Guerrilla War Research Articles

The Union Defence Force and the suppression of the Bondelswarts Rebellion, 1922

ABSTRACT From the proclamation of the Union of South Africa in 1910, the Union Defence Force (UDF) had been deployed to suppress several internal disturbances. These unrests varied in terms of their scale, intensity, and geographic location, and represented dissatisfied and disenfranchised parts of the population, both in the Union and South West Africa (now Namibia). The uprisings in turn tested the organisation, force structure and strategies of the defence force. The Bondelswarts Rebellion of 1922, although brave and tragic, provides a lens through which to investigate the first large scale rural counterinsurgency operation conducted by South African forces after the end of the First World War. These operations occurred only months after the quelling of the 1922 Rand Revolt on the Witwatersrand. The reputation of the Bondelswarts as guerrilla fighters, and the fear of further unrest breaking out across the territory, prompted the South African authorities to seek a rapid resolution to the simmering unrest in the desolate terrain of southern South West Africa. The result of this brief and violent conflict also held far reaching political consequences. This article investigates the uprising and rural counterinsurgency operations undertaken by the South African authorities in suppressing the Bondelswarts Rebellion of 1922.

Lithuanian Partisan Warfare in Museums during the Soviet Occupation and after the Restoration of Independence

The Lithuanian partisan war of 1944–1953 left many unanswered questions, which began to be examined more objectively in Lithuania after the restoration of independence. However, during the Soviet period, this topic also received a lot of attention, albeit from the Soviet propaganda side. The subject of the partisan war is defined rather narrowly in the museums of the Lithuanian SSR and independent Lithuania, but the context goes well beyond the issue of museum exhibitions and displays. Abundant archival documents provide a rather interesting picture and allow us to analyse not only the changes of the topic itself in museums in the Soviet system, during the Revival and in independent Lithuania, but also to show it as a struggle for memory. After the end of the partisan war, this topic was not eliminated from public life. Particular attention has been given to the reinterpretation of information. The shift from military to ideological propaganda was initially reflected in practical decisions. At a time when political life was undergoing the so-called ‘Khrushchev thaw’, propaganda gave particular attention to the interpretation of the legacy of the partisan war. The years 1957–1960 were a turning point in the formulation of further propaganda guidelines. During this period, the Museum of the Revolution of the Lithuanian SSR, in cooperation with the KGB structures, began to organise systematically expositions of the “crimes of the bourgeois nationalists” and exhibitions on the basis of the collected items. The introduction of a compulsory propagandistic idea of the “class struggle” during the Soviet era resulted in complex, largely emotion-based processes during the transition period. From the very beginning of the Sąjūdis, in the context of the partisan war. To refute the “class struggle” assessment established during the Soviet period, first of all, the construction of a narrative of the guerrilla war based on historical research was abandoned from the very beginning. The choice of a martyrological narrative, mainly based on empathy with the processes that took place in the past, has eventually shaped the narrative on victims in the museum exhibitions of independent Lithuania. As the generation of creators changed and young cultural workers took over the activities of the museums, and as experts in various fields were involved in the creation of the exhibitions, not only the forms of presenting the partisan war began to change, but also the content. It is centred not on fatalities, but on the determination to fight and defend the independence of the country.

Ends of War: The Unfinished Fight of Lee’s Army after Appomattox by Caroline E. Janney

Reviewed by: Ends of War: The Unfinished Fight of Lee’s Army after Appomattox by Caroline E. Janney Cecily Zander Ends of War: The Unfinished Fight of Lee’s Army after Appomattox. By Caroline E. Janney. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. 344. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) Historians have expended considerable effort in understanding how and why people go to war. Military mobilization, after all, is a topic that touches on all manner of fields—the history of ideas, politics, economics, diplomacy. What if, as historian Caroline E. Janney asks in Ends of War, historians gave the same care and attention to demobilization and to the myriad ways in which soldiers left the armies that they had once willingly (or forcibly) joined? The answer in the case of the American Civil War is that the surrender of Robert E. Lee to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House was not the end of the war for thousands of soldiers of the Army of Northern Virginia. The scattered and disorganized dissolution of the most important Confederate army, Janney finds, starkly revealed the devotion Confederates felt to their failed nation even after its downfall, while foreshadowing the energy that the defeated rebels poured into creating the powerful Lost Cause ideology in their telling of the war. [End Page 125] The most immediate effects of the surrender were felt in Virginia, where roads and railways were choked with defeated Confederates seeking passage home. Any soldiers not officially paroled at Appomattox were encouraged to find a provost marshal’s office and acquire a signed parole. Parole papers were especially important because they protected Confederate soldiers from being arrested or tried for treason. These documents did not, however, afford their bearers the option to pass through states that had remained loyal to the Union. This left some former rebels trapped in Virginia until the federal government clarified the conditions on which they could return home—conditions that included swearing a loyalty oath and never again wearing the uniform of the Confederate army. Not all soldiers were willing to lay down their weapons and accept a parole. Many who chose not to remain in the Old Dominion struck out for North Carolina, where they hoped to join with Joseph E. Johnston’s Army of Tennessee and continue their fight. Johnston’s surrender to William T. Sherman soon sundered their ambition. The final remaining option for those who would not accept a parole would be to wage a guerilla war for the survival of the Confederacy, though this quickly proved untenable; most, including the notorious raider John S. Mosby, turned themselves in to Union authorities by the end of the summer. While large numbers of former Confederates moved across the landscape, thousands of others remained stationary. For rebels who refused paroles and were captured by the United States, the war dragged on through the summer of 1865 as the Union’s best legal and military minds attempted to determine their status. It was not until President Andrew Johnson’s amnesty proclamation that Confederate prisoners of war were afforded the option to swear a loyalty oath and be allowed to return to their homes. Although more books have been written about the Civil War than almost any other subject in American history, Janney is the first to offer an examination of the legal, political, and military mire generated by the disbanding of a major army at war’s end. Not only is Ends of War destined to become a valuable resource for understanding the complex details of the transition from war to peace, but it should also become a foundational work for further study of the weeks and months between Appomattox and the beginning in earnest of Reconstruction. Joining with a chorus of scholars asking us to consider a longer Civil War, Janney’s work offers a simple premise—the war did not end at Appomattox—and with clarity and verve, she explains why the ends of war matter as much as their beginnings. [End Page 126] Cecily Zander Southern Methodist University Copyright © 2022 The Texas State Historical Association

Impact of political marketing strategies on the BOP voters in India

PurposeThis article aims to examine political marketing strategies adopted by the politicians operating in base of the pyramid (BOP) areas and their impact on the BOP voters using the tenets of the social influence theory.Design/methodology/approachThe authors resorted to a qualitative phenomenological inquiry for this study. The responses obtained from two qualitative studies were subjected to thematic analysis. Two thematic maps were integrated into a conceptual model.FindingsStudy 1 indicates that the politicians operating at the BOP resort to vote-bank segmentation, clientelism, mobilizing opinion leaders, short guerilla war against opposition and communication bombarding. Study 2 has elaborated on how poor voters perceive these strategies and form their opinions towards the party/candidate.Social implicationsThe findings of this study highlight the need for essential policy formulation to protect BOP consumers from deceptive political tactics.Originality/valueThis study develops a model of the effectiveness of voting strategies at the BOP. It also contributes to the literature on social influence theory by indicating how the three social influence processes (compliance, identification and internalization) result in different ways of accepting political influence.

The Last Mass Execution of World War II: The Roundup Carried Out by Soviet Troops in the Augustów Forest in July 1945

The USSR placed great emphasis on fighting national resistance movements, due both to the Soviet leadership’s intention to ensure security to the rear of the invading Red Army and to the threat these movements posed to the prospect of Sovietization of the seized areas. Documents revealed in recent years in Russia indicate that in summer 1945, despite the end of World War II in Europe, Poland and Lithuania saw a series of dragnet operations targeting guerrilla fighters. According to the authors, these operations were connected with the fact that the Soviet leadership had seriously considered the hypothetical failure of the Potsdam Conference and the outbreak of World War III. The roundup carried out by the Soviet 50th Army in the Augustów Forest was the bloodiest of these dragnet operations. During the roundup, more than seven thousand individuals were detained, including at least around six hundred who were subsequently shot dead by SMERSH, which viewed them as hostile elements. Death sentences were pronounced without trial, on the basis of an administrative decision issued by Soviet bodies. In the authors’ view, this was the last mass execution of World War II. Despite censorship having been imposed, the memory of this crime remained vivid among the residents of this region throughout the entire period of the communist rule in Poland.

The weapon PM 44, the microphone, the Angolan nation, and the female voice

After the new nation conquers its place in the world, women seek their place in the nation. These different moments will be discussed by observing how the guerrilla fighter and the rapper use their voices. During the collective struggle for the nation's place, Deolinda Rodrigues, the guerrilla-fighter, silences her voice in her diary. In the post-independence era, the rapper Eva Rap Diva projects her voice with the microphone, inscribing her place in the nation. By causing interruptions in the dominant discourse, the rapper allows for new identity constructions in present Angola – which, both women believe, ought to be continuously independent of restrictive moorings.

Guerrilla War in the Mountains: Experiences of Jewish Fighters in the Slovak National Uprising and Partisan Resistance

ABSTRACT This article aims to bring forward first-person life stories and reflections of “ordinary” Jewish Holocaust survivors who took part in the Slovak resistance during World War II. The article is based on over 30 interviews conducted with Jewish survivors from Slovakia, who, later, after the war, settled In Israel, dealing with their experiences in the three forced labor camps that were established in Slovakia during the Slovak National Uprising, and among the partisans. These interviews were conducted in the early 1960s, mostly in Hebrew, and have rarely been used in historical research.. As a micro-historical study, the article paints a less familiar picture of Jews’ experiences during the war and the Holocaust in Slovakia, by presenting bottom-up, personal narratives and perspectives.

THE BIRTH AND LIFE OF THE DEFINITION OF MILITARY OBJECTIVES

AbstractThe forgotten story of the birth and life of the definition of ‘military objectives’ is relevant to the ongoing discussion about the need to adapt the law to asymmetric warfare. This definition, authored by a West German law professor and former member of the Nazi party, was driven by a Western effort to privilege regular armies while curbing the actions of guerrilla fighters and exposing their civilian supporters to harm. The Non-Aligned Movement turned the tide by burdening regular armies while exempting irregular combatants from the consequences of disregarding the law. It was only through judicial intervention—grounded in an imagined history of the linear progress of humanity—that civilians on both sides of asymmetric conflicts would ultimately become entitled to receive adequate protection.

Stanley Février: Performing the Invisible

This article examines how the Québécois artist Stanley Février approached the absence of BIPOC artists exhibited and collected at the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC) with three performative projects that successfully forced the institution to revisit its collecting and exhibiting practices. In An Invisible Minority (2018), the artist infiltrated the MAC as a security guard after assessing that this was the only culturally diverse body of employees in the museum. Février then showed an installation at ARTEXTE composed of statistics, comparative charts, and other quantitative data points that highlighted the lack of representation in Montreal galleries and museums. It’s Happening Now (2019) was a guerrilla action organized with other collaborators where performers clad in black skinsuits dragged fifty years of annual reports by the MAC tied to their ankles before shredding them in the museum’s main lobby. In conjunction with these project, MAC-I was created as an alternate, unsanctioned portal to the MAC official website to promote the practices of non-white Québécois and Canadian artists. While Février’s figurative sculptural work has garnered attention, with recent acquisitions by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, his more immaterial, institutionally critical, performative works remain undervalued and framed as ‘activism’ rather than their own aesthetic events.

Kurdish “patriotic” families: an incentive or an impediment to joining the PKK through the generations and according to gender

ABSTRACT Participation in national liberation struggles is often considered to be a “family tradition”. The academic literature has taken up the idea that every Kurdish family should “give a child” to the guerrilla movement. These assertions have rarely been based on qualitative data. To examine the role of family traditions on the militant trajectories of the Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan (PKK), we met 64 of its guerrilla fighters from three consecutive generations, encompassing a broad militancy period from the mid-1980s until today. This article highlights the variable impact of primary socialisation processes, in particular, the patriotic family, according to the generations and gender, suggesting that retrospective narratives made by PKK militants themselves reflect reluctance among their family members towards their engagement in the clandestine struggle.

Clausewitz’s Small War in the 21st Century

Abstract Carl Philipp Gottfried von Clausewitz is recognized as one of the most influential military theorists of all time. His ideas and theories represented in “On War” and their relevance in the 21st century are recurring debates as irregular warfare and asymmetric warfare is on the rise since World War II. While Clausewitz did not write extensively about irregular or asymmetric warfare in “On War”, he did hold lectures on as at the time was called “small war”, where he shared his views about the war on the Spanish guerilla war against Napoleon. In this study, we will examine the nature and tactics described by Clausewitz and draw a comparison regarding modern tactics.

There Has Never Been “Old” Wars, or, Drone Ethics

The article challenges traditional notions of war and war ethics from the standpoints of a terrorist attack victim and of a drone strike victim, of the decentralized opposition of “old” and “new” wars, “major” wars and “small” ones, combatants vs. non-combatants, soldiers vs guerilla fighters, friends vs enemies, victors vs defeated. Accordingly, the authors consider the political status and social role of ethnographic, anthropological and ethical research within the context of “new wars,” which include guerilla warfare and resort to terrorist tactics. Building on current research in sociology, anthropology, ethics and political studies (Hugh Gusterson, Mary Kaldor, Jeff McMahan, Lucy Sachman, Emran Feroz, Grégoire Chamayou, Kirill Martynov, Victor Vakhshtayn et al.), the authors regard whether drone technologies and other automated weapons conform to the Russia’s military ethics. They also speculate upon prospects of some technologies being socially adapted in different world cultures. The article brings up to date critique of violence by Walter Benjamin and problematizes the concept of the political by Carl Schmitt through the lens of the present-day military ethnography (see Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov’s Hybrid Peace: Ethnographies of War in this issue of Logos). Analyzing historical transformations and inversions of guerillas, suicide pilots, UAV operators and suicide bombers deconstructs the notion of “hybrid war” as well as “hybrid peace.” Finally, the authors introduce a project of a less rigoristic and not purely prohibitive ethical program (“drone ethics”) which might serve as a basis for automated systems’ algorithms to make decisions during military crises and states of emergency. The article continues to address the range of problems brought up in the Logos issue on war (Vol. 29 #3 2019).

Immigration in the Visual Art of Nicario Jiménez Quispe

Immigration in the Visual Art of Nicario Jiménez Quispe

Ethno-Political Structure of Taliban-led Afghanistan

With the seizure of power by the Taliban on August 15, 2021 a new page in the political history of Afghanistan had been opened. The Taliban, which for 20 years led a guerrilla war against the authorities of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan and their Western patrons, had to come out of hiding and start operating openly within the framework of a new state system. On September 7, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid announced the formation of the government of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. A year after these events, it seems important to trace the process of building government by the Taliban, characterize the current political system of Afghanistan and analyze the basic principles for the inclusion of certain groups in the state system. In the history of Afghanistan, the aspect of ethnicity has always been a key point that has determined one’s position in political and social system of the country. As a result of studies, the author concludes that the Taliban during its first year in power created a Pashtun-centric state, where the struggle between the main Pashtun tribal associations in relation to the foreign policy guidelines of each of them plays a decisive role in the configuration of domestic political forces. At the same time, despite the entry into the public field of the main Taliban functionaries who have taken positions in the leadership of various departments in Kabul, traditional for the Taliban hidden form of top management is preserved.

PERJUANGAN SULTAN MAHMUD RI’AYAT SYAH MELAWAN BELANDA DITINJAU DARI ASPEK STRATEGI PEPERANGAN

Sultan Mahmud Ri'ayat Syah was a king with the title "Yang Dipertuan Besar Riau-Lingga-Johor-Pahang Kingdom", who led his kingdom to fight against the Dutch troops who attacked his kingdom. This research analyzes his struggle from the aspect of warfare strategy. This research is a qualitative research, using the method of Biographical History Research, to dig deeper into his superiority in leading the war series. The theory used is strategy theory and several other relevant theories. Data was collected using literature study techniques, and then analyzed and interpreted so that they have the expected meaning. From the discussion it was found that his decision to fight, move the defense area, and carry out a sea guerrilla war, was very precise and effective, so that he achieved a series of victories and his kingdom could last quite a long time.

Moteris Lietuvos partizaniniame kare: nuo formalaus reglamentavimo iki praktinio veikimo | Women in the Lithuanian Partisan War: Between Formal Regulation and Practice

In 1944, as the Eastern Front was approaching Lithuania, which was then still occupied by Nazi Germany, and the Red Army retook the country, a substantial number of civilians and former members of paramilitary organisations joined the armed resistance to sovietisation. For a long time, the history of the anti-Soviet armed resistance, or guerrilla war, in Lithuania has been told as a story of men, dominated by descriptions of their combat action and stories of the dead. The memories of women, mainly helpers and messengers, have been treated as a supplement to this image, but not as a formative factor. Insufficient attention has also been paid to the role of women who fought with weapons in their hands, and the narratives of those who acted simultaneously as partisans and wives and mothers. The aim of this article is to take a multifaceted look at the experiences of women who contributed to the armed anti-Soviet resistance in Lithuania. It aims to discuss the changing attitudes of the partisan leadership towards women’s participation in action, to show the diversity of female activity in the partisan war, and to reveal how their involvement in the war contributed to changes in their family roles.

Partizanskoe dvizhenie na territorii Zapadnoj Belorussii i Vostochnoj Pol'shi v 1939—1944 gg. i ego ocenka sovremennymi istorikami

The work is devoted to the partisan movement on the territory of the western regions of Belarus and modern Eastern Poland in 1939-1944. The national and social composition of the fighters of the armed formations of the partisans is characterized. The article describes the participation of Polish detachments of the Home Army, Slovak, German and Jewish anti-fascists in the guerrilla war. The facts of the frontline battles of those years are noted, examples of the effectiveness and activity of partisan formations are given.

Review: Verde, by Federico Rios Escobar

Review: <i>Verde</i>, by Federico Rios Escobar

Postface

Postface

Poetry and the Camp: Epiphanic Witness and Ecstatic Cry in the Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1895–98

Poetry and the Camp: Epiphanic Witness and Ecstatic Cry in the Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1895–98