Search

Although conflict issues – the stated goals of actors engaged in conflict – hold a privileged position in many theoretical explanations of the occurrence, dynamics, and resolution of civil war, global issue data are scarce beyond datasets that focus on specific thematic areas. This article aims to bring issues into the forefront of civil war scholarship by presenting the UCDP Conflict Issues Dataset (CID). This global yearly dataset contains 14,832 conflict issues – divided, at the most disaggregated level, into 120 sub-categories – raised by armed non-state groups involved in intrastate armed conflict in 1989-2017. By bringing issues back in, the UCDP CID provides opportunities to reevaluate several central questions about the onset, duration, intensity, and resolution of civil war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction draws out and amplifies the major themes engaged in this special issue of "Abolitionist Rhetorics." Insurgent abolition, we contend, far from marking yet another "turn" in disciplinary history, compels the field to reckon with its conditions of possibility and, in that encounter, with its abolition. It does so inasmuch as it proffers an immanent limit to the rhetorical field's intellectual imagination; in its invention of a planetary vocabulary and praxes of relationality and scale that cuts against rhetoric's imperial commonplaces; and by confronting rhetoricians with their disavowed desires for radical realization. In the upshot, the larger stakes of abolitionist rhetorics go beyond epistemic and disciplinary refurbishment. Instead, we argue that abolition—as seen in the rebellions, insurgencies, and resistances that have marked the twenty-first century—are unfoldments of radical survivance and living in the late racial capitalocene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I argue for an infraconstitutive rhetoric as a practice for attending to Black rhetorical formations. I first unfold four key dimensions of infraconstitutive criticism: the infraontological, immanent, praxis, and chronotopian vectors of criticism. I then explicate the contours of an infraconstitutive imagination by reading the George Floyd rebellion as both a planetary and singular irruption of insurgent abolition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article "The Battle for Latin America" in Diplomatic History discusses Allen Wells's book, Latin America's Democratic Crusade, which argues that the struggle between dictators and democrats, not communists and capitalists, defined Latin American politics in the first half of the twentieth century. Wells challenges existing literature by highlighting the role of moderate reformers in the region's political landscape. The book traces the transnational struggle between democratic activists and dictators, shedding light on key figures and events that shaped Latin American politics from the 1920s to the early 1960s. Wells's work is praised for its comprehensive analysis of the region's political history, making it a significant contribution to the field of Latin American international history. [Extracted from the article]

Why do militant groups decide to escalate or deescalate their use of violence in conflict? Examining the case of the "Troubles" in Northern Ireland, we analyze groups that adopt violence as a political strategy and evaluate factors that influence its application. To do so, we adopt a novel empirical approach to the study of militant groups. Drawn from information science, this approach enables estimation of variable influence and uncertainty within structured case studies, and is thus ideal for topics such as militant decision-making where systematic data collection is difficult. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Ethiopia’s Tigrayan elites harbored deep-seated resentments toward the Shewa Amhara ruling class, mainly driven by the suppression of the 1943 Tigrayan peasant rebellion. These resentments catalyzed the rise of ethnonational consciousness within Tigray, manifested through deliberate attempts to undermine Ethiopian culture, tradition, and heritage with a paradoxical ownership claim of Abyssinian history. Tigray’s pivotal role as the nucleus of the Aksumite civilization within the broader Abyssinian context is palpable memory. This civilization extended across territories such as Eritrea and Amhara, encompassing various less-visible groups. Tigrayans featured prominently in the Solomonic Dynasty, stretching from the legendary Queen of Sheba to the 1974 Ethiopian Revolution that toppled Emperor Haile Selassie (r. 1930–1974). Before the advent of Italian imperialism in Eritrea and the Southward expansion of Menelik II (r. 1889–1913), the Tigrigna-speaking regions, along with the Amhara, had served as the epicenter of the Abyssinian politics and cultural sphere. This paper scrutinizes the emergence of Tigrayan ethno-nationalism amid the Marxist Revolution, juxtaposing it against entrenched Ethiopian values. It also highlights the historical significance of Welkait (a generic term used to refer to an area west of river Tekezé that includes Welkait itself, Telemt, Teg,edé, and Humera) and Raya – areas annexed by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) in 1991 and still in contention. The author offers an all-encompassing analysis, incorporating a wealth of secondary and primary historical sources, including archives, chronicles, inscriptions, memoirs, traveler accounts, and oral narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the cusp of disarmament, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia–People's Army (FARC-EP) held a giant weeklong media event in the middle of its territory along the northern edge of the Amazon basin. This photo essay explores the anxious moments of venturing into a mixed realm where they wore both military fatigues and civilian clothes as well as the group's efforts to control the media even as it was being manipulated by it. My photographs strive to capture the tensions coursing through the event itself and the liminal moment of the FARC-EP's then-imminent disarmament. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Boundaries of Belonging: English Jamaica and the Spanish Caribbean, 1655–1715" by April Lee Hatfield explores the complex interactions between England and Spain in the Caribbean during the seventeenth century. Hatfield delves into the legal and relational aspects of Jamaica's evolution from a privateering hub to a plantation complex, highlighting the differences in how England and Spain defined subjecthood and belonging. The book also examines the implications of interimperial slave trading, the role of race in defining political identity, and the challenges of creating shared legal spaces for trade and imperial expansion. Overall, "Boundaries of Belonging" sheds light on the evolving empires in the Caribbean and their impact on subjects' identities and rights. [Extracted from the article]

The phenomenon of ungoverned (and ill-governed, and ungovernable) spaces has resulted in increases in insecurity in Nigeria's rural communities, especially breeding insurgencies and other forms of militancy. As a corollary, non-state security actors have arisen as community-created mechanisms to reduce the ever-increasing rates of crime. This study investigated the establishment of these NSSAs, with a view to understanding community perceptions of their effectiveness. Using selected inclusion/exclusion criteria, the study targeted two rural communities in Southwest Nigeria and collected data using a structured online survey. Data were analyzed using a simple linear regression model. The findings revealed that the residents of the communities feel safer under the protection of the vigilante groups, and the groups have been effective in reducing crime rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do governments make concessions to some rebels but not others? We argue that the origins of rebel groups influence the bargaining process, and the government's willingness to make concessions in particular. Rebel groups inherit different resource endowments – community ties and military expertise – from pre-existing "parent" organizations. These resource endowments are visible to the government, and they provide critical information about the likely durability of the rebellion. We expect that rebel group origins facilitating these endowments are associated with the state offering concessions earlier in the conflict. Employing original data on rebel group origins, as well as information on government concessions during post-Cold War African conflicts, we find general support for our expectations, although not all types of parent organizations are equally beneficial to rebel groups when it comes to extracting concessions from the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emphasis in recent decades on weak state capacity as an explanation of civil war detracts from an important fact: some of the deadliest and most protracted rebellions since WWII arose not where the state was weak, but rather in areas of significant state power. This study challenges the predominance-of-peripheral-conflict paradigm by disentangling rebel formation from civil war onset and emphasizing the urban origins of numerous rebel groups. Quantitative analyses show that three group types—military-, social interest-, and political party-based groups—are far more likely to form in large cities, especially the capital, and far less likely to form in the rural countryside. Case studies then illustrate the constraints and opportunities nascent rebel groups of each type face. This study advances the field's understanding of a surprisingly large number of violent rebellions that current mainstream approaches and the emphasis on weak states and conflict opportunities cannot effectively explain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quantitative approaches to conflict research are evolving to incorporate better theoretical, methodical, and dataset tools. One key area where our progress is especially limited relates to the social origins of rebel groups: how a group's political identity emerges as a focal point for mobilization and future conflict behaviors. We benchmark two key empirical agendas in civil war and rebellion research and then discuss key contributions of this special issue. In bringing together multiple theoretical perspectives and original datasets, including the individual-level and group-level data, the contributions to this special feature push the research frontier further along these lines. Jointly, they demonstrate that a rebel group's origins – where it comes from, who are its constituents, what is its political appeal, and how it organizes – have far-reaching implications to explanations along different dimensions and across a wide range of contexts and regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The anthracite mineworkers of Northeastern Pennsylvania fomented a series of insurgencies during the first three decades of the twentieth century. This study focuses on their activism in the northern-most of three ‘hard coal’ fields, located around the cities of Wilkes-Barre and Scranton. Following several failed unionization attempts between 1848 and 1895, the United Mine Workers of America (UMAW) entered anthracite in the mid-1890s, organized the workforce, and called a successful strike in 1902. However, the discontent continued prompting the Industrial Workers of the World to enter the field in 1907. Drawing mainly on immigrant support, especially from the Italians, the ‘Wobblies’ suffered defeat in the Strikes of 1916 and left the area. The grassroots rebellions nevertheless persisted undere the Cmmunist-inspired National Miners Union between 1928 and 1931, the United Anthracite Miners of Pennsylvania between 1933 and 1934, and the Progressive Miners Association in 1939. The rear-guard actions ended during the post-World War II years and the decline of the industry. Through it all, the workers, who were originally British and German but by 1900 mainly Eastern and Southern Europeans, were motivated by grievances agaisnt the coal companies and the UMWA, and sustained by a deep well of family, community, and religous solidarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is a review of the memoir "Smoking Red: The Memoirs of a Fighter Pilot" by Wyndham Ward. The memoir focuses on Ward's 58-year career in aviation, particularly his time in the Royal Air Force (RAF). It provides a narrative of British air power from the aftermath of the Suez Crisis to the Falklands War, touching on topics such as the Soviet threat and Operation Unthinkable. The review also discusses the challenges faced by the RAF due to economic constraints and changing defense policies. The reviewer recommends the book for those interested in aviation history. [Extracted from the article]

The secular reforms the young Republic of Turkey launched during the interwar period were one of the most comprehensive modernization schemes in the world history. These extraordinary reforms have been considered as the sole maker of today's Turkey. The political histories, focusing on formal politics, mostly reduced the social opposition to secularism to a few well-known hapless protests and rebellions. This article, however, argues that modern Turkey was the culmination of a more complicated process in which popular opposition to these reforms also shaped politics. It reveals that the daily life of ordinary people, particularly in rural areas, was rife with the anti-secular voices and attitudes by exploring non-elite public spheres and popular discursive strategies though which anti-secular opinions and attitudes were produced and expressed. Rather than seeing them as a result of clash between secularism and religion, it emphasizes the socio-economic reasons that lead to people's negative response, primarily the loss of authority or economic advantages of some groups due to reforms. Finally this article offers that the roots of the Islamist politics of the following decades could be sought in this popular dissent, which subtly contested the secularism's hegemony in daily life during the early republic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Where cross‐border sanctuaries enable rebels to marshal external support, classical theories of counterinsurgency extol the strategic value of border fortification. By sealing borders, counterinsurgents can erode transnational militants' resources, degrading the quality of rebellion. Extending resource‐centric theories of conflict, I posit a fortification dilemma inherent in this strategy. Externally supplied rebels can afford conventional attacks and civilian victimization. When border fortifications interdict their foreign logistics, insurgents compensate by cultivating greater local support. In turn, rebels prefer more irregular attacks and cooperative relations with civilians. Hence, counterinsurgent border fortification trades off reduced rebel capabilities for greater competition over local hearts and minds. I test this theory using declassified microdata on border fortification and violence in Iraq. Results highlight the central link between border control and cross‐border militancy, and show how governments can contest the transnational dimensions of civil wars, such as external rebel sponsorship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Radical Islamic insurgency and violent extremism have claimed over 5,250 lives and forcibly displaced at least 734,000 people in Cabo Delgado, northern Mozambique over the past six and a half years. Counter-insurgency efforts of the government to date have mainly focused on a military- and security-based response, paying less attention to the structural drivers of extremist violence, such as socio-economic inequalities, poor gov-ernance, historic ideological, ethnic and religious oppositions, and an incomplete peace-building and reconciliation process from the post-civil war period. The paper examines how Mozambique can learn from its past peace-building and Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration (DDR) experience, build on the achievements while also correct the shortcomings, which have equally contributed to the rise of violence. It also analyses ways to implement a tailored, inclusive, and effective strategy of Countering and Pre-venting Violent Extremism (C/PVE), building on the past but linking it to present needs and future challenges. Addressing long-standing root causes, focusing on youth and their communities, and furthering reconciliation are just a few areas, among others, to focus on to ensure that a heavy military response does not undermine the prospects of long-term peace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Taliban's takeover of Afghanistan in 2021 terminated the country's democratisation. The crisis was more an outcome of the two-decade-long flawed state-building and democratisation, and the escalation of the insurgency than an overnight change in the country's politico-military landscape. This paper examines Afghanistan's failed democratization from 2001 to 2021 by focusing on five variables including stateness, welfare, rule of law, political regime, and political community. The paper explains how flawed progress in the five areas gradually eroded the democratisation process resulting in state collapse and the restoration of the Taliban's Islamic Emirate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Precision strikes from a distance are a common practice of state warfare. However, the global proliferation of precision strike technologies, like missiles and armed drones, makes such weapons progressively available to non-state armed groups (NSAGs). We look at Daesh in Syria and Iraq and at the Houthis in Yemen as two case studies to analyse the consequences of this proliferation for non-state warfare. Our focus is the socio-spatial dimension of warfare. We probe to what extent precision strike technology is used to conquer and control territory (solid warfare) or to weaken the enemy network without territorial ambition (liquid warfare). The predominant view in the literature on NSAGs perceives them as would-be state builders who desire to govern and hence, seek to control territory. Our findings support this view, as both Daesh and the Houthis have applied precision strike technologies for solid warfare. However, at the same time, both groups have used these weapons for liquid warfare, too, targeting in particular civilians and civilian infrastructure to weaken the network of their enemies. This poses new questions to scholars of small wars and insurgencies and calls upon policy makers to increase efforts to curb the proliferation of precision strike technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the enduring relevance of Mike Davis's Ecology of Fear in understanding contemporary environmental crises. Topics include the impact of climate change on Southern California, the critique of urban development policies, and the interplay between social inequality and environmental disaster, emphasizing how human agency shapes ecological vulnerability.

During summer 2021, the world watched the swift and, for some, surprising collapse of Afghanistan's government. However, a Taliban victory was always a possibility for players of ADistant Plain (ADP), a boardgame about insurgency and counterinsurgency in post-9/11 Afghanistan. These events inspired many ADP players, and its designers, to (re)engage with the game, thus providing scholars with a unique opportunity to investigate in real time how historical practice occurs within the popular culture space. Utilizing primary sources, this article demonstrates that contemporary history games – those which depict current events or open-ended, unresolved periods, rather than ones designed to model what is seen as 'settled' history – are uniquely subject to external, out-of-game interventions which may prompt reevaluations of their assumptions and models, since players and designers are repeatedly challenged by changing circumstances to integrate new data into how they perceive and consume the historical representations found therein. These games are therefore exceptionally suited to engendering genuine and ongoing historical practice, through the use of evidence, argumentation and debate, retrospective reassessments, and counterfactual analysis. The broader discipline will greatly benefit from taking a more inclusive view of popular history by paying greater attention to historical games of this type. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do some jihadist organizations engage in beheadings while others do not? Although beheadings have become a signature tactic of the contemporary global jihadist movement, I show that most jihadist groups perpetrate few or no beheadings and only a minority have adopted beheading as a consistent part of their repertoire of violence. Such variation exists even among ideologically similar 'Salafi-jihadist' groups, suggesting that ideology alone cannot explain why such violence occurs. Instead, I argue that the use of beheadings is shaped by a combination of local strategic context and transnational ties. Beheadings are strategically useful to jihadist groups engaged in insurgency as a means of deterring civilian collaboration with the enemy, demoralizing enemy combatants and attracting foreign recruits. But the use of beheading is also costly for such groups, notably because of its tendency to alienate potential civilian supporters. Whether or not particular jihadist groups use beheadings depends largely on whether they can afford to ignore these costs. Jihadist insurgents who control significant territory are less sensitive to civilian attitudes because of their ability to obtain support through coercion and are therefore more likely to perpetrate beheadings. The use of beheadings is also shaped by transnational ties: organizations that seek formal affiliation with transnational jihadist networks are more likely to calculate that the benefits of using extreme violence to attract transnational support outweigh its costs. I test this theory using an original dataset of over 1,500 beheading events perpetrated by jihadist organizations between 1998 and 2019. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

States and their security forces often assume future insurgency will be versions of Mao Zedong’s “people’s war,” and counterinsurgency remains backward looking without a theoretical foundation to situate it within broader global security environment and armed-conflict trends. Next-gen insurgency will be networked, swarming, global, and focused on narrative-centric conflict and integrated cost imposition, and social media and the virtual world will be its central battlespaces. No nation has fully grasped that the “people’s war” reflected the military, economic, political, informational, technological, and social conditions of its time. Through an examination of insurgency’s nature, character, patterns, and trends and a thought experiment about next-gen insurgency, states and their security and intelligence services can think about what insurgency will be (rather than what it has been) and prepare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Contrary to the dominant narrative of the historical formation of democracy in Denmark, which emphasises a smooth and gradual linear transition to democracy and modernity, this paper accentuates a discontinuous and contentious road towards democratisation. Based on quantitative and qualitative sources, this article identifies four major waves of popular mobilisation that paved the way for the introduction and expansion of political rights. The first wave of popular protest began in the 1830s and culminated in 1848 with the fall of absolutism and the transition to constitutional monarchy. The next protest wave from 1885 to 1887 arose from the so‐called 'constitutional struggle' and mobilised hundreds of thousands of ordinary Danes and contributed to the nationalisation and parliamentarisation of the political system. The third wave unfolded around the end of the Second World War, while the hitherto last wave of popular struggle erupted in 1968 with the youth rebellion. The analysis shows that 'democracy' was the central issue of contention in all four protest waves and supports the main thesis that periods of intense interaction between popular protest and the state have had a decisive formative influence on the genesis and further development of Danish democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the Syrian War, the US and other Western countries trained, equipped and paid Syrian rebels to fight the government and, later, root out the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). When states use armed groups to attain foreign policy objectives, control is a key concern. The US sought to enforce such control over providers and recipients of lethal military assistance in the period from 2013–18. We investigate the parallel CIA and Department of Defence assistance programmes. We challenge theoretical assumptions related to the application of the principal-agent model to explain the dynamics of foreign assistance to rebels. We argue that, in the US strategy to control rebels, co-ordinating the providers and dividing the recipients of security assistance were essential conditions. Meanwhile, the delays in recruitment, the limitations on the number of soldiers trained, the short supply of weapons and the strict regulation of the actions carried out by the rebels all reduced the efficacy of the assistance. This way of instrumentalising security assistance helped the US and its Western allies to crush ISIL while avoiding a collapse in Damascus. However, this happened at the expense of rebel cohesion, autonomy, and legitimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Turkey's Kurdish borderlands, smugglers occasionally entered insurgent corridors, the guerrilla-controlled mountainous passages, to bypass state control. This article takes insurgent corridors to frame sovereignty as monopolization of space-making and proposes space-making as a key analytic to examine the forms of sovereignty that facilitate or undermine specific extractive practices. As a spatial form, corridors are central to the claiming and exercising sovereignty and extraction without having complete territorial control across a bounded space or the whole population in that space, the territoriality identified with nation-states. By controlling corridor space and monopolizing the traffic in them, colonial empires, nation-states, corporations, and rebel movements exercised sovereignty and extracted value that is carried or generated by corridor traffic. The insurgent corridors further complicate corridor sovereignty as the Kurdish guerillas monopolized corridor-making without monopolizing and extracting the corridor traffic under a post-nation-state political vision that favors grassroots democratized organization of mobilities and livelihoods rather than centralized exclusive authority and biopolitical governance on them. The insurgent corridors constituted what I call countersovereignty, a practice contesting not only the existing state sovereignty but also political models of nation-state sovereignty and territoriality. While anthropologists understand refusal as disengagement from actors claiming sovereign superiority, the insurgent corridor countersovereignty entailed a distinct form of political refusal that rejects mimicking state sovereignty and associated forms of biopolitical governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do conflicts within a country's borders affect its behavior beyond them? We argue that fighting insurgencies at home shapes a country's human rights posture at the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC). States often suppress insurgencies using methods that violate their international human rights commitments. They are therefore hesitant to condemn other countries' alleged violations for fear of reciprocal condemnation of their own actions. This is especially true in countries with greater media freedom where the media is more likely to hold the state accountable for human rights violations, and to highlight its apparent hypocrisy internationally. Such states, we argue, are more likely to vote against or abstain from resolutions that target individual states for human rights transgressions. We test this claim with a global statistical analysis of country voting patterns at the UNHRC from 1973 to 2017. Our results yield new insights into the determinants of countries' voting behavior in multilateral human rights fora. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes Malay-Muslim insurgents' attacks in the three southern provinces of Thailand between the years of 2010–2021 and identifies the role of public holidays on the level of violence. The existing literature suggests terrorists consider holidays during attack planning. However, there is a lack of agreement on the effect direction. Some studies have found that holidays are a force for peace while others have found they can act as trigger for more violence. Applying environmental criminology to the timing of terrorist attacks, we argue that the type of the holiday matters. Therefore, we analyze public (secular), Islamic, and Buddhist holidays separately. We show that Islamic holidays witness increased violence while Buddhist and public holidays see reductions. We discuss that Islamic holidays increase the Malay-Muslim insurgents' motivation to attack by assigning to those dates a higher symbolic value. On the other hand, on Buddhist and public holidays, insurgents may hesitate to attack to avoid the adverse effects of losing public support and triggering a backlash. The results demonstrate the necessity to analyze the temporal dynamics of terrorist attacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the development of Russia's use of repression and cooptation during the Soviet-Afghan War and Russo-Chechen Wars by tracing the origins of these practices to Tsarist Russia's imperial expansion. It further explores the role of information operations targeting domestic and foreign publics during these wars and in Ukraine since 2014, arguing that these narratives endeavor to frame Russia as a great power and regional hegemon. In this way, Russia sees Ukraine's shift Westward as an insurrection against Moscow's hegemony instigated by the collective West, and thus Russia's military intervention in Ukraine can be seen as constituting a sort of self-wrought pseudo-counterinsurgency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2009, the Nigerian military has engaged in counterinsurgency operations against Boko Haram and other extremists groups in Northern Nigeria, making extensive use of airpower. In such operations, the seeming casual and indiscriminate airstrikes have produced unfortunate scale of collateral damage to both civilians and its own personnel. This paper examines Nigeria's recurring mis-targeted airstrikes against the backdrop of the country's protracted and problematic COIN operations. The paper argues that such incidents are not necessarily 'a mistake' or 'a mishap', but a reflection of the limitations of airpower capabilities. Going forward, Nigeria's endeavours at countering insurgency and allied threats need to be systematically repositioned in a manner that guarantees optimal operational efficiency and precision. This requires improvements in combat techniques and technology as well as in command and intelligence capabilities of the forces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the personalist leadership style of Fabio Vásquez, a founding member of the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN), the Colombian guerrilla group. Personalism, as a theoretical framework for understanding Latin American leaders, has primarily focused on traditional political practices, emphasizing the tensions and conflicts among formal institutions, political parties, and personalist politicians. While these studies provide valuable insights, they overlook leaders who operate outside conventional political structures who also rely on personalist strategies to attract and retain followers. This article seeks to bridge this gap by presenting a case study of Vásquez's leadership style. In an era marked by the resurgence of populism and renewed interest in the effects of personalism on conventional politics, this article argues that examining personalist leadership within revolutionary insurgent groups that reject conventional party politics is necessary for a thorough understanding of the phenomenon. In particular, it offers a comprehensive overview of how Vásquez's personalist strategies shaped the ELN's early insurgency, ultimately revealing the strengths and vulnerabilities of such leadership within revolutionary movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai, Philologia is the property of Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The security challenges posed by Boko Haram and its breakaway factions in the riparian states of Lake Chad have attracted plethora of academic inquiries. Comparatively less attention has been paid to the relationship between the national economic interests of the riparian states (Lake Chad oil, fish, etc.) and adopted strategies for dealing with the challenges posed by these terrorist groups. Practically, regional organizations and national governments have evolved different strategies to counter the perennial security threats and hence stabilize the region for intra- and inter-state movements, trades and development with little success. The study argued that historical antecedents among states in the Lake Chad region which appear to institutionalize centrifugal social relations and conflicting economic interests in a security-threatened region that lacked durable security interdependence feed into sustenance of Boko Haram and subsequently undermine counterinsurgency operations. Data collection was based on survey method and complemented by documentary evidence based on secondary sources. The study found out that insurgency will persist unless appropriate security infrastructure is emplaced to promote patterns of amity and economic interdependence that will entrench deeply rooted and durable security architecture in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why did British military commanders in the Victorian age resort to punitive violence in so-called small wars? This study argues that the lack of military manuals or literature on conducting small wars resulted in the implementation of Jominian strategies in a non-European context. This, combined with Victorian assumptions that the enemy was 'inferior' and unable to adhere to reciprocal codes of military conduct, along with the constraints of operating in remote theatres of war, all coalesced to suggest that punitive violence was the simplest, safest and most efficient means of projecting British power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Revolts against the Persian Great Kings remain a largely contentious issue in Achaemenid studies, several aspects of which are however left unexplored. One such example is the question of the role of the Persian sovereign himself in this conflict: Was he actively implicated or did he adopt a more passive stance? This study aims to provide an answer to this question by systematically examining in a chronological order all the attested rebellions that have broken out in opposition to the incumbent Persian sovereign. Although on the surface level the attitude of the Achaemenid monarchs greatly varied, through this study a more coherent picture emerges, as it gradually becomes clear that the policy of the Persian sovereigns when facing an internal threat to their authority depended on the objective of the rebel themselves: Secession from the empire and the formation of an independent state or usurpation of the imperial throne. [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]

Shortly after Toussaint Louverture died in 1803, a literary tradition emerged in British abolitionist texts which portrayed the character of Toussaint in heroic terms. This article takes five texts written between 1803–1863 to demonstrate how Toussaint was constructed as an antislavery hero and what the motivations were behind this construction. The hero can be understood as a lens through which Toussaint’s character, and the character of the whole Haitian Revolution, was flattened. The hero was a frame that made him knowable and understandable to European audiences, but that also erased both the mass of enslaved people that formed the grassroots of the revolution in Haiti, as well as the many aspects of Toussaint himself that were not deemed to fit the hero narrative. This literary tradition arose because the mainstream of the nineteenth-century British antislavery movement opposed and feared rebellions led by enslaved people, believing on racist grounds that they were violent, uncontrolled, and anarchic, and at odds with the new liberal vision of empire that most British abolitionists wanted to create. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The conflict in Afghanistan 2001–2021 pitched coalition forces into the midst of a civil war. Armed political rebellion of this sort presents practitioners with a deeply intricate problem; multiple, interdependent layers of conflict and competition creating an ever-shifting ecosystem of violent competition. But in their efforts to resolve the root-causes of political rebellion in Afghanistan, Western counterinsurgents unwittingly contributed a set of philosophical, constructionist and cognitive ingredients to the dynamics powering violence on the ground. Using a variety of theoretical approaches, this article explores aspects of the campaign in Helmand and Kandahar 2008–11 in order to better explore the intersection between COIN theory, COIN practice, and the layered complexities involved for stabilisation forces seeking to instrumentalise power and influence in another nation's internal conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The escalation of militarized interstate disputes (MIDs) into interstate wars has been studied extensively with opportunity and willingness frameworks. In this article, we conceptualize and operationalize proto-insurgencies as a civil war equivalent to MIDs. Just as most MIDs do not escalate into interstate war, most proto-insurgencies never make the key tactical transitions needed to produce the onset of civil war. We separately examine proto-insurgency formation and proto-insurgency escalation to onset. We find that proto-insurgency formation is associated with political persecution, such as denial of access to justice, regime corruption, and mid-range levels of repression. Our theoretical focus is on how state repressive violence creates diffusion effects that push proto-insurgencies toward the tactical transitions that enable the escalation to civil war. Proto-insurgency escalation to civil war onset is driven by high levels of state repressive violence directed against proto-insurgency and its area of origin. This leads to the dispersal of proto-insurgents and the displacement of surrounding populations, inducing the spread of state repression to a larger number of administrative units. This creates the foundation for guerrilla warfare and establishes the conditions for rebels to offer sanctuary to displaced persons in return for active support, marking the onset of civil war. [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]

The 2021 military coup in Myanmar incited widespread civil resistance, including mass street protests, a civil disobedience movement, labour strikes and armed rebellions. Despite more than three years of conflict, the junta maintains power in certain areas Of the country. This article employs an outcome-explaining. process-tracing approach to elucidate the junta's persistence. The analysis reveals that civil resistance activities are highly fragmented, with minimal convergence in their operations or long-term visions. This fragmentation stems from divergent views within the movement regarding non-violent versus armed resistance and the varied objectives Of different armed ethnic organizations opposing the military. Concurrently, the junta has bolstered its repressive capabilities by developing institutionalized methods for countering adversarial forces. These methods are deeply intertwined with Myanmar's ethnicpolitical history and the military's entrenched dominance over political institutions. Consequently, this article contends that the evolution of both resistance efforts and the junta's repressive strategies has been markedly asymmetrical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines various rebellions against the nationalist government in Anatolia during the Turkish War of Independence (TWI) (1919–1922), which began as an insurrection against the Ottoman government and the occupation forces of the Entente. As the nationalists began to extend their authority, they met with resistance from different groups in different parts of the country. While some groups sought independent ethno-states, some consisted of war-weary Turks who simply refused to share the burden of a new conflict; others were supported by the Ottoman government in Istanbul and sought to restore the authority of the Sultan and weaken the nationalists. Most rebellions, especially those supported by the Ottoman government, involved former or current soldiers and government officials. Both sides fought in the name of what they considered to be legitimate governments and had access to heavy weapons. The rebellions often met with violent repression and the use of irregular forces, resulting in significant loss of life and damage to property and leaving a lasting impact on the collective memory of Turkish society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Africa Spectrum is the property of Sage Publications Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)