Search

This article explores how Francisco de Aguirre used the Copiapó Valley encomienda to negotiate political power during the transition from conquest to colonial rule in northern Chile. Simultaneously, we analyze the circumstances of how a native society was incorporated into the Spanish Empire after a decade of fighting and resistance on the fringes of the empire. The strategic use of the fear of native rebellions to close the road from Peru to Chile gave Aguirre enough power to negotiate an important political position, which in the future would clash with the colonial authorities. Copiapó Valley’s peripheral location in the southernmost Atacama Desert constituted a political gray zone for the colonial administration. This space contributed to consolidating power for Aguirre and enabled locals some negotiation power within the possibilities afforded by the colonial system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a comparison between Romanian communist counterinsurgency (1944–1962) and similar campaigns fought by Western and Eastern governments in the early Cold War, in particular those waged by the British and French governments in their African, Asian and European colonies and those of the Soviet Union in its borderlands. The comparison focuses on three main components, population control, intelligence and military operations. Highlighting both similarities and differences across different cultural, economic, geographical, ethnic and political landscapes, the perspective laid out in this paper is an argument in favour of systematic and sustained comparative approaches to asymmetric warfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay addresses the likelihood of "success" in two dimensions: (1) success in war and (2) success on the battlefield. The terms "war" and "battle" are often used interchangeably and the men and women who won the battles are often told that the war was lost. As a polity discusses the Just War Tradition (JWT) in relationship to a forthcoming war, the term "success" is squishy, malleable, quantifiable only in comparative terms, and politically charged. The definition of battles is the win and loss of men, material, and moral. These can be measured. The two terms should not be used carelessly, and the relationship between the two needs to be more carefully considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mainstream urban theory fails to encompass urbanization in Africa. Among its many drivers, armed conflicts displace rural populations to cities, accelerating urban processes and impacting sustainability and governance — the phenomenon of conflict-induced urbanization. In the province of Cabo Delgado, a violent insurgency has been displacing thousands of civilians since 2017; many of whom have fled to the provincial capital Pemba, doubling its population in just 5 years. This article presents the theoretical framework and methodological design for an inquiry located within a contemporary critique of mainstream urban studies; the goal is to analyse conflict-induced urbanization in Pemba with a comparative case study, using participatory visual methods, for which a pilot study took place in September 2022. With this, the author aims to contribute to engaged urban studies in Mozambique and Portugal and to transform the trauma of war into opportunities for sustainable development and prosperity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the evolution of UK military doctrine on counterintelligence (CI), one of the more consistently troubled aspects of military doctrine in general and intelligence doctrine in particular. We argue that current UK and NATO CI doctrine are in thrall to a deeply problematic defining concept in TESSOC (Terrorism, Espionage, Sabotage, Subversion and Organised Crime) that conflates an intractably diverse assortment of security threats under CI. Furthermore, TESSOC is the latest embodiment of a slow, century-long oscillation between two different basic concepts of CI. The first focuses purely on human threat vectors (referred to here as Human Threat CI or HTCI) while the latter entails a more comprehensive, all-source range of adversary technical and open as well as human source intelligence activities (designated Multidisciplinary CI or MDCI in US doctrine). That oscillation is driven largely by the balance between conventional and asymmetrical operations in defence priorities and recent campaign experience. TESSOC is a legacy of the recent, pre-Russo-Ukraine War emphasis on counterterrorism (CT) and counterinsurgency (COIN) operations. Consequently, UK and allied military counterintelligence doctrine are entering the second quarter of the 21st Century fundamentally ill-equipped to cope with strategic peers and their use of full-spectrum and hybrid strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Raven Sentry, a project that employed artificial intelligence to provide advance warning of insurgent attacks in Afghanistan. During 2019 and 2020, the Resolute Support Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence (J2) benefited from a command culture open to innovation, the urgency created by the US drawdown, and a uniquely talented group of personnel that, aided by commercial sector experts, built an AI system that helped predict attacks. The war's end cut Raven Sentry short, but the experience provides important lessons on AI and the conditions necessary for successful innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Integrating local militias in the counterinsurgency (COIN) operations in Sinai has achieved tangible successes. The presence of local fighters contributed to the penetration of the Islamic State—Sinai Province network. The integration of locals into the ongoing COIN process has imposed a degree of local participation in local governance and decision‐making. Nevertheless, this article argues that there are two approaches to local integration into the COIN operation; the first is institutional integration, in which the state integrates local fighters at an institutional level in the ranks of the security apparatus. The second is the collaborating militia approach. In this pattern, the state resorts to warlords and tribal chiefs to mobilize irregular militias, coordinating with the regular forces in the COIN process without formally merging them into security institutions' ranks. The Egyptian model in the Sinai is one of the latter type. The collaborating militia integration approach into COIN operations contributes to wooing elites to create narrow patronage networks of cronies, preventing systematized community participation in the decision‐making process, which leads to keeping the factors of rebellion alive below the surface even if the rebels are defeated militarily. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The longest war in the history of America resulted in an Afghan Taliban victory. Despite astronomical material and capacity superiority of the American-led NATO forces vis-à-vis Afghan Taliban, the latter overcame the greater forces and captured Kabul in a lightning-fast sweep across the country. Failure of the US to realize a superior military force in achieving a political victory on the field lies in the characteristics, actions, and effective operationalization of Afghan Taliban's warfare tactics on the battleground. Tribalism, networked structures, and innovative recruiting principles, coupled with the Afghan government(s) own inefficiencies and rampant corruption led to the demise of American power in Afghanistan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

The existing literature explains the war in Donbas and the rationale for why conflict broke out there while failing to do so in other Ukrainian provinces, such as Odesa or Kharkiv. Local pro-Russian organizations could not attract considerable attention and support in the pre-war period in all parts of Ukraine, except for Crimea. The social marginalization and negligible influence of the pro-Russian organizations among the locals presumably stemmed from their weak social ties among the local population. The question is why they had such weak social embeddedness in the local societies despite relatively popular pro-Russian sympathies in these regions? Surprisingly, nobody has sought to explain the social origins of the pro-Russian movements as a source of their weakness and failure to be sparked by the anti-Ukrainian rebellion in 2014. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why and how do African states become peacekeepers? Through a single-case study, this article accounts for a transformation in peace and security: how Ethiopia became the world's prime source of blue helmets in the early twenty-first century, having largely shunned peacekeeping in preceding decades. We propose that peacekeeping came to serve as an unexpectedly useful technology to pursue state-building agendas. Historically, regional proxy wars undermined state-building efforts in Ethiopia and mismanagement of ethno-linguistic diversity rendered it vulnerable to externally supported rebellions. In the 2000s, an evolving approach to peacekeeping dovetailed with the ruling Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front's (EPRDF) vision for recalibrating political order domestically and in the Horn of Africa. EPRDF became convinced that changing Ethiopia required changing its surrounding region. Regional intervention as peacekeeping was supported by global powers and helped bind neighbouring states to Ethiopia in new ways. This entailed the crafting of deep political ties in Somalia, South Sudan and Sudan that mitigated historical fears of Ethiopian hegemony and shielded EPRDF state-building from outside destabilization. Moreover, as Ethiopia's increasingly prominent role in United Nations and African Union missions improved the external environment for the EPRDF developmental state, it also expanded Ethiopian National Defence Force's role in the political economy, buttressing the party-state's hegemony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under what conditions do states protect minority rights in a context of domestic resistance? Recent decades have seen rapid divergence on LGBT rights worldwide, with Africa presented as "norms antipreneur" in the face of international pressure. Yet, in 1996, South Africa was the first country in the world to provide constitutional protection on grounds of sexual orientation. This article develops an original theory on LGBT rights protection using a conflict-to-rights framework. Employing process tracing, elite interviews and archival sources, I show how a situation of insurgency allows LGBT activists to build networks and increase egalitarian attitudes to attain in-group status. Continued violence also works to block public participation in policy-making while dividing opposition forces, allowing a tiny group of activists to effectively lobby for change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Faced with the absurdity of continued climate inaction, more people are becoming morally outraged about the projections of human suffering and loss due to global warming impacts. This article draws from the work of Albert Camus to examine human responses to absurdity through rebellion and how this can be applied to understand the notion of climate rebellion. Focusing on Camus' works The Rebel and The Plague, as well as his speech "The Human Crisis", I examine the conditions of climate injustice that present the grounds for climate rebellion, what becoming a climate rebel might mean, the importance of solidarity in climate rebellion, and lastly how Camus' value of limitation might inform ethical responses to minimize climate-related harm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study proposes an organizational mechanism that links ideology to the use of terrorism in mass dissident campaigns. Ideology affects the level of competition among factions within mass dissident campaigns by shaping whether actors see their interactions as a positive- or zero-sum game. We identify ideological diversity within a campaign and the degree to which ideologies embrace the principle of pluralism as key factors affecting the intensity of factional competition and, consequently, the occurrence of terrorism. We introduce new data on the ideologies of campaigns from the Nonviolent and Violent Campaigns and Outcomes 2.0 dataset and use causal mediation analysis to test our proposed mechanism. We find that greater ideological diversity within a campaign increases the likelihood of terrorism by increasing factional competition. We also find that the presence of a pluralist ideology is associated with a lower likelihood of terrorism by the lowering of factional competition. By shedding light on the mechanisms that link ideology to terrorism, this study helps advance our understanding of why dissident groups might decide to use terrorism tactics within the context of a campaign of mass resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces the Women's Activities in Armed Rebellion (WAAR) project, a multi-methods project that includes a cross-sectional dataset of women's participation in more than 370 organizations fighting in civil conflicts between 1946 and 2015. The dataset features 22 measures of women's participation in rebel organizations: it includes prevalence and presence measures of women's participation in combat, non-combat and leadership roles; details on all-female units within groups (and their primary focus – combat or support activities); and presence measures for types of support work (disaggregated into clandestine work, outreach to civilian populations and logistical support) and types of leadership activities (military or non-military) that women contribute. The WAAR project also includes a detailed, qualitative assessment of women's involvement in each organization, comprising an approximately 360-page handbook of female rebel participation in the post-WWII period. This article describes the WAAR project and suggests avenues for future research leveraging these data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the effect rebel women have on the shape of civil war peace agreements, paying particular attention to the specific gender-inclusive provisions female rebels advocate for. I argue that, through conflict experiences and socialization, rebel women develop group identities that foster collective demands. Their identities as fighters and women from marginalized groups encourage rebel women to lobby for provisions that address the grievances of women from these societal groups. Using data on women's participation in conflict and the terms written into contemporary peace agreements, I find support for this contention. Greater participation of female combatants is associated with an increased likelihood of observing gender-inclusive agreement provisions calling for the inclusion of women from marginalized groups and addressing the specific post-conflict needs of female ex-combatants. This study is one of the first to show that women's participation in rebellion matters for the shape of post-conflict peace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

The article focuses on Murray Rothbard's perspective on war and foreign policy, emphasizing their crucial role in shaping a free society and preserving individual autonomy and peaceful cooperation. Rothbard recognized the dilemma of granting governments power to protect property, acknowledging the inherent risk of state overreach and aggression domestically and internationally.

Classic and modern theories of rebel warfare emphasize the role of resource endowments. We demonstrate that intelligence gathering, made possible by these endowments, plays a critical role in determining specifics of how rebels launch complex attacks against better equipped government forces. We test implications of a theoretical model using highly detailed data about Afghan rebel attacks, insurgent‐led spy networks, and counterinsurgent operations. Leveraging quasi‐random variation in opium suitability, we find that improved rebel capacity is associated with (1) increased insurgent operations; (2) improved battlefield tactics through technological innovation, increased complexity, and attack clustering; and (3) increased effectiveness against security forces, especially harder targets. These results show that access to capital, coupled with intelligence gathering, meaningfully impacts how and where rebels fight. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contrary to much of the commentary tradition, the book of Job is not primarily a discourse on how to properly speak (or withhold speech) about God in the midst of innocent suffering, nor is it aimed primarily at offering up the character of Job as an exemplar of how to suffer correctly (or incorrectly). Neither is it a treatise about human submission to (or rebellion from) God's mysterious sovereign prerogative in permitting evil. It is instead a theological exploration of the dilemmas and demands of consolation that confront us given the inexplicable enormities of human suffering. Its unifying aim is to confront us with multiple voices that pull us into an open-ended—and decidedly pessimistic—reflection on what innocent suffering reveals to us about our creaturely limits and the fragility of our hope in God, features of the human condition that require our capacities for compassion to exceed our capacities for theological sense-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the links between a political rebellion that occurred in Coahuila in 1893 and the activism that was carried out by some members of the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM) in the early 1900s in Southern California. It builds upon connected and transnational history to study continuities between the conflicts in the early 1890s in the Mexican countryside and the growth of discontent against the government of Porfirio Díaz. It argues that the support gained by the PLM in parts of the U.S. Southwest cannot be separated from the political experience that many of its sympathizers had in Mexico. Furthermore, it argues that to better understand the PLM's mobilization north of the border, it is necessary to study the social and economic conditions in which they lived and moved in both countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article re-evaluates the debates over a proposed Scottish militia that took place in the British public sphere at the height of the Seven Years War and French invasion and Jacobite rebellion scares, and locates within them the origins of the discourse of Highlandism. Accordingly, the real and imagined ethnic traditions and characteristics of Scottish Highlanders to some extent came to represent the entire Scottish nation, while concurrently rehabilitating and replacing former stereotypes of Highlanders as bellicose 'savages' and Jacobite 'rebels.' Further, the debates were not merely informed by domestic politics and intellectual agendas, as typically assumed in the historiography; they were also tied to the larger geopolitical and cultural entanglements of imperial warfare and continued threats from Franco-Jacobite fifth columns, as circulated in an anxious, mercantilist, wartime print culture. These discourses reveal that mid-century whiggish Britons continued to worry about French-instigated rebellion despite historiographical assumptions to the contrary, and experienced considerable uncertainty and concern for the intertwined problems of foreign enemies, overseas war and domestic politics. This context, the widespread doubts surrounding Scotland's trustworthiness and relative status within the Union, and the defensive reactions among certain pro-militia 'Scots', show how commentators mobilised Highland soldiers in support of Scotland's deservedness of political, institutional and cultural equality with England. This, however, was not an era of growing confidence, cumulative antigallican military service and a 'long-eighteenth-century' process of political and cultural consolidation, but rather a deeply uncertain time of burgeoning global conflict and entangled Scotto-Franco-British identity dynamics which must be more fully considered on their own problematic terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines two films, Haanduk (2016) and Jwlwi: The Seed (2019), which explore the issues of identity and insurgency in Assam. Insurgency began in Assam during the 1980s when the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA), an organisation that emerged along with the Assam Movement (1979–1985), started an armed uprising for an independent Assam. Meanwhile, the Bodos also engaged in violent insurrection, seeking to establish an independent state. As a response to these uprisings, the Union Government implemented several measures, such as the enactment of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, 1958 (AFSPA), that transformed Assam and the Northeast region into a heavily militarized area. The military executed multiple counter-insurgency operations to quell the armed rebellions. However, in the middle of these occurrences, accounts of violence promoted by the state, violations of human rights, and instances of torture emerged in both local and international media outlets. This engendered a feeling of apprehension and psychological distress among numerous people throughout Assam. The paper aims to critically examine the ideological dimensions of how the concerns related to insurgency are depicted in the select films. Additionally, it will also examine the portrayal of trauma and breaches of human rights in the select films. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on examining the items purchased from George Washington Eayrs by missions and private ranchos in Alta and Baja California between 1807 and 1812, shedding light on their daily activities and relationships. It also discusses the economic aspects of Alta and Baja California during this period of significant change in the Spanish Empire due to events like Napoleon's imprisonment of Carlos IV and the emergence of insurgents in New Spain and South America.

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

This article examines the role of a subset of European militaries in responding to the Afghan insurgency during their deployment as part of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). While part of a multinational coalition, their heterogeneous military transformation was crucial to fighting the insurrection and confronting American pressure. In comparing the counterinsurgency innovations of Germany, Sweden, and France, we find that Germany acted reluctantly, Sweden largely emulated American doctrine, and France became a counterinsurgency pioneer. We argue that these developments took time and were accompanied by conflicts within ISAF and between the respective national military and political leaderships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an account of Jaysh al-Tahrir (Liberation Army) in the Sahara, an anticolonial insurgency from the late 1950s. Occurring after Moroccan independence, the Liberation Army's aims were at once irredentist, in surpassing Morocco's borders, and anticolonial, in attacking French and Spanish military outposts dotting colonial borders across the western Sahara. While histories of this movement have largely been coopted, erased, or marginalised by nationalist narratives and processes of Sahrawi, Moroccan, Mauritanian and Algerian state formation, the afterlives of the Liberation Army continue to haunt the region's political present. This paper argues that the history of the Liberation Army reveals multiple dynamics of Maghrebi decolonisation. The first involves the complex relations of autonomy and dependence between Maghrebi and Saharan peoples that challenge the border-making processes of nation-state formation. The second shows the nonsynchronous dimension to decolonisation in the Maghreb and Sahara, raising questions about when decolonisation ended. With these insights, the MLA defies methodological nationalism and also complicates the global turn in decolonisation historiography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the relation between coups d'etat and civil wars? While a wide set of studies have traced the determinants of internal armed conflicts and coup attempts, the interplay between these contentious processes remains unexplored. Building on different strands of research, this article seeks to explain why, and under what conditions, some regimes experience coup attempts in the midst of civil wars while others do not. Concretely, I posit that coup attempts during internal armed conflicts are more likely to occur when two conditions converge: when insurgents reach a medium-level of strength in situations of intra-elite competition. Key military forces, elite outsiders and coalition insiders interpret this situation as a unique opportunity for changes in the distribution of power and potentially coalesce through the formation of alternative regime coalitions. This argument is tested with a novel dataset on 90 Latin American revolutionary socialist insurgencies active since 1950 and a qualitative case study of the dynamics leading to the 1976 coup d'etat in Argentina, with results supporting the theoretical expectations. These findings contribute to a more detailed understanding of the relation between coups and civil wars, opening the way for further studies on this burgeoning area of research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The practice of enforced disappearance is one of the most extreme manifestations of state violence, exemplifying the opaque nature of the state, particularly with regard to the management of its peripheries. Pakistan is one of many countries where this practice is widespread. Many of those missing are from Balochistan—the country's most underdeveloped province, which has been the site of an ongoing insurgency for several decades. Despite the thousands affected, this issue rarely makes it onto the national media. For this reason, activists and family members of missing persons increasingly rely on the digital sphere, particularly Twitter, to call for the return of their loved ones and to highlight the state's violent practices. This paper analyses the digital tactics of Baloch activists and family members of the disappeared as they forge an affective digital counterpublic. Interview findings demonstrate the double-edged nature of social media, which is also used by the state for the purposes of surveillance, to further their narrative, and to frighten critics into silence. The paper highlights the multiple affective meanings Twitter holds for the Baloch as a space that represents both promise and risk for members of marginalised groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades urban scholarship has witnessed a 'vertical' or 'volumetric' turn that has advanced understandings of the multi-modal power asymmetries cutting through and organising urban space. Yet, this volumetric scholarship often remains locked into binary critiques – of success/failure, inclusion/exclusion, luxury/abjection, dispossession/accumulation, arborescent/rhizomatic, horizontal/vertical. This special issue tinkers with the limitations of these (unwittingly) binary urban geometries and volumetrologies – material as well as metaphorical ones. By building the etymological opposition of 'the vertical' with 'the radical' into the title of the volume (via the Latin root radix, meaning 'root'), we seek to make the radical itself work with geometric and morphological associations. The papers in this special issue proffer diverse ethnographic, geographic and conceptual material for considering and theorising urban verticality in concert with rather than in opposition to its incumbent horizontalisms, diagonals, curls, zigzags and scattered planes. As we completed work on the special issue, the horrors of russia's full-scale invasion of Ukrainian territory played out before our eyes. Accordingly, we make use of the introduction to reflect upon the insight that the war in Ukraine brings to bear on the intersection between domains of the urban, the vertical and the radical in the fraught, tense, vicious, fragile – but resistant – urban worlds of today. In doing so, we seek not only to render more clearly visible the violent effects of power verticals on lives, worlds and cities, but also to find seeds of hope in emergent, insurgent forms of (vertical as well as horizontal, and neither vertical nor horizontal) resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The human lice Pediculus humanus is distributed worldwide but, it thrives and flourishes under conflict situations where people are forced to live in crowded unhygienic conditions. Molecular methods were used to identify and screen human lice for the DNA of pathogens of public health importance in an area that has been under insurgency related to religious and political conflicts with tens of thousands of internally displaced people (IDP). DNA of Bartonella quintana, Acinetobacter baumannii and Acinetobacter haemolyticus was detected in 18.3%, 40.0% and 1.7%, respectively, of human lice collected from children in Maiduguri, Nigeria. More body lice than head lice were positive for pathogen's DNA (64.3% vs. 44.4%; χ2 = 1.3, p = 0.33), but the difference was not significant. Two lice samples were found to harbour mixed DNA of B. quintana and A. baumannii. Phylogenetic analysis of the cytochrome b (cytb) gene sequences of the positive lice specimens placed them into clades A and E. This is the first report on the molecular identification of human lice and the detection of the DNA of pathogens of public health importance in lice in Nigeria, West Africa. The findings of this study will assist policy makers and medical practitioners in formulating a holistic healthcare delivery to IDPs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Processes of justice and accountability have long overlooked the death and suffering resulting from famines. This article examines how various domestic and international actors involved in the Red Terror Trials (1992–2010) framed the 1984–1985 famine in Ethiopia and what explains the absence of famine-related cases from the trials. Based on archival sources and interviews, the article discusses how the Red Terror Trials offered an opportunity to prosecute famine-related cases. The study shows, however, that despite the framing of the famine as 'political' and an act of crime by various actors, the Red Terror Trials were silent about the famine. One explanation is the difficulty of establishing a legal case based on famine-related casualties, coupled with a lack of incentive as there were already enough criminal cases to prosecute former Dergue regime officials. The complicated political history of the famine and its causes, which might implicate various domestic and international actors and not just the Dergue officials, can also explain the absence of the famine-related cases from the trials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

What determines the outcomes of civil wars? Existing literature highlights numerous factors at the systemic, state, and organizational levels of analysis. Yet there is little research on the attributes of rebel leaders in shaping war outcomes despite ample theories of their importance in steering their organizations. This article focuses on rebel leaders' age as one key driver of their behavior. Applying insights from developmental psychology to the context of armed rebellion, we argue that young rebel leaders are the most likely to suffer military defeats, middle-aged leaders to win military victories, and elderly ones to reach negotiated settlements. We use a mixed-methods strategy to substantiate our claims, combining case studies of George Washington and Yasser Arafat with new data from the Rebel Organization Leaders (ROLE) database. Our findings help advance the study of non-state violent leaders in world politics while illuminating neglected sources of risk and opportunity for peace practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Charu Mazumdar seemed like an unlikely leader for a violent guerilla organization. Born into a family of landlords in India's West Bengal in 1918, his slender frame gave him the look of someone more used to studying than directing armed insurgency. Yet, Mazumdar justified his violent leadership in West Bengal during the 1960s and 1970s by referencing the writings of Mao Zedong – known collectively as Mao Zedong Thought or Maoism – as inspiration for his revolutionary actions. Mazumdar declared that 'the foremost duty of [Indian] revolutionaries is to spread and propagate the thought of Chairman Mao', and that 'China's path is our path, China's chairman is our chairman.' While Mazumdar had no claim to Chinese ethnic or linguistic belonging, his activities – along with the actions of thousands of others – manifested as a result of the transnational connections and entanglements between Maoism, its translation and propagation by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and its reception by revolutionaries across the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Processes of coalescence and fragmentation are used to understand the time-evolution of the mass distribution of various systems and may result in a steady state or in stable deterministic or stochastic cycles. Motivated by applications in insurgency warfare we investigate coalescence-fragmentation systems. We begin with a simple model of size-biased coalescence accompanied by shattering into monomers. Depending on the parameters this model has an approximately power-law-distributed steady state or stochastic cycles of alternating gelation and shattering. We conduct stochastic simulations of this model and its generalizations to include different kernel types, accretion and erosion, and various distributions of non-shattering fragmentation. Our central aim is to explore the robustness of the steady state and gel-shatter stochastic cycles to these variations. We show that an approximate power-law steady state persists with the addition of accretion and erosion, and with partial rather than total shattering. However, broader distributions of fragment sizes typically vitiate both the power law steady state and gel-shatter cyclicity. This work clarifies features shown in coalescence/fragmentation model simulations and elucidates the relationship between the microscopic dynamics and observed phenomena in this widely applicable interdisciplinary model type. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do government counterinsurgency tactics shape the behavior of the rebels they are combating? This letter builds upon foundational theories of civil war to argue that within-conflict government actions can further increase rebels' levels of grievances. This increases the likelihood rebels continue fighting as conflicts unfold. I test the argument using newly compiled individual-level data on over 1,700 members of the Irish Volunteers and Irish Citizen Army who participated in the 1916 Easter Rising. Rebels varied in whether they were interned after the uprising. I show that rebels who were interned were more likely to fight throughout the entire Irish War of Independence. Qualitative evidence corroborates the contention that internment increased rebels' levels of grievances. The letter elucidates how within-conflict events shape rebel behavior, by documenting how the tactics governments employ as they fight can shape the subsequent actions of the rebels they are combating. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the widespread phenomenon of anti-colonial movements that relied on magical rituals for protection against European weapons. It examines both the beliefs of the magical practitioners themselves, and those of colonizing observers whose fascination with stories of "primitive magic" contributed to their contrasting self-representations as superior beings in possession of technological wonders. North America's Ghost Dance movement, China's Boxer Rebellion, and East Africa's Maji Maji uprising took place on three different continents but occurred almost simultaneously. The cases come from a narrow period of time, roughly 1890 to 1910, during a peak of colonial violence all over the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout history, insurgency has been a persistent phenomenon, its origins stemming from various factors such as political, economic, social, and ethnic grievances that drive certain factions or individuals to take up arms in resistance. This study determined the status of COIN operations in terms of Legal basis, Manpower, Financial resources, Logistical resources, and Accomplishments from 2021 to 2023. Likewise, this evaluates the COIN operations of the unit along with the conduct of Internal Security operations, Intelligence operations, and Police Community Affairs and development to determine challenges that were encountered by the personnel. The respondents of the study are the PNP personnel, barangay officials, and former rebels. The counterinsurgency framework presents a comprehensive and strategic approach to addressing insurgency threats, with the potential to significantly enhance the conduct of counterinsurgency operations. The findings underscore both the acknowledged strengths and identified areas for enhancement within police operations, as reported by respondents from the PNP. This shows a widespread acknowledgment of the pivotal role of the ISO in upholding internal security and addressing insurgent challenges. It signifies a mutual understanding among diverse stakeholders, encompassing barangay officials, former rebels, and law enforcement personnel, regarding the necessity of proactive strategies to prevent, interrupt, and counter-insurgency operations within impacted localities. Overall, the proposed framework offers a promising strategy for countering insurgency threats and advancing the goals of peace, stability, and security in affected regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relationship between film and cities, focusing on how cities have influenced cinema and how cinema has shaped our understanding of urban spaces. It reviews four books that examine different aspects of this relationship, including censorship debates in early twentieth-century urban America, Black filmmaking in Los Angeles, location shooting in San Francisco, and the global circulation of urban imagery in film. The books highlight the intersections of regulation, race, and capital in the construction of cinematic representations of cities. The article provides a detailed analysis of each book's contributions to the field of film and urban history. It also discusses the representation of cities in Hollywood films, contrasting the depictions of San Francisco and Los Angeles in films from the late 1960s and early 1970s. The emergence of the L.A. Rebellion filmmakers, a group of Black independent filmmakers who focused on South Central Los Angeles, is also explored. The article mentions the book "Noir Urbanisms," which offers a global perspective on cinematic urban history by examining the portrayal of cities in film noir. Overall, the article emphasizes the importance of considering the political and economic factors that shape the representation of cities in film. [Extracted from the article]

Environmental drama film Cenizas del cielo (2008), set in a polluted area of the otherwise idyllic North-western region of Asturias, was internationally saluted as Spain’s first explicitly ecologist film. While most studies have focused on its environmentalist theme, the film presents additional thematic complexities, such as the progressive depopulation of fast-aging rural Spain, the challenges of growing old as a lonesome man in a traditional, patriarchal community, and generational frictions between older peasants and younger environmental activists. In Cenizas del cielo, Galician-born actor Celso Bugallo embodies the complex intersections between aging, masculinity, and ecology. He plays the combative character of Federico, a local farmer in his sixties who lost his wife to the pollutants of a nearby power plant. In his determination to see the plant closed, this rebellious character clashes with numerous opponents, such as workers of the power plant, local authorities and even some of his own small-village neighbors. A living metaphor of an aging but defiant España vaciada, Bugallo’s character is studied in this paper as the site of multiple insurgencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relationship that the United Irishmen, Irish revolutionaries of the 1790s, had with slavery during the Revolutionary Period. The United Irishmen were exiled by the British Government as a result of a failed rebellion in 1798 and were exile throughout the Atlantic World. For the exiled United Irishmen, the United States became a primary destination for their exile, and here, slavery became an important source of disunity. In Ireland, resistance to slavery was assumed across the entire membership of the United Irishmen, but in exile, this unity diminished. In conversation with past histories, this scholarship focuses on the limitations of Jacobinism as a political ideology and the prominence of rhetoric in revolutionary ideologies of the period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Central African Republic is a fragile state mired in internal instability and external interventions. The article presents the case of Russian involvement in the country. It argues that the utilisation of the Wagner Group is setting up proxy neo-colonial ties between the regime and Moscow. The political elite in the Central African Republic is protected against a possible takeover by rebel troops or an army coup and the external benefactor is allowed to export the sought-after natural resources and gather some diplomatic support. The relationship thus clearly follows the neo-colonial pattern rather than developing the state capacities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of Extinction Rebellion (XR) in 2018 as a global movement led to the establishment of chapters all around the world. Much existing work has focused on cases located in the UK, Western Europe and the Anglosphere. This profile presents a case study of the formation of XR in The Gambia as an example of further diffusion of the movement. We examine how partial democratisation opened up space for contention, which in turn led to the adoption of the XR brand in the country. In turn, becoming a chapter of XR has opened up new opportunities for the transnationalisation of Gambian environmental activism. The profile concludes by reflecting on the potential future of the group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This profile offers an analysis of Extinction Rebellion (XR) from the vantage point of vanguardism. Vanguardism is a Leninist approach that marshals universal(isable) grievances to mobilise massconstituencies. XR is used as a conduit through which to raise awareness of vanguardism's environmental applications. XR is introduced before a theoretical framework for understanding vanguardism is offered. The article then discusses XR's politics, before discussing its protest repertoire. It is found that whilst vanguardism is ordinarily associated with the left, XR contributes to its 'greening', taking the pursuit of uprising beyond the left. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]