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Being the only Vietnam War author on the English curriculum for American middle and high schools, Tim O'Brien skillfully mixes his real wartime experience with fiction in his various bestsellers and awarded novels. All O'Brien's Vietnam War stories are always "bad," meaning that the war contains mostly sad and horrific experience for American soldiers and Vietnamese civilians. A closer look at O'Brien's war stories reveals that he indeed touches upon almost all issues the American GIs encountered during this war; nevertheless, not all online literary analysis websites and peer-reviewed authors can identify or call them all out. To assist middle and high school readers in understanding the meaning behind Tim O'Brien's Vietnam War stories, the war details in Going After Cacciato and its historical perspective are discussed in this article. The war-related issues that O'Brien touched upon in this novel are: lack of purpose, the lower standards of the American troops (McNamara's morons), desertion, lack of courage, friendly fire, fragging their own officers, and contemptuous attitude toward the Vietnamese, the very people they came to help and protect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the beginning of the Arab Spring in 2011, explosive global growth was observed for the majority of indicators of sociopolitical destabilization in all parts of the World System. In order to identify the structure of this destabilization wave, we apply a series of statistical techniques such as trend analysis and t-tests to study the degrees of intensification of various instability indicators (as recorded by the Cross National Time Series database). We reveal explosive global growth in anti-government demonstrations, riots, general strikes, terrorist attacks/guerrilla warfare, and purges, as well as in the global integral index of sociopolitical destabilization. On the other hand, no statistically significant growth has been detected for assassinations and major government crises, whereas for such an important indicator of global sociopolitical destabilization, as the global number of coups and coup attempts, we find a statistically significant decrease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper evaluates Boko Haram's military capabilities and details the process of how its standing army, driven by these capabilities, came to pose a phased threat between 2013 and 2015 in particular. This was a period when military fighting dominated the insurgency in north-east Nigeria. Whereas there is an abundance of literature on Boko Haram's histories and the impact of its insurgency on north-east Nigeria, analysis of Boko Haram's military campaigning is still deficient. Attempting to fill this gap, this paper uses field findings and battlefield case studies from north-east Nigeria to highlight how Boko Haram's overt front - its standing army - came to supplant its guerrilla operations as the main security threat to the frontier area. This pivot towards military fighting, for a group initially composed of a few ragtag combatants, on the surface might seem surprising. Yet, whereas Boko Haram may lack the popular support required for 'people's war', classic insurgency theories nevertheless hold some explanatory power for this deliberate shift: away from guerrilla warfare as the expedient of the weaker side, and towards the use of a large standing army of locals to swarm, and sometimes successfully overrun, state forces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article sheds new light on the development of concentration camps in colonial warfare in the longue durée from 1868 to 1974. Introducing different examples of forced removal and deportation in the Spanish and Portuguese empires, the analysis emphasizes their interrelation, highlighting possible transfers of knowledge that have been neglected in comparative discussions. Specifically, the article reassesses the Cuban experience of concentrating civilians in times of war (1868-98); it critically evaluates Spain’s forgotten concentration camps on the Canary Islands, which emerged during the Ifni-Sahara war of 1957-58; and it focuses on both the theory of revolutionary warfare and the practice of so-called strategic resettlement in the long and protracted Portuguese colonial wars in Africa (1961-74). In particular, the camps on the Canary Islands suggest the need for an analytical distinction between the function of forced removals in counter-guerrilla warfare and administrative internment; they are related but essentially different policies. Based on hitherto ignored archival material, this empirically supported analysis challenges common assumptions about the “origins” of camps, and questions traditional temporal boundaries in the development of (anti-)guerrilla warfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arthur Ransome’s 12-volume Swallows and Amazons series (1930–1947), is often seen as the pioneer of the school holiday adventure story. However, a striking feature of these stories is the incorporation of a very large number of survival skills that are described in considerable ‘this-is-how-you-do-it’ detail. Previously overlooked or seen merely as references to Baden Powell’s burgeoning Scout movement, these books are better understood in the context of Ransome being a very experienced foreign correspondent. As this paper suggests, moreover, within the school holiday format, he is drawing a blueprint for rural guerrilla warfare after a successful invasion. Since the men will be away fighting, women must take leadership roles within a society, which, while respecting class differences, works harmoniously across them and which has taught its young people the skills to survive in the countryside, while observing on and reporting back about the invaders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the recent years it has been a commonplace to think that Barranquilla has not been a scenery where the armed conflict occurred. However, the historical analysis shows the opposite. In this work we present a descriptive approach to the armed conflict dynamics in this city between 1990 and 2006. We observed that both the guerrilla groups and the paramilitary structures were actively present in the city and modified some aspect the city social, political, economic and institutional life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Colombians, including some 170,000 children, have undertaken forced displacements in the face of human rights violations stemming from guerrilla warfare in Colombia. The government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) signed the so-called "Havana Peace" agreement in 2016. However, a sequence of political events threatens the agreement effectiveness. Given this panorama, the article examines the continuity of granting refuge by Brazil to Colombians, especially to children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Zimbabwe, the discourses of Chimurenga music are marked by continuities and discontinuities anchored in the ideological persuasion of individual or group singers. This article discuses Mbuya Madhuve, the Mbare Chimurenga Choir, and Thomas Mapfumo, whose songs depict marked contradictions in conceiving the aims and objectives of Chimurenga war, its course and anticipated benefits in postindependent Zimbabwe. The songs that are sampled are "Ndasara Ndega Ndega" by Edna Chizema also referred to as Mbuya Madhuve, "Team" by Mbare Choir, and "Maita Kurima Hamubvire" by Thomas Mapfumo. These songs are selected firstly on the basis that they are to be representative of the various trends of Chimurenga music in Zimbabwe and secondly, in that the dialogical imagination that went into the creation of the songs suggest useful ideological continuities and discontinuities in the meanings associated with Chimurenga genre. This article argues that these uneven patterns of the values embedded in the songs of Chimurenga encourage readers to challenge a certain kind of scholarship that seeks to restrict Chimurenga music only to a category of songs that authorise visible political sentiments. The article demonstrates that Mbuya Madhuve's songs reveal the challenges of executing a guerrilla warfare against a brutal and vicious enemy led by pre-independent Zimbabwe's white leader, Ian Douglas Smith. The Mbare Chimurenga Choir is an official musical mouthpiece of the Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF), whose songs unambiguously speak for that political party. Contrary to the official grand narrative promoted by Mbare Choir, national and communitarian discourses embedded in Thomas Mapfumo's songs interrogate and fracture the ZANU-PF ideology of land and prosperity. The songs do so by using the rhetoric of open political polemical narratives to reveal cracks and inconsistencies in official rhetoric about land reform as the panacea of Zimbabwe's problems. The article concludes that discourses of Zviimurenga music in Zimbabwe are varied, ambivalent and polyphonic as they seek to achieve different ideological goals. In their processes of narrating the Zimbabwean nation, these Zvimurenga discourses also introduce the idea of "epistemic disobedience". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 2003 war in Iraq, private military and security companies (PMSCs) have become increasingly legitimate actors in modern conflicts. Despite this normative shift, rumours in March 2015 regarding the use of South African mercenaries in Nigeria to combat Boko Haram insurgents caused an international outrage, while the Nigerian government remained nonchalantly silent on the matter. This article investigates the impact of mercenaries on the conflict in the last six months of the Jonathan government. Using primary and secondary qualitative research, it assesses the role that PMSCs played in Nigeria’s counterinsurgency strategy, along with the ensuing reaction of international and local media to the outsourcing of violence to foreign companies. The article concludes that - notwithstanding the improved image of PMSCs in the world, and the actual impact of the contractors on the Nigerian counterinsurgency effort - the stigma of mercenaries continues to plague the industry, particularly on the African continent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of terrain is one of the most important in our spatial lexicon but, with a few exceptions, has been under-analyzed in critical theories of space. In this essay, I propose a materialist and affective conceptualization of terrain that draws from first-hand accounts of warfare in the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan, where the US military's power was undermined by the mountainous terrain and by the manipulation of this terrain by guerrilla fighters. Drawing from Spinoza and the turn to materiality in critical theory, I propose that terrain can be best analyzed through an affective geometry attentive to how bodies in motion are affected by, and affect, the terrain they are part of. In particular, I analyze the visual and textual material on warfare in the Korengal to argue that terrain can be conceptualized as a non-representable multiplicity of forms and objects that is irreducible to human experience and has the power to both constrain and enhance human action; that terrain is intrinsically opaque to human perception; that terrain has a processual, shifting materiality that is inseparable from the flux of the atmosphere; and that terrain's three-dimensional nature becomes most clear in the importance of controlling the higher ground in mountain warfare. This conceptualization of terrain reveals the microphysics of how insurgents weaponized the materiality of mountains and why an affective geometry of terrain matters in the analysis of insurrections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of the following study is to explain the activism of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia - People's Army (FARC-EP) within the framework of the Colombian internal armed conflict between 2002 and 2012. In addition to being the time of the greater armed intensity, the investigation tries to explain the impact of different social, economic or institutional variables that, from a statistical exercise with regressions, show how it is possible to find foundation in understanding why the activism of this guerrilla responds in a greater manner to some scenarios than to others. Drawing on a multivariate exercise with institutional sources, a comprehensive exercise on guerrilla violence in Colombia is conducted, which escapes from unidirectional explanations and juxtaposes different variables in order to seek for an answer, with greater complexity, to what and how the logic of the guerrilla activism from the FARC-EP has been understood during the last decade and a half. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Decades of guerilla warfare in Colombia have left behind a deadly legacy of thousands of landmines. Now a German‐Colombian partnership is developing new ways of detecting these often improvised devices. Innovative technologies such as these can help further the incipient peace process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United States' intervention in the Salvadoran Civil War, 1979-92, represented the largest nation-building effort launched by Washington between the end of Vietnam and the second war with Iraq. Washington deployed US Special Forces advisers to El Salvador to prevent further human rights abuses, emphasise the importance of winning the affection of civilians, and professionalise and reform the Salvadoran military. Overall, the intervention produced mixed results, including a negotiated settlement. Despite reservations about the efficacy of US policy, lessons from El Salvador have been reapplied elsewhere, including most recently in Iraq. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Ayer: Revista de Historia Contemporánea is the property of Asociacion de Historia Contemporanea 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.)

This paper discusses the significance of materials that are among the primary evidence for the activities of the liberation forces in the battlefield during Zimbabwe's war of liberation. These are the field reports that were compiled by the guerrilla fighters on the frontline especially by the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA), one of the liberation army units during the war. The author had the privilege of perusing through the documents, which were housed at the Zimbabwe African National Union/Patriotic Front (ZANU/PF) headquarters in Harare, when he was conducting fieldwork for his doctoral studies. Guerrilla activities included military operations, their interaction with the rural populace, wrongdoings or contravention of set rules. The study seeks to subject these documents to critical scrutiny as Zimbabwean liberation war historiographical sources and interrogate their value. This study is motivated by two perspectives as well as unsubstantiated insinuations on guerrilla activities that have emerged because of the explosion of liberation war histories; the nationalist school which portrays an exclusively rosy picture of the efficacy of revolutionary guerrilla warfare which the ZANLA fighters adopted; and the perspective that draws from Rhodesian government that the ZANLA fighters were terrorists who imbibed from alien communist teachings and had no clear-cut objective in waging the liberation war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In preparation for withdrawing from Afghanistan, the Soviets targeted key guerrilla logistics trans-shipment depots located in remote, difficult-to-access regions. One of these was located on the Iranian border in the vicinity of Herat. The Soviet 40th Army and Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan launched a successful, hard-fought battle to take down this mountain fortress and destroyed large amounts of war stocks before withdrawing. It was a blow to guerrilla efforts, but was not decisive. Redundant guerrilla logistics networks were able to sustain the guerrilla effort following the battle. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Why do some civil wars feature the mass killing of civilians while others do not? Recent research answers this question by adopting a ‘varieties of civil war’ approach that distinguishes between guerrilla and conventional civil wars. One particularly influential claim is that guerrilla wars feature more civilian victimization because mass killing is an attractive strategy for states attempting to eliminate the civilian support base of an insurgency. In this article, I suggest that there are two reasons to question this ‘draining the sea’ argument. First, the logic of ‘hearts and minds’ during guerrilla wars implies that protecting civilians – not killing them – is the key to success during counterinsurgency. Second, unpacking the nature of fighting in conventional wars gives compelling reasons to think that they could be particularly deadly for civilians caught in the war’s path. After deriving competing predictions on the relationship between civil war type and mass killing, I offer an empirical test by pairing a recently released dataset on the ‘technology of rebellion’ featured in civil wars with a more nuanced dataset of mass killing than those used in several previous studies. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, I find that mass killing onset is more likely to occur during conventional wars than during guerrilla wars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction. This paper stems from an investigation to characterize the political kidnapping by the FARC in Colombia. Objective. To Develop the profile of the guerrilla who would succeed the legality if the peace process between the Colombian government and the FARC. Materials and methods. It is a descriptive exploratory research based on content analysis, from the reading of seven books whose authors were victims of political kidnapping by the FARC. Results. The guerrilla reaches almost always very young squad, hunger, fear, need or belief; It is inserted in a rigid and vertical organization structure, whose ideology is easily indoctrinated, because almost always come poor, will cove that speech. It fits almost always easy to the jungle, but develops insensitivity to people's lives, even animals. The bosses are authoritarian, whimsical and high interference in everyday decisions of guerrillas and hostages. Conclusions. The guerrilla fighter would return to legality she is young, with low or average academic level, but high level of indoctrination; very resourceful in everyday life; used to obey and logic to support their decisions on arms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Estudios de Filosofía is the property of Universidad de Antioquia, Instituto de Filosofia 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.)

In 1954, Gene Z. Hanrahan published a book containing translations of some of the Malayan Communist Party's most important documents, many of which were unavailable to scholars at the time. That book subsequently became one of the most important and influential studies of the Malayan Emergency and is cited by practically every major work on the conflict. However, unlike other prominent scholars of the Emergency, Hanrahan faded into obscurity. His other work, of which there was little, ran the gamut from a collection of Ernest Hemingway's early writings to compilations of documents on the Mexican Revolution. The lack of information on Hanrahan and his diverse bibliography has raised questions about whether 'Gene Hanrahan' was a pseudonym used by an intelligence organization, research institute, or other collaborative research body. Drawing on Hanrahan's writings and newly-uncovered archival materials, this biographical account traces his career and scholarship, highlights his intellectual contributions, and considers how his approach to research can inform future work on Malaysian history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Yvonne Vera is certainly the most successful and imaginative female novelist to emerge from Zimbabwe and conceivably one of the most significant writers of Africa. Her prose is valued for its characteristic lyricism and its lightness of touch which paradoxically highlight silenced and weighty realities of life. Being a Zimbabwean, she has directly experienced generational trauma of colonial oppression, horrors of guerrilla war and brutal killings of civilians in post-independence era. In 1990s, researchers have worked on trauma studies focusing on the sufferings of Whites like in the Holocaust and war veterans of Vietnam but less attention has been paid to the sufferings of black women. This study endeavours to locate Vera's texts within the theoretical debates of trauma studies. I intend to focus on Yvonne Vera's Under the Tongue (1996) which is about a sexual assault of a pre-adolescent girl by her own father, written against the backdrop of severe guerrilla warfare against colonialism. It aims to analyse the recovery of the protagonist in light of John Bowlby's Attachment Theory. This research will strive to study the role of secure base and safe haven which function as a mean of re-constructing the broken-self of the protagonist. In certain cases, nature or religion helps the healing process of the individual but the paper will establish how affectionate attachment figures have comforting, healing and therapeutic effects on the suffering individual. This will in turn help to reconstruct the broken-self and enable the survivor to face the society with confidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]