative evidence collected via in-depth interviews with former male and female combatants in the Maoist insurgency in Nepal. This work has important implications for the study of armed conflict duration, rebel organizations, and post-conflict peacebuilding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do some insurgent groups escalate violence to higher-intensity insurgencies or civil war? We explore this question among 140 insurgent groups worldwide across various thresholds of armed conflict. We argue that the main drivers of escalation are insurgent networks and domestic resource mobilization. Findings show that territorial control and engagement in criminal activities to finance operations are key factors associated with insurgent-inflicted battle deaths. The number of insurgent alliances, however, is the strongest determinant of higher-intensity armed conflicts. State counterinsurgency strategies also play an important role. Many of these insights support an exploratory look at rising insurgent violence in West Africa's Sahel region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the structural conflict conditions surrounding insurgencies produce rebel demand for external participation. Drawing on a data set of 140 militant organizations between 1998 and 2012, we find robust evidence that violence between insurgent groups is most likely to cause one or more of them to recruit externally. The effect is especially pronounced when regimes also employ punitive "stick" measures against opponents. Rather than a particular ideology being the best predictor of foreign fighters, it is desperate conflict conditions that lead insurgents to invest in the costs and uncertainties of outside assistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International attacks by rebel groups are an historically important phenomenon. Yet, few scholars have sought to understand why some rebel organizations "go abroad" and commence international attacks and some do not. We theorize that a rebel group's decision to attack internationally is partly the result of its home-state's counter-insurgency strategy. Home-states that employ broad-based repression discourage rebels from engaging in international attacks. By contrast, home-states that employ narrowly targeted repression accelerate rebel decisions to attack internationally. Finally, concessions by the home-state are a sufficient condition for the rebel groups in our data to never attack internationally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do foreign militaries attack some insurgencies and not others? Although foreign involvement in civil conflicts is on the rise, many insurgencies are not targeted militarily by external powers. Current research suggests organizations that are lethal or that attack democracies should be targeted more often. We argue that organizations that have vital markers of capabilities, such as alliances with other violent non-state actors (VNSAs) and territorial control, and the ability to attack members of a powerful country, in this case, U.S. citizens at home or abroad, are more likely to be targeted. Our empirical analysis supports this contention: we use a logistic regression model and, in post-estimation, predicted probabilities and a Classification and Regression Tree (CART) model to understand the effect of potential factors on international military interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the reasons for the rise of the Taliban and the onset of the insurgency in Afghanistan after the 2001 U.S. invasion, using counterfactual and path dependence analysis to bolster its arguments. We argue that the U.S. decision to de-Talibanize was a critical juncture, after which the rise of insurgency was far harder to prevent. The total rejection of the Taliban translated into the under-representation of Pashtuns in the Afghan government, delivering power to ethnic minorities at their expense. De-Talibanization led the United States to support strongmen to hunt the Taliban, but they were predatory, creating grievances that the Taliban exploited to recruit. Finally, de-Talibanization led many Taliban to flee to Pakistan, pushing them into the country most opposed to Afghanistan new political order. The lessons of the U.S. experience in Afghanistan suggest the necessity of a strategy for managing defeated enemies after an initial military victory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do some governments negotiate with insurgent organizations while others use force? This study examines the factors that influence these strategic government approaches to insurgencies using an original data set of state actions toward 140 insurgent groups between 1998 and 2012. We develop a simple model to explain government policy choice and test on these original data. After accounting for ideological differences and insurgent organization alliances, our findings suggest that the size of the insurgent group, the extent of previous lethal violence, and previous government decisions all influence government selection of conciliatory, repressive, mixed, and non-response strategies. We conclude by discussing the implications for how governments make counterterrorism/counterinsurgency strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article pursues a two-fold purpose. The first is to identify elements of continuity throughout history in internal armed conflicts where state structures are still in the process of being formed or, if already consolidated, where they have suffered serious deterioration. The second is to present and analyze a case study that has received scant attention in scientific literature on insurgencies, namely, the War of the Alpujarras, which was fought at the beginning of the early modern period and was the last Islamic rebellion in Spain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the recent literature on hybrid warfare has focused overwhelmingly on Russia, military tactical hybridity among non-state actors has received less attention, and minimal comparative examination. This is surprising as the range of non-state actors successfully using hybridized irregular-conventional tactics (increasingly symmetrically) against states has grown. Examining this phenomenon comparatively in three divergent cases (Islamic State, Boko Haram, the Houthi Movement), this article tests an often-overlooked argument stating that military hybridity among non-state actors is a result of these groups' common adoption of a specific form of Maoist-style warfare strategy – emulative insurgency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Colombian counterinsurgency campaign against FARC, during the years 2003–2012, was successful in significantly reducing the insurgency to its weakest condition in history. The strategy was a result of the transformation of the leadership mind-set, which motivated an understanding of counterinsurgency as a political enterprise, demanding the participation of all state institutions and officials. This all-of-government approach allowed to place military action as part of a broader strategy, in which military commanders transformed the way the struggle was understood, placing legitimacy as a center of gravity in operations. However, the latter part of the strategy, the consolidation of state institutions in remote regions of the territory, wasn't achieved, while extrajudicial killings clouded the entire success of the strategy.1 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The work of TE Lawrence is traditionally included among theories of insurgency and irregular warfare. However, such a reading of Lawrence's work disregards the political theory of state creation underpinning his strategic understanding of insurgency. This article comprises a historically driven analysis of Lawrence's writing and action in order to discern his military theory and return the Arab Revolt to its context of proxy warfare. This article argues that Lawrence's work is strategic and political as opposed to tactical. Rather than a simple theory of insurgency, Lawrence's military theory is one of proxy war that envisions state creation as a strategic goal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks at the linkage between arms smuggling and terrorist groups operating in and outside India, focusing on inflow and outflow of weapons through the country. By examining various news reports and using information from security officials, it concludes that the nexus between arms smugglers and terrorists encompasses multiple fronts. These include weapons that enter India mainly from Pakistan, Myanmar, and Bangladesh. Using theories of insurgencies as a reference point, it analyzes how various terrorist/insurgent groups in India have sustained themselves logistically using these linkages to wage war against the Indian state. The article thus tries to tackle the under-researched nexus between arms proliferation and terrorism in India and abroad by providing national, socioeconomic, and political recommendations, a useful reference point for members from the government, security, and research community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even though Kunduz province in Afghanistan was under relatively firm government control in 2011, the Taliban insurgency was able to consolidate its power throughout the province in the years that followed and to temporarily take-over the provincial capital of Kunduz city for the first time since the U.S.-led intervention in 2001. Based on field research in 2013 and 2016, I argue that the Taliban's upsurge took place because of a favorable opportunity structure for the insurgency that coincided with sufficient organizational capacities and a sense of urgency among the Taliban's senior leadership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies non-state militant group emulation and development of a special operation capability that stands in stark contrast to the normal repertoire of guerilla and terror tactics. Building on evidence of one well-documented Islamic State attack in 2012 that fit many of the criteria of a special operation, we analyzed the mission using concepts from strategic studies to understand the decision-making behind it. We then expanded our search of Islamic State operational claims looking for other examples, in order to understand the scope and frequency of Islamic State special operations since 2006. We found solid evidence of at least three Islamic State special operations over a decade: Ramadi, Iraq (2007), Haditha, Iraq (2012), and Abu Ghraib/Taji, Iraq (2013). Using these insights, we present two key levers – leadership and propaganda - used by the Islamic State in the decision-making and centralized distribution of resources to invest in a special operations capability that produced outsized strategic effects. These findings contest the conventional wisdom of the future of insurgency as decentralized structures made up of loose, leaderless networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research suggests that civilian defense forces (CDFs) – a distinct type of pro-government militia – can help states suppress insurgent movements. Considering the potential benefits, it is understandable why governments would want to use them. However, viewed from the perspective of civilian recruits, militia duty is a perilous side job that pays very little. So, why do civilians sign up to serve in them? This paper argues that civilian private agendas play a major role in facilitating the recruitment of CDFs. Because private agendas are difficult to observe directly, I examine their impact indirectly by identifying tribal groups as a population segment with particularly strong private incentives stemming from intertribal feuds and the concomitant desire to gain an upper hand relative to local rivals. The argument is tested on a novel province-level data set of CDF deployments in Turkey and the Philippines. Statistical analyses of these data show that states recruit over 50 percent more CDFs in regions with even modest tribal presence than in comparable areas without any tribal populations. These findings suggest that private agendas play a significant role in motivating militia recruitment. Private agendas thus help governments to combat macro-level insurgent movements by exploiting micro-level social tensions. The research also sheds light on the makeup of recruits and points to intensification of civilian disputes as likely ramification of CDF deployment in counterinsurgency campaigns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 1980s, the United States spent substantial political and economic capital supporting the Nicaraguan Contras. How effective was this in helping the rebels take on the Sandinista government? This article explores this topic by extending the application of principal-agent theory. It finds that, as expected, the effect of U.S. assistance was undermined by adverse selection and agency losses. However, the most important factor that undermined support effectiveness was the great inconsistency of the level of U.S. aid awarded to the insurgents. Reductions of official U.S. government support led to insurgency campaign collapse and meant that, in the end, the U.S. support program was only partially effective in helping the Contra struggle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using case study evidence, this article demonstrates how the relationship between conflict intensity, gender inclusive ideologies and gender inclusive policies on one hand, and the decision to recruit female combatants on the other hand, is conditioned by the groups' conflict phase. Conflict phases divide conflict events into two distinct parts, the guerrilla activity phase and the civil war phase, contingent on the insurgents' number of armed fighters, military capabilities, level of institutionalization and degree of territorial control. These conflict phases affect the recruitment behavior of insurgent groups making them more likely to recruit female combatants in the civil war phase and less likely to do so in the guerrilla activity phase. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2016 Peace Agreement between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia—People's Army (the FARC-EP or FARC) commits to reforming political participation, especially of traditionally marginalized sectors throughout the country to consolidate Colombian democracy. While the Peace Agreement provides implementation mechanisms that support the insurgency's transition from armed group to political party, it also complements the FARC's political strategy that has traditionally maintained consistency. This article argues that the 2016 Peace Agreement has the potential to enhance democratic, political, and societal participation by engaging with FARC in two key ways—by attempting to reconcile key FARC grievances and containing specific mechanisms that increase participation of traditionally marginalized groups in Colombia. This article argues that the Agreement has impacted positively on FARC's political participation and given it incentives to pursue its political strategy democratically. Likewise, the Agreement has provided a positive-sum outcome for the Colombian government to strengthen its democratic legitimacy by placing emphasis on structural reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of the contagious spread of insurgency and conflict across national boundaries has generated a good deal of empirical research over time. While the contagious spread of terrorism has also been a policy concern, few empirical studies exist on the extent to which terrorism spreads contagiously. This article uses methods developed by criminologists to study the spread of crime to examine the worldwide diffusion of terrorism from 1970 to 2013. We distinguish between contagious increases (based on shared borders) and non-contagious increases (where no borders are shared). We define the “domino effect” as a particular type of contagious diffusion where high levels of terrorism spread to an adjoining country but also remain high in the host country. Our analysis shows that both contagious and non-contagious diffusion has been rare over the past 43 years, non-contagious diffusion is more common than contagious, and when contagious diffusion occurs, it is very likely to occur according to the domino effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As part of their common efforts to undermine public support for their militarily-stronger adversaries' war efforts, insurgents and other militarily weak actors often accuse governments of fighting in a brutal manner and of committing brutal acts such as deliberately targeting innocent civilians. While sometimes there is sufficient evidence to support this claim of the government's deliberate brutality, other times militarily-weak actors will lack sufficient evidence to support this allegation. In such situation of lack of evidence, instead of making only those minimal allegations which can still be support by existing available facts, some weak actors decide nevertheless to make unsubstantiated claims and resort to fabricating the necessary evidence. This behavior presents a challenge not only for many counterinsurgent governments but also for the larger international community (most notably by diverting attention away from real atrocities). We identify some of the most common evidence-forging techniques recently employed by weak actors designed to create the factual basis to support of their chosen (often false) narratives of government brutality. The study also discusses some implications for international actors to prevent rewarding faking of atrocities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

U.S. counterterrorism (CT) forces that deployed to Iraq in 2003 as Task Force 714 (TF 714) faced an ugly surprise. Tasked to dismantle the al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) dominated insurgency, the organization could not achieve that mission. General Stanley McChrystal, who commanded TF 714 concluded, "we were losing to an enemy ... we should have dominated." But TF 714 transformed in the midst of war and during 2006-2009 was able to largely dismantle AQI's clandestine networks to a degree that they could no longer function in a cohesive manner. By developing the capacity to operate inside those networks, TF 714 was able, in the words of General McChrystal, to "claw the guts out of AQI." This transformation runs counter to what organizational experts identify as barriers inhibiting militaries from learning, innovating, and changing, especially in wartime. To decipher the puzzle of how TF 714 overcame these barriers, two questions are addressed in this study: 1) How did TF 714 transform from a specialized and compartmented unit customized for executing infrequent CT missions in peacetime to a wartime industrial-strength CT machine that by 2009 dismantled AQI's networks that operated across Iraq; and 2) Why was TF 714 able to achieve this remarkable transformation? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between armed rebels and local civilians is among the least understood aspects of insurgency. This article posits a novel theory, the rebels' resource curse, to argue that the interaction between rebel groups and local communities can be traced to the availability of revenue-generating resources. The theory is developed using a case study comparison approach to critically analyze how access to revenue-generating resources among the Naxalites in India and the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) in Colombia affect these insurgent-civilian interactions. The theory proposes that insurgents face a resource curse similar to that faced by states. Rather than resource wealth contributing to greater social engagement and fruitful insurgent-civilian interactions, it appears to precipitate isolationist, and even exploitative and violent relations between insurgents and local civilian populations. Conversely, resource scarcity predicts a greater degree of social integration and cohesion between civilians and insurgents. The framework of the rebels' resource curse can also be applied productively to other insurgent groups, enhancing our understanding of the social realities of insurgency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To understand the Islamic State's strategy, we have to look at the way the group twins Maoist and post-Maoist strategies, previously considered strategically incompatible. By establishing a state that it claims to embody the Caliphate, it not only gains revenue and resources, but also generates a seductive “brand” with a compelling message that it “sells” via the Internet. This brand, based on Propaganda of the Deed, synergizes its physical and digital activities to create a virtuous circle that is very close to being self-sustaining. As such it represents a new insurgent model that corroborates the News Wars thesis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Political assassinations can dramatically impact political and social dynamics, especially in times of violent political conflicts or electoral competition. The current study explores if and how specific social and political events facilitate the occurrence of political assassinations. After an examination of the logic of political assassinations, a theoretical framework is presented, which explains the role of civil wars and electoral processes as facilitators of different types of political assassinations. The theory is tested via a dataset of political assassinations worldwide between the years 1946–2013. The findings confirm that different sets of structural and contextual factors facilitate assassinations against heads of state, legislators, and leaders of opposition movements/parties. In addition, the findings illustrate the tendency of elections, especially in nonliberal settings and in polarized societies, to facilitate political assassinations rather than to calm the political environment. In contrast, civil wars have a more limited impact on the probability of assassinations, and their intensity and endurance mainly enhance the risk of assassinations of legislators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS)'s activities now go beyond insurgency and conventional operations in the territories it controls in the Middle East. It poses a threat to U.S. interests and allies in Europe, and a serious threat to Iran and its borders. While Washington formed an international coalition encompassing many European and Middle Eastern states to combat ISIS, it only coordinates some tactical and operation-level efforts with a key player on the ground: Iran. For its part, Iran is leveraging similar counter-ISIS tools as those adopted by the United States, despite their strategies differing fundamentally. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The causes and consequences of the Boko Haram insurgency as well as its possible solutions have been subjected to different interpretations among scholars, politicians, and journalists. Little is known, however, about how the Nigerian populace thinks about the uprising. The present study contributes to the literature on Boko Haram by analyzing the perceptions of Nigerian students vis-à-vis Boko Haram's agenda and the government's response. The results demonstrate a north–south divide with Christians or Igbo and Muslims or Hausa-Fulani holding different ideas on the causes of the crisis, being differently affected by it, and slightly disagreeing on the desirability of military government responses. In conclusion, perceptions on Boko Haram lay bare ethno-religious fault lines reflecting existing grievances, thereby possibly undermining efforts at nation-building and peaceful coexistence in the multi-ethnic Nigerian society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses Burma/Myanmar from 1948 to 2011 as a within-case context to explore why some armed insurgent groups agree to cease-fires while others do not. Analyzing 33 armed groups it finds that longer-lived groups were less likely to agree to cease-fires with the military government between 1989 and 2011. The article uses this within-case variation to understand what characteristics would make an insurgent group more or less likely to agree to a cease-fire. The article identifies four armed groups for more in-depth qualitative analysis to understand the roles of the administration of territory, ideology, and legacies of distrust with the state as drivers of the decision to agree to or reject a cease-fire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the choice of tactics by armed groups. We claim this choice is largely determined by the capacity of the rebel groups to control territory. Groups that are not able to liberate territory remain underground and have to rely mainly on bombings. Groups with territorial control engage in guerrilla-like attacks in which there is a physical encounter with the enemy. This conjecture is tested and largely confirmed at three levels: a cross-sectional analysis of the distribution of tactics in 122 armed groups, using compositional data analysis; a geographical analysis of the distribution of tactics in the largest cities as opposed to the rest of the country; and a case study of Hezbollah. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the convergence among ethnic groups, narco-traffickers, insurgents, and terror organizations in Central Asia. It analyzes the lucrative business of drug trafficking and the diffusion of globalization, which have undoubtedly brought these once disparate groups together. It will explore how the increasing movement of illicit goods and people, proliferation of transportation technology, growing infrastructure, cooperative ethnicities, as well as a shared need for funding, have provided these groups with an opportunity to consolidate their efforts in ways that were not possible in the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does an established state authority respond to an insurgency? How does such an authority plan and carry out its struggle to counter an armed non-state actor and why? The issue of strategy in counterinsurgency (COIN) remains a rather contentious subject and several practitioners and theorists on COIN have prescribed various remedies to the same problem. This article offers a re-evaluation of the concept of strategy in COIN and outlines the practices and mentalities that counterinsurgents should adopt (and avoid) to successfully counter an insurgency. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Jihadist foreign fighters have become common in civil conflicts in Muslim countries. While research exists on the impact they have upon returning home, less attention has been given to their influence on the opposition cause that they mobilize in support of. This article looks at the impact that jihadist foreign fighters on the Chechen and Syrian resistance causes, evaluating their influence on oppositional cohesion and ideology, domestic and international perceptions of the movements, and on governmental narratives regarding the conflicts the foreign fighters engage in. It is concluded that foreign fighters have overwhelmingly damaged the Chechen and Syrian opposition movements, making the likelihood of opposition success more remote. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media have played an essential role in the jihadists’ operational strategy in Syria and Iraq, and beyond. Twitter in particular has been used to drive communications over other social media platforms. Twitter streams from the insurgency may give the illusion of authenticity, as a spontaneous activity of a generation accustomed to using their cell phones for self-publication, but to what extent is access and content controlled? Over a period of three months, from January through March 2014, information was collected from the Twitter accounts of 59 Western-origin fighters known to be in Syria. Using a snowball method, the 59 starter accounts were used to collect data about the most popular accounts in the network-at-large. Social network analysis on the data collated about Twitter users in the Western Syria-based fighters points to the controlling role played by feeder accounts belonging to terrorist organizations in the insurgency zone, and by Europe-based organizational accounts associated with the banned British organization, Al Muhajiroun, and in particular the London-based preacher, Anjem Choudary. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Transnational insurgents are a common feature of contemporary wars, but research on how to address this problem is still scarce. This article examines the South African Defence Force's (SADF) counterinsurgency against Namibian transnational insurgents. It concludes that the South African forces focused a large amount of their efforts outside the borders of Namibia. Highly coercive operations in Angola and Zambia created the space for hearts and minds activities in Namibia, as well as forcing neighboring states to end their support for the insurgents. Although the war in Namibia is somewhat different from contemporary wars, SADF's cross-border strategy gives us some important insights into the regional dynamics of civil wars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses a collective-action framework to study the mobilization of the Arrow Boys (AB), a community defense militia in South Sudan. Drawing on general collective-action explanations, this article argues that the mobilization of the AB was facilitated by two factors: (1) a strong overlap of the fighter's private and the community's public benefit and (2) close social relationships and expectations within the community. The article supports these theoretical claims by, first, examining the scope conditions under which the AB formed and, second, drawing on individual interviews with AB members from Western Equatoria in South Sudan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Illegal organizations, like mafia syndicates, gangs, and insurgencies, are often highly cohesive and hostile toward the outside world. Such groups cultivate a particular form of “anti-social” capital, which relies on ingroup bonding and limits outgroup bridging for the purpose of commissioning illicit acts. We argue that experiences within the group leave members with varying intensities of anti-social capital, and that higher intensities lead to significantly weaker relationships with political institutions and civil society, even many years after they exit the group. We test this theory using survey data from 1,485 former members of insurgent and paramilitary groups in Colombia, along with insights from 68 qualitative interviews. We find strong evidence that anti-social capital has individually varying and sticky effects on former members. These effects are pervasive and intense, and exhibit surprising and counterintuitive properties: former members of pro-state militia with higher levels of anti-social capital are systematically less likely to trust political institutions, while members of peasant-based insurgent groups with high levels of anti-social capital are less likely to participate in their communities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article assesses the effect that leveraging civilian defense force militias has on the dynamics of violence in civil war. We argue that the delegation of security and combat roles to local civilians shifts the primary targets of insurgent violence toward civilians, in an attempt to deter future defections, and re-establish control over the local population. This argument is assessed through an analysis of the Sunni Awakening and ancillary Sons of Iraq paramilitary program. The results suggest that at least in the Al-Anbar province of Iraq, the utilization of the civilian population in counterinsurgent roles had significant implications for the targets of insurgent violence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In response to Somalia's decades-long political and humanitarian crises, the African Union has deployed a peace support operation known as the African Union Mission in Somalia. Tasked to help eliminate an ongoing insurgency, the mission has seen heavy combat as it fights to reclaim territory held by the al-Shabaab militant organization. This article applies the techniques of open source campaign analysis to assess the mission's prospects for long-term success. The prognosis is not good. Analysis reveals a range of vulnerabilities that threaten the deployment's core security objectives, suggesting that the optimism many have expressed for the mission is misplaced. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article studies the association between ethnic conflicts and political attitudes. It employs a new data set on the casualties of the ethnic conflict in Turkey to identify the effects of the Kurdish insurgency on the electoral behavior of the Turkish voters. The results indicate that the conflict leads to the political polarization of the society along ethnic nationalist lines. Further investigation of the data also provides some empirical support for the constructivist argument that the salience of ethnic identities is subject to change in response to external stimuli, of which ethnic conflict constitutes a drastic example. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Romanian anti-communist armed resistance has received relatively little attention outside the country, despite its resemblance to other small, diffused, headless insurgencies being fought in the first decades of the twenty-first century. This article deals with military operations mounted against the partisans, with a special focus on tactics such as cordoning, checkpoints, patrols, sweeps, ambushes, and informed strikes. Based mostly on primary sources, it highlights success and failure against determined and elusive guerrillas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]