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Kidnapping is a common tactic used by insurgent groups. However, why insurgents commit kidnappings remains insufficiently understood. Based on 1,386 group-year observations of 140 insurgents between 1998 and 2012, we analyze conditions driving the within-group temporal changes in their involvement (1 vs 0) versus event-frequency in kidnappings. We find that changes in specific quasi-state activities (i.e., extraction and provision of public services), which may rely on kidnappings for coercive enforcement and social control, predict kidnapping “involvement” only. Meanwhile, general resource and capacity conditions (i.e., territory-control, criminal networks and combat-lethality) influence changes in both kidnapping involvement and event-frequency.

Informed by different grassroots learning and educational practices engaged in waste management, and drawing from the concepts of insurgent citizenship and environmental stewardship, we examine the role of waste picker organizations and movements in creating new pathways towards more sustainable environmental waste governance. Two case studies (Argentina and Brazil) demonstrate how waste pickers inform and educate the general public and raise the awareness of socio-environmental questions related to waste management. Different educational practices are used as strategies to confront citizens with their waste: to see waste as a consumption problem, resource, and income source. Our paper draws on grassroots learning (social movement learning and insurgent learning) and education (stewardship) aimed at the transformation of waste practices. We argue that waste pickers play an important role in knowledge production promoting recycling, in landfilling less and recovering more resources. We conclude that waste pickers act as insurgent citizens and also are environmental stewards.

The devastation of lives, livelihood and property in Nigeria caused by over a decade of insurgency by the Boko Haram terrorists is a subject of security, policy, humanitarian and academic concern. Several counter-measures have been adopted by both state and non-state actors to combat the insurgency with limited successes recorded. Consequently, studies have examined several efforts taken by the Nigerian government toward ending the Boko Haram insurgency, including the challenges confronting such efforts. However, Nigeria’s de-radicalization, rehabilitation and reintegration programme for ex-Boko Haram fighters, known as Operation Safe Corridor, has received marginal attention in literature. The Operation Safe Corridor programme which was established in September 2015 is aimed at de-radicalizing, rehabilitating and reintegrating repentant Boko Haram insurgents into society. Using a field survey method involving key informant interviews and focus group discussions as well as documentary reports, this article examines the progress and pitfalls of the Operation Safe Corridor programme. It argues that the failure to mainstream the concerns of local communities both in policy and programming of Operation Safe Corridor severely undermines the prospect of successful and effective reintegration of ex-Boko Haram fighters. The article concludes that if this gap is not addressed, the programme will succeed in terms of the number of ex-combatants graduating from it but will fail in terms of reintegrating the graduating ex-combatants into society. This poses significant risks to both Boko Haram defectors and society at large.

Since the early 2000, Balochistan is yet again embroiled in a cobweb of violence after a hiatus of more than two decades. The Baloch nationalist militancy began to reinvigorate after the seizure of power by General Pervez Musharraf in 1999. Musharraf marginalised the moderate Baloch nationalists and repressed dissident voices. The differences over power and resource sharing escalated quickly into a full-blown armed struggle once Musharraf used indiscriminate force to subdue opposition against his regime. This article examines the proximate and long-term structural factors that led to the resurgence of armed militancy at the turn of the twenty-first century. It analyses the new drivers and dynamics of the present conflict that make it more virulent and lend it a distinctive character.

States around the world have lost control over their territory to armed non-state actors, including states like Yemen, Afghanistan and Myanmar in the Asian region. This article aims to understand why these states are unable to exercise control over all of their territory. The study identifies and examines four major challenges faced by states in maintaining control over their territory – lack of state legitimacy and effectiveness, strategic motives of armed non-state actors, socio-economic motives of armed non-state actors and external intervention. A comparative analysis of the cases of Yemen, Afghanistan and Myanmar illustrates the wide relevance of these challenges faced by the states with respect to territorial control.

The Mizo War of Independence, also labelled as the Mizo Insurgency Movement, spanned over a period of nearly 20 years, during which significant events and developments occurred, which greatly shaped and moulded the socio-political landscape of the state. Accounts and narratives of what took place during those turbulent years are aplenty. However, not much literature or narrative could be found about the ideological dimension of the movement and its ramifications. Hence, the main aim of the article is to emphasize on the underlying two strands of nationalism, that is, the nationalistic ideals pursued by the Mizo National Front (MNF) as an organization, on the one hand, and the strand of nationalism championed by its president and leader, Laldenga, on the other hand. The first part of the article examines the strand of nationalism of the MNF, the main perpetrator of the independence movement and the role of its founding president, Laldenga, in formulating that ideology. The second section of the article traces and analyses the so-called ‘Laldenga’s nationalism’. Finally, the article attempts to draw conclusion on how the two strands of nationalism impacted the outcome of the Mizo War of Independence as a whole.

Scholars of civil war and insurgency have long posited that insurgent organizations and their state enemies incur costs for the collateral damage they cause. We provide the first direct quantitative evidence that wartime informing to counterinsurgent forces is affected by civilian victimization. Using newly declassified data on tip flow to Coalition forces in Iraq we find that information flow goes down after government forces inadvertently kill civilians and it goes up when insurgents do so. These results confirm a relationship long posited in the theoretical literature on insurgency but never directly observed, have strong policy implications, and are consistent with a broad range of circumstantial evidence on the topic.

This article explores the Taliban’s insurgency (2007–2009) in Swat Valley (northern Pakistan) and the multiple meanings of violence in this context. A thematic analysis of data collected through qualitative fieldwork finds that the violence experienced by the victims was understood in three ways: physically as bodily harm, psychologically as terror and fear, and socially in the form of humiliation and dishonor. By delving into the experiences of civilians, the article offers a victim-centered approach and argues that instances of violence were characterized by harm as a “core referent.” It further argues for a context-specific understanding of harm and explicates that this notion is also determined by the local culture of Swat Valley, Pashtunwali.

This article discusses how Zapatista women have built themselves as transformative political subjects that disrupt the racist, classist, and patriarchal nation-state. It underscores the importance of reflecting on Zapatista women, on their struggle for particular demands specified in the Revolutionary Women’s Law, especially the collective struggle for obtaining rights such as to land, to participate politically, and to organize themselves in the armed struggle. Instead of entering into debate over whether Zapatista women are feminists or not, this article recognizes how, besides transforming living conditions, the Zapatistas have organized politically and gone from a process of invisibility, silence, and obedience to one of recognition, speech, and command. In this sense, the struggle of Zapatista women is an example of theoretical and practical ruptures within the history of class, gender, and race struggled in Mexico and the world.

Research on rebel behavior during conflicts has traditionally focused on the use of violent tactics. However, evidence from several intrastate wars suggests that armed groups also occasionally employ general strikes—a method of civil resistance that has typically been associated with nonviolent groups. But when do rebels resort to general strikes? I argue that these tactics have a particular function which can offset potential risks for rebels after they have suffered losses in previous battles: Through general strikes, rebels signal sustained authority to the local population. The argument is tested for districts in Eastern India using newly compiled, disaggregated data on contentious action during the Maoist conflict. The paper contributes to a burgeoning literature on wartime civilian activism in two ways: First, it shows that armed groups themselves rely situationally on civilian mobilization. Second, it investigates the effect of conditions endogenous to the conflict on these tactical choices.

Armed banditry is prevalent in Nigeria. It has competed with insurgency for the soul of Nigeria’s national security. Contemporary trajectories of armed banditry in Nigeria have been full of complications. One of the complications is the emergence of crime lords who engage in a self-aggrandizing but also socially sensitive criminal career. This paper seeks to explore the phenomenon of ‘crimelordism’ as a new trend in armed banditry in Nigeria. Utilizing a mixed qualitative method, the paper posits that the prevalence of grossly under-governed territorial spaces, especially in the countryside and borderlands of Nigeria, has created a vacuum of security that is being exploited by criminal kingpins to establish enclaves of criminality where they wield and exercise quasi-territorial powers. The paper submits that ‘crimelordism’ holds critical implications for Nigeria’s national security in view of its ruinous impacts.

There have been three main types of political outcome from the Great Recession. The first is an insurgency from the left exemplified by Podemos, now in decline, in Spain. It demands a return to classic European social democracy, but presents itself in a more radical rhetorical garb than its mid twentieth century forbears. The second is an insurgency from the right, best exemplified by Hungary’s Victor Orbán and his Fidesz Party. It demands a return to a national capitalism reminiscent of the 1930s. The third is the uniquely Italian phenomenon of the Five Star Movement-Lega combination combined with the rise of technocratic governments called into existence by an increasingly activist presidency. What explains this third, mixed model?

2019 marked 10 years since the beginning of the Boko Haram insurgency in Nigeria—a violent conflict that later spilled over to Chad, Cameroon, and Niger, killing over 37000 people and displacing 2.6 million. For over a decade, researchers and policy makers in peacebuilding and development have been trying to understand the drivers of conflict in order to find lasting solutions. Whilst violent conflicts rarely have straightforward explanations, the narrative on the Boko Haram insurgency has been somewhat reductionist, largely addressing the role of religion, and to a lesser extent, other drivers. Moreover, a lot of the literature has focused on Nigeria, for the obvious reason that it was the birthplace of Boko Haram and the epicentre of its activities. As a result of the disproportionate focus on Nigeria, data on the conditions in the affected regions and provinces of Chad, Cameroon, and Niger that facilitated the regional spill over are very minimal. To fill the gap, this article examines the role of the underdevelopment of public infrastructure and socio-economic deprivation as underlying drivers of the insurgency in all four affected countries. Complemented by data from secondary sources, the article builds on primary evidence from field observation, key informant interviews, and focus group discussions in Borno State of Nigeria, the Lake Province of Chad, the Far North Region of Cameroon, and the Diffa Region of Niger, to establish the link between infrastructural development gaps, illiteracy, unemployment, and poverty and the Boko Haram insurgency.

The essay explores three recently published books on the origins of militancy in Kashmir. In short, they all find that two causal factors are responsible for the insurgency’s ability to endure. First, the unending muscular security policy of India coupled with its explicit integrationist approach that triggered alienation by squeezing the democratic space of Kashmiris. Second, the role played by Pakistan in strongly backing the menagerie of militant groups for weakening political and territorial control of India over Kashmir. These books rely on a series of case studies of the different militant groups that have operated in Kashmir: most notably, Al-Fatah, the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), Hizbul Mujahedeen (HM) and Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (LeT). The emergence of Al-Fatah and JKLF was an offshoot of New Delhi’s iron-fist approach compounded with the dwindling of democratic space. Pakistan played a major role in the creation of HM and LeT by invoking Islam and Muslim identity as mobilising factors. These books, in their own different ways, identify a teleological shift in the thinking, strategies and operations of the militant groups, and this essay tries to extrapolate this by outlining the key markers of distinction between the old and new militancy.

Faced with the apologetic and exclusionary tendencies of liberal normativism, there is a marked trend in political theory to recover a more critical conception of justice, which does not adopt the dismissive attitude of traditional Marxism. In this context, the legacy of post-structuralism has been ambivalent. On the one hand, the work of thinkers such as Jacque Derrida, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze has helped to shape the direction of the relevant discourse. On the other hand, post-structuralist critiques of political normativism have been often accused of leading to a subsumption of justice to power. Contributing to the ongoing discussion, my article explores the insights of Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze and assembles them into a coherent line of analysis. The main argument advanced is that post-structuralist thought provides a fertile basis for a critical concept of justice, which foregrounds the notion’s material texture without forfeiting its normative and ethical traits.

Developmental issues of the North-Eastern States of India cannot be studied inisolation without accounting for the varied politico-socio-economic and institutional factors. This study covers a wide range of the socio-political issues and developmental gaps in the North-Eastern Region (NER) of India. It presents a broader picture and gives an understanding of the issues of governance and development prevailing in this region. Many issues pertain to paucity of developmental outcomes, ethnicity, demand for statehood, insurgency, absence of rule of law, corruption and so on, suggesting state’s ineffectiveness and people’s incompetence to take development to the front stage. An effort has also been made to trace the literature that deals with these issues.

How does armed conflict affect accountability and political trust in democratic governments? To answer this question, we present quasi-experimental evidence based on survey data which, coincidentally, were collected in the days surrounding an unanticipated violent attack by a rebel group in Mali. The chance occurrence of the attack five days into the survey demarcates respondents into two groups surveyed before and after the attack and allows us to examine how the attack affected approval of politicians and trust in political institutions. Our results show that people mainly attribute responsibility to the president and not to parliament or local government, while trust in institutions is largely unaffected. We also show that these effects are strongest in the region of the attack. These findings suggest that voters in new democracies are capable of attributing responsibility to individual politicians and governments while maintaining trust in the fundamental political institutions of democracy.

The aim of the study was to explore the career aspirations of the youth in Manipur, and data were collected through focus group discussions from 18 participants. The analysis of the data using thematic analysis was done to identify themes to develop an understanding of what careers these youth aspire for and the barriers to their aspirations. Four major themes identified were aspirations, barriers, support from family, and impact of the insurgency. The participants were found to have high career aspirations, clarity with regard to what they want to achieve in life, and desire to have careers that let them work for the betterment of their community. Limited job opportunities in Manipur and underdevelopment of private sector were attributed as major barriers. Participants from lower socioeconomic status reported facing greater challenge. Emotional as well as monetary support from family facilitated high career aspirations and perseverance in achieving them.

The post-World War II occupation of western Germany remains salient to developing theories of post-war crime, insurgency, and policing during post-conflict reconstruction. Yet there are no quantitative assessments of civilian crime for its first year (1945–6). Different from the Soviet-controlled East, where there is a relatively robust consensus that social and governmental disorder led to prolonged violent criminality, the picture for the western US and British zones is less clear and the literature is disjointed. We address this gap and in so doing help resolve the account of post-war criminality in the west with new data derived from the records of the US and British military government courts. Comparative analyses of crimes against the person, against property, and against civil restrictions were conducted. We employed a historical criminological approach to interpreting these data and to extrapolating their findings to current theories of counterinsurgency, post-conflict policing, and reconstruction. They indicate high rates of petty property crimes, minor civil violations, and limited violent disorder, commensurate with earlier studies of 1947 onwards. We could also better assess contested accounts of social conditions, revealing a more nuanced picture than prior historical analyses. Drawing on criminological, psychological, and counterinsurgency theories, we suggest that economic and social strain forced extensive minor law-breaking that, when combined with intense anxieties, manifested as fear of violent crime. But, importantly, Germans remained confident in the US and British military governments’ ability to ensure security, aiding the west’s recovery.

The most ubiquitous information and communications technology (ICT) in the hands of the common man today is the mobile phone. Most existing literature on the impact of mobile phones in farming has examined the various components of the farming cycle in isolation, and failed to holistically account for the complex interactions and relationships between these components. In this study, we combine the strengths of the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework (SLF) and Systems Theory (ST) as a theoretical lens to understand the impact of mobile phone use in farming and its developmental contributions on the livelihoods of smallholder farmers in post-insurgency northeast Nigeria. On the basis of empirical data and literature, we develop a qualitative system dynamics model depicting mobile phone use in farming. The main feedback loops show that the greatest bane to farming in the area is insecurity and climate variability. However, better access to information and communications afforded by mobile phones empowers farmers and enables them to overcome these vulnerabilities. The use of feedback loops in analysis provides rigour and depth to the findings due to their ability to demonstrate the interdependencies between system components. We contribute to knowledge and inform practice by extending the understanding of the impact of mobile phone use in farming through system dynmics modelling.

Several recent international health crises have revealed significant vulnerabilities in global pandemic preparedness. The 2014 Ebola fever epidemic expanded into an international threat far more quickly than experts anticipated, and the 2018 Ebola fever epidemic continues to expand, even with new technological innovations designed to control the disease. The 2015 yellow fever outbreak in Angola exhausted global vaccine supplies and put millions of people at risk. This article argues that global health authorities failed to anticipate the magnitude of these outbreaks because the field has not been updated to address the ways recent changes in international political economy are combining with environmental instabilities of the Anthropocene to increase epidemiological risks. Many public health textbooks and teaching materials continue to rely on variants of 20th-century modernization theory to explain and predict global health trends. Since the end of the Cold War, however, there has been a dramatic reconfiguration of governance in many parts of the world, and these macro-level changes are accelerating ecological destruction and fueling armed conflict in ways that will reduce the range and effectiveness of public health methods and prevention technologies that were successful during the 20th century. The combined effect of these institutional and environmental changes will increase global pandemic risks in the Anthropocene, even for infectious diseases that are easily preventable today.

What sustains commitment to rebel fighting during civil war? Using original survey data from the ongoing conflict in Syria, we examine whether self-ascribed rebel fighters, former fighters, civilians, and refugees can be clearly differentiated based on commitment to rebellion. We ask whether such groups are better characterized as a broadly holistic fighting community or a heterogeneous mix of actors with different levels of support for violence. Using a well-balanced sample of over 300 active and former rebel fighters, civilians from within the conflict zone, and externally displaced refugees, we observe that fighting commitment is greater among active combatants compared to other cohorts. To understand why, we examine underexplored psychological mechanisms and find that individuals with higher risk tolerance, optimism bias, and identity fusion with rebel forces display greater dedication to fighting. We discuss the implications of our results for understanding who participates in civil war violence and why.

Under what conditions do rebel organizations control territory during civil war? How do civilians influence the distribution of territorial control? This article introduces a civilian agency theory, emphasizing community collective action capacity (CAC) defined by underlying social network structure, to complement existing explanations of territorial control. I argue communities with greater CAC mobilize information and resources more efficiently, increasing belligerents’ incentives to control territory. However, CAC also increases community bargaining power to demand costly investments in governance, partially offsetting these gains. CAC increases rebel control in areas of state neglect. But, as state service provision increases, communities leverage CAC to demand prohibitively costly rebel governance, deterring rebel control. This article tests the theory in the context of the communist insurgency in the Philippines, using military intelligence reports from 2011 to 2014 to measure village-level communist insurgent territorial control and a household-level census (2008–2010) to measure village CAC. Interviews with village elders in Eastern Mindanao illustrate causal mechanisms and explore alternative explanations.

State indiscriminate violence against civilians has been viewed as counterproductive for the government. This conclusion hinges on the assumption that indiscriminate violence aggrieves civilians against the government even when the rebels provoke the state by using civilians as human shields. An alternative view suggests that civilians recognize if the rebels exploit them as human shields and blame the rebels if such provocation occurs. We ask: do civilians evaluate all state indiscriminate violence in the same way or do they think of state indiscriminate violence differently when it is provoked by insurgents? Accounting for the covariate differences between individuals with and without personal experience of warfare in the survey data from postwar Ukraine, we find that personal exposure to violence shapes one’s blame attribution for provoked state attacks on civilians. Individuals unexposed to violence tend to take into account whether the government was provoked by the rebels. By contrast, individuals with personal experience of warfare tend to blame the government for indiscriminate attacks regardless of rebel provocation. This finding has implications for counterinsurgency scholarship and policy. It is likely that the difference between unexposed and exposed to violence civilians emerges in geographically isolated conflicts. If so, targeting of civilians may have different effects on the escalation of insurgency in geographically concentrated as opposed to widespread cases of violence.

When war breaks out, how important are risk preferences to explaining why some individuals stay in conflict zones while others take flight? We examine risk tolerance among rebel combatants and civilians in Aleppo, Syria using a variation of the Eckel-Grossman Choice Game. Field work in Syria was conducted in 2013–14 with a total of 232 participants to include both Syrian civilians and active rebel fighters in Aleppo and Idlib Province, as well as among Syrian refugees in neighboring Turkey. Compared to Syrians in other locations, people in rebel-held territory of Aleppo, both combatants and non-combatants, are significantly more risk tolerant. We consider possible explanations for elevated risk preferences in Aleppo based on self-selection, adaptive learning, a sense of self-efficacy to affect future outcomes, conflict-related grievances, and in-group solidarity. Our analysis suggests that self-selection based on access to resources and a strong sense of self-efficacy may explain higher propensity for risk-taking. Overall, our results speak to a plausible sorting mechanism during conflict where risk averse individuals select out of conflict, while highly risk tolerant individuals are more prone to discount the inherent dangers of remaining in conflict zones. Our results provide new micro-level explanation for why some societies become mired in conflict traps involving highly risk tolerant fighting communities.

Political violence is a key theme in understanding the historical and contemporary Middle East characterized by different religious, social, and political revolts. It is thus salient to analyze why political violence emerges, how it is diffused, and why it takes different configurations during insurgencies. In order to study these questions, this article establishes three analytical frameworks: interdependency among violence and social movements, diffusion of violence, and proxy warfare. First, I argue that political violence and mobilization are interdependent processes which are shaped by personal, local, and historical dynamics. Secondly, violence is more likely to spread among the societies displaying similar political, religious, or ethnic characteristics, in particular, if there are individuals and militant organizations who take it as a model in order to affect the conflict. Finally, this violence, which depends on local and regional factors, often intersects with global politics and its path is altered as a result.

We introduce a new data set on the strategies and tactics employed by belligerents in 197 internal armed conflicts that occurred between 1945 and 2013. The Strategies and Tactics in Armed Conflict (STAC) data set provides scholars with a rich new source of information to facilitate investigations of how regimes and their foreign supporters have responded to insurgent threats and the effects of actors’ force employment choices on a wide variety of intra- and postconflict outcomes. In addition to seventeen novel variables that measure the strategies and tactics employed by governments and intervening states, the STAC data set contains independently coded measures of many variables that overlap with existing data sets—a feature that facilitates the replication of existing studies and robustness checks on the results of new studies. We demonstrate the utility of the STAC data with an analysis of the impact of rebel mobilization on the basis of ethnicity on the propensity of governments to employ forced resettlement, civilian protection, civilian welfare projects, and civilian targeting to counter the insurgent threat.

The effectiveness of Nigeria’s counterinsurgency operation has once again underscored the strategic importance of Russo-Nigerian relations. Having played a pivotal role in safeguarding the ...

What are the effects of civil conflict on political behavior? Even though war tends to be the continuation of politics, little is known about the effects of conflict on citizens’ voting behavior. Colombia is an interesting case in which civil war and elections coexist, and illegal armed groups intentionally affect electoral outcomes. Nonetheless, different groups use different strategies to alter these results. Using panel data from Senate elections from 1994 to 2006 and an instrumental variable approach to address potential endogeneity concerns, this paper shows that increasing guerrilla violence decreases voter turnout, while paramilitary violence has no significant effect on this variable. The results also suggest that after 1998, when the paramilitaries got involved in politics, electoral competition has had a tendency to be lower in municipalities affected by paramilitary violence. Relative to traditional parties, newly created third parties have a better performance in municipalities affected by paramilitary attacks. Additionally, FARC violence is significantly higher during election years, while paramilitary violence is lower. This is consistent with the hypothesis that the guerrilla’s strategy is to sabotage elections, while paramilitaries establish alliances with certain candidates. These patterns seem to be the result of deliberate strategies undertaken by the illegal armed groups.

A considerable literature has accumulated on the ‘Confrontation’ conflict over the formation of Malaysia in the mid-1960s. Many accounts are of variable quality, especially where they lack knowledge of the local political and social context or ignore the complexity of often intertwined events. Conclusions from such limited studies can be misleading. This article identifies some aspects of the conventional narrative that should be revisited, particularly the crucial role of the related anti-colonial insurgency and its social and economic roots, the dynamics of the Indonesian intervention and the wider historical context in which the conflict should be placed. Despite British claims of military success and undoubted logistical and diplomatic achievement, Confrontation was in many respects a ‘phoney war'. Nevertheless, the Borneo conflict had far-reaching consequences, as well as providing valuable lessons in the development and containment of insurgency. It secured the establishment of Malaysia. It accelerated Britain's withdrawal from its long imperial presence ‘East of Suez', while confirming American dominance for the next 50 years of one of the world's strategic keypoints. It underpinned the development of authoritarian government in democratic guise. Hence it eased the way to the devastation of the Borneo rainforest with still incalculable global consequences.

In analyzing the motivations behind the formation of insurgent groups and their activities against the state, academic debates have been sharply divided. On the one hand are scholars who emphasize insurgency as fallout of religious activities, while on the other hand are those who prioritize geostrategic politics or political marginalization as the root cause. Either claim, however, is only valid in part and obscures a holistic understanding of insurgency as a political phenomenon. Using Boko Haram as a case study, this article interrogates literatures on the aforementioned perspectives and highlights the empirical inadequacies in emphasizing one perspective at the expense of the other. This study suggests that only a synergized and balanced consideration of both perspectives can broaden the understanding of the motivations behind the emergence of Boko Haram as one of the world’s deadliest insurgent groups.

Progress in theorizing networks and events requires formulating a greater diversity of networks and, in particular, enabling network analysis to exploit relations between events and the attributes, actions, and variables that characterize them. We advance this line of inquiry in dialogue with a recent approach to the systematic study of violent conflicts among state actors and groups of people who refuse to accept their governments’ power. One productive way to analyze an insurgency is to view it as a network of sequenced events across stages (periods) of conflict. We explore this formulation, identify limitations, and present illustrative analysis demonstrating how new and useful insights can be obtained by combining our formal approach with one grounded in the comparative analysis of case studies.

Focusing on the upsurge in anti-colonial insurgency between 1945 and 1947, this article explores critical transitions in colonial state violence in two French dependencies: Algeria and Madagascar. The suggestion is that official and local responses to colonial disorder in these immediate post-war years defined new, more violent parameters of French colonial counter-insurgency that would long endure. The argument connects the ascendancy of a new French political elite at the Liberation with a reconceptualization of imperial threats, particularly in those territories where political intelligence analysis and security policing became integral to day-to-day governance at the provincial, prefectural, or district levels.

Drawing on a qualitative analysis of two recent labor disputes in Guangzhou and Shenzhen, this article asks: Why has a broad-based labor movement failed to emerge in contemporary China? Both pro-labor legislation and the existence of movement-oriented labor NGOs appear to provide opportunities and resources for workers to engage in organized action to expand workers’ rights. Two political mechanisms, however, help explain why a strong labor movement has not developed: 1) legislation and courtroom procedures and 2) official institutions that monopolize the space for representation—specifically the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU). We call these two mechanisms “political fixes” and discuss how they interact to engender a feedback between the fragmentation of collective action during labor conflict and the continuous uptick in labor insurgency. This article contributes to labor movement theory: It puts greater emphasis on the institutional mechanisms that constrain labor, as opposed to sheer repression or economic factors.

This article examines the impact of colonial-era armed conflict on contemporary institutions. It argues that when British colonial administrators were faced with armed insurrection they responded with institutional reform of the police, and that the legacy of these reforms lives on today. Violent opposition prompted the British colonial administration to expand entrance opportunities for local inhabitants in order to collect intelligence needed to prosecute a counterinsurgency campaign. This investment in human capital and institutional reform remained when the colonial power departed; as a result, countries which experienced colonial-era conflict have more efficient policing structures today. I demonstrate how this worked in practice during the Malayan Emergency, 1948–60. Archival data from Malaysia show that local inhabitants were recruited into the police force in greater numbers and were provided with training which they would not have received had there been no insurgency. This process was consolidated and reproduced upon independence in path-dependent ways. To expand the empirical domain, I statistically explore new archival data collected from the UK National Archives on police financing across colonial territories. The results show that armed insurgency during the colonial era is associated with higher percentages of police expenditure during the colonial era and higher perceived levels of contemporary policing capacity.

This article examines international reactions and actions on militancy and insurgency in Nigeria since 1999. It employs historical method of data collection and adopts descriptive and analytical approaches of analysis. It has utilised various sources, mainly secondary literature which include journal articles, books, newspaper reports, reports of international organisations and agencies. The article reveals the nature, trends and dynamics of insecurity in Nigeria; especially, the emergence and rise of militancy in the Niger Delta and Boko Haram insurgency in the north-east have not only affected the unity, territoriality, sovereignty, economy, political environment, government income and institutions, infrastructure and wanton deaths but also attracted international reactions and concerns from different quarters of the global community, especially Nigeria’s immediate neighbours which have affected her external image and international relations. The article concludes that, while her image has improved, Nigeria should continue to embrace progressive dialogue and improve on the multilateral collaborative counter-insurgency approach (i.e., The Joint Multinational Tasks Force involving Chad, Cameroon, Niger and Nigeria and Benin Republic) which has proved very efficient and effective since the advent of this present administration in May 2015.

A common refrain is that ‘talk’ is cheap, yet nobody likes their inconsistencies being pointed out. With this in mind, dialogue, and specifically ‘rhetorical traps’, can be an effective nonviolent ...

Research on civil resistance has flourished in recent years. Several attempts have been made to identify the moral or pragmatic advantages of nonviolence, to show that resistance can take the form ...

Growing media attention and international criticism about human rights violations in the wake of the resurgence of insurgency led India to make major policy changes in its attitude towards human rights and begin to discuss human rights with the European Union for the first time in 1990. This article critically examines Indian perceptions of the EU’s approach towards human rights since the 1990s to the present. It evaluates Indian responses to the inclusion of human rights provisions in trade agreements and criticism of the ‘one size fits all’ model of the Europeans for the promotion of human rights. It explores the sources of Indian scepticism about the international human rights regime and criticism of Western countries’ selectivity in enforcing human rights. In the ultimate analysis, the responsibility for initiating and implementing the multitude of structural, economic, social and political reforms necessary to improve human rights implementation must be taken by Indians themselves. External players can only play a supportive role and their capacities to bring about fundamental change are necessarily limited.

This paper studies the impact of food insecurity on civilian–rebel interactions. We argue that food price volatilities affect the incentives of insurgent groups and their subsequent treatment of civilians. The hypotheses developed in this study are empirically evaluated across a battery of statistical models using monthly data from a sample of 112 first administrative districts in sub-Saharan Africa. The results show that increases in food insecurity substantially raise the likelihood of insurgent groups committing violence against civilians and that districts with a higher proportion of agricultural land are at greatest risk of civilian victimization by rebel groups during these episodes of food insecurity. The implications of this analysis suggest that the human impact of food insecurity does not simply relate to nutrition and questions of governance. Food price volatilities also incentivize the use of violence against civilians by non-state actors, which is a pertinent concern of human rights organizations and policymakers.

What are the long-term effects of colonial institutions on insurgency? My article shows the historical origins of insurgency by addressing the puzzle of why the persistent Maoist insurgency, considered to be India’s biggest internal security threat, affects some districts along the central eastern corridor of India but not others. Combining archival and interview data from fieldwork in Maoist zones with an original district-level quantitative data set, I demonstrate that different types of British colonial indirect rule set up the structural conditions of ethnic inequality and state weakness that facilitate emergence of Maoist control. I address the issue of selection bias, by developing a new instrument for the British choice of indirect rule through princely states, based on the exogenous effect of wars in Europe on British decisions in India. This article reconceptualizes colonial indirect rule and also presents new data on rebel control and precolonial rebellions.

The Araguaia guerrilla war (1972–1974) was an attempt to reconcile armed struggle and political awareness that became a sort of “guerrilla focus” with roots in the peasant population, which assumed a decisive role in the resistance to military repression. This period was characterized by the centralization of operations of information and repression, consolidating the tactic of “political disappearance” in Brazil. The military occupation terrorized the population to mitigate any multiplier effect of the insurgency, and its success reverberated throughout the continent. At the same time, denunciations of its human rights abuses helped to erode the dictatorship. A guerrilha do Araguaia (1972–1974) representou um esforço para reconciliar a luta armada e a consciência política que se tornou uma espécie de foco de guerrilha com raízes na população campesina, que por sua vez desempenhou papel decisivo na resistência à opressão militar. Esse período caracterizou-se pela centralização das operações de informação e repressão, consolidando a tática de “desaparecimento político” no Brasil. A ocupação militar aterrorizou a população com o propósito de reduzir a possibilidade de insurgência e nesse sentido alcançou sucesso que reverberou por todo continente. Contudo, denúncias das violações de direitos humanos contribuíram para a erosão da ditadura.

This article examines studio photographs of Taliban fighters that deviate from popular media images which often confine them within the visual coordinates of terrorism, insurgency and violence. Gathered in a photographic book known simply as Taliban, these 49 photographs represent the militants in Afghanistan through a studio photography aesthetic, transplanting them from the battlefields of the global war on terror to intimate scenes of pretence and posing. Besides troubling the Taliban’s expected militant identity, these images invite an opaque and oppositional form of viewing and initiate enigmatic visual and imaginative encounters. This article argues that these alternative visualizations consist of a compassionate way of seeing informed by Judith Butler’s notions of precarity and grievability, as well as a viewing inspired by Jacques Rancière’s aesthetic dissensus that obfuscates legibility and disrupts meaning. Consequently, these photographs counter a delimited post-9/11 process of enemy identification and introduce forms of seeing that reflect terrorism’s complexity.

Conflict environments exacerbate an incentive dilemma between employers and private military and security companies (PMSCs). PMSCs seek to maximize profits, but employers seek to minimize expenses and maximize services. We argue that PMSCs are influenced by two complementary economic factors: contract structure and intra-sector competition. Contract structures are set by employers and establish compensation constraints and intra-sector competition identifies potential replacements. Both impact service delivery. We find that PMSCs with contract structures that lack performance incentives, even in the presence of competition, increase the likelihood of violence in Iraq. PMSCs that lacked intra-sector competition had a similar but smaller effect.

The Boko Haram insurgency in the North-Eastern part of Nigeria has exacerbated development challenges in a region that is already regarded as the least developed region in the country in terms of h...

How do securitizing actors go about desecuritizing policy issues that have been securitized across multiple spatially bounded referent objects? Do such desecuritizations develop as a single or manifold process and with what political effect? And critically, how do we methodologically approach the study of such processes? These are pertinent questions that have been left underexamined in the (de)securitization literature. In seeking to fill this gap, this article makes two main points. First, it calls for a greater focus on the study of (de)securitizations that are constructed according to multiple spatially bounded referent objects, and on how these diverging strands of discourse and practice shape the overarching process. Second, it argues for a greater use of longitudinal methods of analysis as a better way to capture the evolutionary dynamics of desecuritization processes, which (re)constitute security policies and agendas. To illustrate these claims, the article considers the empirical case of Russia’s (de)securitization of insurgent threats since 2000 by tracing this process over a longitudinal period and across three spatial-referent objects, namely the local level: Chechnya; the sub-federal level: North Caucasus; and the national level: Russia.

Drawing on unique interviews with former jihadists from Russia's autonomous republic of Dagestan, this article is the first to examine the impact of ethnicity on jihadist groups' methods of organization and operations, primarily in terms of their target selection, local support, and recruitment and leadership policies. It distinguishes between largely monoethnic rural jamaats—or jihadist groups—and multiethnic urban jamaats, pointing to the contested nature of ethnicity, particularly in the latter group. It examines the steps taken by the leadership of urban jamaats to overcome ethnic cleavages and avoid interethnic tension both within the jihadists' ranks and with regard to the local population. The article illustrates that, as a divisive phenomenon in multiethnic urban jamaats, ethnic identity has been deliberately downplayed by the leadership of these groups at the expense of strengthening supra-ethnic Salafi-jihadist identity. The article also highlights the significance of ethnic identity in jihadist groups, in spite of it being contradictory to Salafi-jihadist doctrine.

Feedback fuzzy cognitive maps (FCMs) can model the complex structure of public support for insurgency and terrorism (PSOT). FCMs are fuzzy causal signed digraphs that model degrees of causality in interwoven webs of feedback causality and policy variables. Their nonlinear dynamics permit forward-chaining inference from input causes and policy options to output effects. We show how a concept node causally affects downstream nodes through a weighted product of the intervening causal edge strengths. FCMs allow users to add detailed dynamics and feedback links directly to the causal model. Users can also fuse or combine FCMs from multiple experts by weighting and adding the underlying FCM fuzzy edge matrices. The combined FCM tends to better represent domain knowledge as the expert sample size increases if the expert sample approximates a random sample. Statistical or machine-learning algorithms can use numerical sample data to learn and tune a FCM’s causal edges. A differential Hebbian learning law can approximate a PSOT FCM’s directed edges of partial causality using time-series training data. The PSOT FCM adapts to the computational factor-tree PSOT model that Davis and OMahony based on prior social science research and case studies. Simulation experiments compare the PSOT models with the adapted FCM models.