Guerrilla Warfare Research Articles

Editor's Note

April 01 2019 Editor's Note Author and Article Information Online Issn: 1531-3298 Print Issn: 1520-3972 © 2019 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology2019President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Journal of Cold War Studies (2019) 21 (1): 1–2. https://doi.org/10.1162/jcws_e_00870 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Search Site Citation Editor's Note. Journal of Cold War Studies 2019; 21 (1): 1–2. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/jcws_e_00870 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAll JournalsJournal of Cold War Studies Search Advanced Search This special issue was in the works for several years. It took much longer than usual because a significant number of the manuscripts initially submitted for the issue did not make it through the peer review process. We eventually narrowed the issue down to the core group of articles that are published here. In earlier issues of the journal, we published articles discussing the roles of Cuba and the Soviet Union in the wars in southern Africa. The articles published here should be read in conjunction with those earlier articles. The articles in this issue look both at the perspectives of local actors in Africa (Angola, Mozambique, South Africa) and at the roles of certain external actors—Portugal, the United States, Yugoslavia, and the World Council of Churches—in the process of decolonization and guerrilla warfare. Even after Portugal ended its presence in southern Africa and gave way to the independent states... You do not currently have access to this content.

Echo of the Arab Spring in Eastern Europe: A Quantitative Analysis

The article analyzes the impact of the Arab Spring on destabilization processes in Eastern Europe. The authors show how the success of the Arab revolutions influenced the rise of protest activity in Eastern Europe in 2011. The similarities of the protests in Eastern Europe with the protests of the Arab Spring period are demonstrated. We also analyze ways of borrowing patterns of destabilization. The wave of protest activity after 2011 is compared with the previous wave of protest activity initiated by the global financial-economic crises of 2008–2009. In addition to the external factor of the Arab Spring, the article examines the internal factors of the protest activity of the second wave of the economic crisis associated with the economic crises in Portugal, Italy, Spain, and Greece. The authors define the most typical forms of destabilization for Eastern Europe: anti-government demonstrations, riots, terrorist actions, and guerrilla warfare. The contribution of the Ukrainian Revolution in 2014 to the dynamics of the most violent forms of protest in Eastern Europe is also analyzed. In explaining the special case of Ukraine which breaks with the general trend of Eastern Europe, the authors show that Ukraine experienced a transition from less-violent forms of destabilization (anti-government demonstrations and riots) to more violent ones (guerrilla warfare and terrorist attacks) in 2013–2014. The reasons for the growth of terrorist activity and guerrilla warfare as well as the role of the war in Donbass are discussed. It is shown that though the case of Ukraine is unique for Eastern Europe in the period under study, it has many parallels on a global scale.

De immuniteit van non-combattanten en irreguliere oorlogvoering

Abstract Non-combatant Immunity and Irregular Warfare The Ethical Problem of Human Shields One of the basic principles of the Just War Theory is that of non-combatant immunity. Basically, this principle is about protecting the civilian population against the violence of war. Now, despite the fact that this principle is firmly ingrained in our collective moral conscience and in international humanitarian law, the truth is that the civilian population has never been really insulated from the horrors of war. Quite on the contrary. This seems to be especially the case in so-called irregular warfare. In order to avoid military defeat against a stronger opponent, non-state armed movements very often use tactics that entail important risks for the civilian population. These irregular combatants hide and fight, for instance, among the civilian population or they intentionally blur the distinction between combatants and non-combatants. One of those tactics consists in using non-combatants as human shields. It goes without saying that this tactic presents a complex moral challenge for conventional troops. Should these human shields be treated like any other innocent bystanders, or should they be considered as partial combatants? And can the non-combatant immunity principle be of any moral assistance here? It is the objective of this article to shed more light on this issue. The argument will be developed in four stages. First, we will take a closer look at the principle of non-combatant immunity as it is understood within the Just War Theory. In order to see if and to what extent the principle of non-combatant immunity can be of any assistance in confronting human shields, we will conduct a first case-based analysis. Next, we aim to develop a moral continuum of paradigmatic cases of human shields, the purpose of which is to provide an instrument that will help us to formulate more nuanced moral appreciations. Finally, we will briefly look at the practical relevance of the proposed approach.

Parameters – Full Issue – Autumn 2018

FEATURES: Challenges for Civil-Military Relations: "Policy Revolt: Army Opposition to the Korea Withdrawal Plan On Alliances and Coalitions" by Eric B. Setzekorn. "The Walter Reed Scandal and the All-Volunteer Force" by Richard G. Malish. On Alliances and Coalitions: "Fighting and Learning in the Great War" by Kelly A. Greico. "India-US Relations" by Vinay Kaura. "Toward a Whole-of-Government Approach" by Paul E. Vera Delzo. On Clausewitz: "Reclaiming Clausewitz's Theory of Victory" by Richard M. Milburn. "A Clausewitzian Response to 'Hyperwarfare'" by Brandon T. Euhus. Plus, Military History, Irregular Warfare, Security Studies, and Book Reviews!

Birth of the Cold War: irregular warfare first blood in Greece

ABSTRACT While often held up as a model of successful American counterinsurgency, the Greek Civil War presents a unique case. Peculiar local conditions and geopolitics contributed to the defeat of communist forces in Greece. A firm British and later American commitment to combating communism stood in contrast to ambiguous support from the Soviet Union in an area they considered outside of their sphere of influence. Strong nationalist feeling among the Greek population buttressed support for the government and undermined the ‘internationalist’ concessions of communist forces. These characteristics make the extrapolation of broader lessons focused on victory through the application of overwhelming American resources and the financing of local forces problematic. If lessons are to be gleaned from this case, they should focus on the critical roles played by internal political dynamics and geopolitics in undermining the strength of the insurgent forces and how these provided a stable platform from which the counterinsurgents could operate.

Systems failure: the US way of irregular warfare

ABSTRACT Since 9/11, the United States has achieved notable gains against al Qaeda, and also Islamic State (IS), all while avoiding another mass-casualty attack at home. Yet, institutionally, culturally, and in its capabilities, the US government remains seriously ill-equipped for the task of countering irregular threats. Partly as a result, Islamist extremism shows no sign of being defeated, having instead metastasized since 9/11 and spread. Why, given the importance accorded to counterterrorism, has the US approach remained inadequate? What is impeding more fundamental reforms? The article evaluates the United States’ way of irregular warfare: its troubled engagement with counterinsurgency and its problematic search for lower cost and lower risk ways of combating terrorism. It suggests needed reforms but acknowledges also the unlikelihood of change.

Gerilla-hadviselés és a terrorizmus kapcsolatrendszere napjainkban

The guerrilla warfare was already known in the era of Carl von Clausewitz, however during the 20. century, the relation between terrorism and guerrilla warfare became a sharing factor among the theoreticians. While Carlos Marighella preferred the urban area and terrorism, Che Guevara went for the countryside and gave a negative meaning to terrorism. The judgement of the terrorism was divided and at the beginning of the 21. century the concept of terrorism and guerrilla warfare became almost the same after that the boundaries between the two nearly gone and the new world, insurgent, changed up the traditional guerrilla one. Nowadays, the Islamic State has the center of this two concept and forms a discussion.

Criteria for defining war, terrorism, and guerrilla warfare based on clausewitz’s concepts of the nature and essence of war

The definition of terrorism and its differentiation from war and guerrilla warfare has been a problem for science, international relations and legal systems for decades. This article posits that defining terrorism requires also the definition of other warlike phenomena, so as not to conflate the acts or events. Therefore, the proposed criteria for defining terrorism and guerrilla warfare are presented as a means to differentiate their definitions from that of war. The methodology is a review of the concepts of the nature and essence of war, as described in the Carl von Clausewitz book, Vom Kriege (in the standard German edition of Hahlweg and its widely accepted English translation by Howard and Paret). These concepts were cross-analyzed with recent scientific discoveries about the behavior of social animals, with a focus on humans. The resulting classification allows historical or contemporary events to be evaluated to determine what kind of conflicts they are.

Upon the Fields of Battle: Essays on the Military History of America’s Civil War ed. by Andrew S. Bledsoe, Andrew F. Lang

Reviewed by: Upon the Fields of Battle: Essays on the Military History of America’s Civil War ed. by Andrew S. Bledsoe, Andrew F. Lang Wayne Wei-siang Hsieh Upon the Fields of Battle: Essays on the Military History of America’s Civil War. Edited by Andrew S. Bledsoe and Andrew F. Lang. Foreword by Gary W. Gallagher. Conflicting Worlds: New Dimensions of the American Civil War. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2018. Pp. xiv, 304. $48.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-6977-3.) The state-of-the-field military history essays authored by Gary W. Gallagher and Kathryn Shively Meier in the Journal of the Civil War Era and Earl J. Hess in Civil War History in 2014 caused an uncommon stir among historians. Both pieces acknowledged the benefits of a wide aperture in defining the purpose and provenance of military history as a scholarly genre, but (among other points) they also dared to assert that traditional military history inhabited a marginal position in the world of academics, with deleterious consequences for the larger goal of rigorously understanding the American Civil War in all its aspects. Upon the Fields of Battle: Essays on the Military History of America’s Civil War, a collection of essays edited by two established but not yet senior scholars, thus sets foot on fraught historiographical terrain. Many of the collection’s contributors are also in the middle of their careers, and the volume serves as a proxy of sorts for the field’s future. Much to their credit, the editors succeed in this volume at least in productively bridging the divide between “drum-and-trumpet histories and the more theoretical war-and-society approaches that sometimes minimize or circumvent military considerations” (p. 7). The pieces testify to the field’s diverse set of interests. Strong essays on army command from Andrew S. Bledsoe and Jennifer M. Murray represent operational military history. Kenneth W. Noe’s piece on the effects of weather in the [End Page 924] Peninsula campaign is splendid, and an essay by John J. Hennessy on the sack of Fredericksburg continues a productive strand of scholarship on “hard war” and the question of whether (and how) Civil War violence was limited. Andrew F. Lang authors a related piece on the relationship between ideas of American exceptionalism and military occupation. Three chapters by Brian D. McKnight, Kevin M. Levin, and Brian Matthew Jordan cover different aspects of Civil War violence and its effects as seen in guerrilla warfare, executions of deserters, and the long lingering effects of battlefield trauma, respectively. There is also an essay by Keith Altavilla on understudied Democrats in the Union army during the election of 1864 and a concluding piece by Robert L. Glaze on Albert Sidney Johnston’s hitherto neglected place in Lost Cause memorialization. It is impossible to do justice to each individual essay, but they are each concise enough for readers to consider directly. Nevertheless, the pessimistic tone of Earl J. Hess’s essay in this volume, which lays out a research agenda for operational military history, remains unanswered by the larger field. Hess rightly identifies a deficit in academic scholarship on important topics such as field artillery and cavalry, never mind important support services like logistics. Even operational military historians have not paid as much attention as they should to the transportation and administrative infrastructure needed to project military power across vast distances—a phenomenon vital not only in the American Civil War but also in other contemporary conflicts such as the Taiping Civil War and the German Wars of Unification. Modernity, empire, cultural distinctions between wartime and peacetime, and American exceptionalism (or lack thereof) are issues that implicitly or explicitly loom over the larger field—but those themes rely on assumptions about the practical workings of Civil War armies that could be more thoroughly tested in the same way that Hess and other historians have scrutinized the significance of the rifled musket. Regardless, while debates over the past, present, and future of the field of military history will continue for the foreseeable future, there should at least be a consensus that this volume of essays represents a fine contribution to the larger body...

Auguste Blanqui és a városi felkelések

„The duty of a revolutionist is the fight, the fight come what may, the fight until death.” This motto belongs to Auguste Blanqui’s definition of revolutionist’s tasks. 3 After the Napoleonic wars the modern urban environment had become the main theatre of guerrilla warfare where the urban proletariat was the main source of insurrection against the Western-and Middle-European monarchies. This study focuses on these insurrections and Blanqui’s main works and theories on the urban insurgency. The related research was supported by the ÚNKP-18-4-NKE-13 New National Excellence Program of the Ministry of Human Capacities.

Insurgency and Small Wars: Estimation of Unobserved Coalition Structures

Insurgency and guerrilla warfare impose enormous socio‐economic costs and often persist for decades. The opacity of such forms of conflict is an obstacle to effective international humanitarian intervention and development programs. To shed light on the internal organization of otherwise unknown insurgent groups, this paper proposes two methodologies for the detection of unobserved coalitions of militants in conflict areas. These approaches are based on daily geocoded incident‐level data on insurgent attacks. We provide applications to the Afghan conflict during the 2004–2009 period and to Pakistan during the 2008–2011 period, identifying systematically different coalition structures. Applications to global terrorism data and identification of new groups or shifting coalitions are discussed.

Revolutionary Terror in Russia in 1906—1907: Historical and Legal Aspect

The paper presents an analysis of legal technologies of counteraction to terrorism in Russia in 19061907. The complex of special organizational and legal measures taken by the Russian authorities at the beginning of the XX century in order to counter the terrorist threat is studied. Special attention is given to both law-making and law-enforcement activities of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which continued to carry out systematic work to suppress the activities of terrorist groups. An attempt is made to establish key legal obstacles and restrictions to build an effective mechanism to combat terrorist crimes. It is noted that by the beginning of 1906 the method of organizing terrorist activities of revolutionary organizations had undergone significant changes: terror in Russia had become decentralized, and the procedure for making a decision on the implementation of another terrorist act had changed. The political component of the Party’s activities faded into the background, as the mass nature of terrorist practices by revolutionaries was not actually analyzed in any way, and the terror itself became more opportunistic and consistent with the realities of the revolutionary time. During this period, Russia began to register the facts of terrorist acts against members of pro-government organizations and structures of patriotic orientation: cases of terrorist acts against representatives of “legalized” political societies (primarily Black-Hundred organizations) became more frequent, which could provoke the emergence of mass inter-party protests. At the same time, the analysis of the revolutionary situation in Russia at that time shows that the majority of the known revolutionary parties made attempts to organize a mass armed uprising. Attention is focused on the emergence in the terrorist environment of a new tactic of political struggle through terrorist attacks — the organization of guerrilla warfare. Particular attention is given to the study of the problem of effective management of the Secret Agency of the Police Department.

Seven Years of Terror : Jihadi Organisations's Strategies and Future Decisions

"This paper aims to provide practitioners and academics with an empirical approach for assessing the current state and future directions of the Salafi-Jihadi Movement’s (SJM) member organisations. Making use of available data, it taps into the Islamic State’s (IS) and al-Qaeda’s (AQ) strategic priorities. Then, the article maps and examines various strategies of the broader SJM using game theory. It assigns numerical representations to these strategies based on both the quantitative analysis of AQ’s and IS’s strategic priorities and published assessments of jihadi organisations’ strategies. The findings suggest that Localisation is the most pragmatic approach when compared to global undertaking for winning the hearts and minds of jihadi constituencies or proto-state building. Moreover, the results indicate that to regain hegemony of the SJM, AQ may opt to orchestrate terrorist attacks against the West. The model also shows that IS scores the highest payoffs through using guerrilla warfare methods and sleeper cells—as well as by rebuilding its depleted capacities and carrying out attacks that polarise Sunni communities. The paper concludes by providing implications, limitations, and directions for future research"

The Calculus of Violence: How Americans Fought the Civil War by Aaron Sheehan-Dean

Reviewed by: The Calculus of Violence: How Americans Fought the Civil War by Aaron Sheehan-Dean Kenneth W. Noe The Calculus of Violence: How Americans Fought the Civil War. Aaron Sheehan-Dean. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. ISBN 978-0-674-98422-6. 480 pp., cloth, $35.00. Historiographically at least, the Civil War seems to grow bloodier every year. Recent explorations of soldier and civilian deaths have pushed the war's combined butcher bill upward toward perhaps a million lives lost, in a divided nation of about 31 million people. Yet as bad as it was, it could have been much worse. As Aaron Sheehan-Dean points out in his introduction to The Calculus of Violence, more than 20 million people died in China's roughly contemporary civil war. In Mexico's long Caste War of the Yucatan, 35 percent of the population lost their lives. The American Civil War was somehow simultaneously catastrophic and more controlled. Explaining that apparent paradox is at the heart of Sheehan-Dean's project. Acknowledging the war's shocking lethality, Sheehan-Dean maintains that nineteenth-century American moral culture, military tradition, and wartime ideology nonetheless combined to limit the killing from spiraling even further out of control. The Lincoln administration fought the war on the foundational belief that Confederates were still countrymen, an assertion that demanded some circumspection. For their part, the Confederates were eager to look like a modern nation-state. Millions of soldiers thus enlisted in conventional armies with clear chains of command and accountability. They fought battles according to long-recognized rules and rituals that permitted surrender and that largely prevented the killing of civilians and prisoners. Threats of equal retaliation, Sheehan-Dean agrees, often worked to deescalate flashpoints. Confronted with ugly incidents, generals wrote each other letters and debated the fine points of law. Meanwhile, the fighting produced new debates among the two governments that led to thoughtful if sometimes ineffective augmentations of the rules of war. Often political leaders refused to go as far as their power allowed. Occupation produced violence but not the show trials and mass killings that appeared elsewhere. [End Page 405] Rules mattered, even in the breach. Most important of all, Sheehan-Dean concludes, enslaved African Americans deliberately chose to eschew revenge killings on their way to freedom. A different response might well have produced the racial bloodbath whites on both sides feared. Yet despite those parameters, the war was bloody enough. Rejecting the widely accepted notion of a war that proceeded steadily from a "soft" phase in 1861 to "hard war" or "total war" at its end, Sheehan-Dean posits waxing and waning waves of violence and restraint at national, regional, and local levels. Much of the staggering casualty total had to do with numbers and the nature of mid-nineteenth century firepower and tactics, but other cultural forces were at play as well, threatening to knock over the barricades. The mid-nineteenth century was a period of growing jingoism around the world, and the people of the divided United States were not immune to casting themselves as noble victims of oppression and anarchy. Even previously pacifist abolitionists embraced the sword, and everyone justified their sides' actions while condemning the enemy. The Confederacy's fateful decision to support irregular warfare unleashed wave after wave of poorly regulated brutality, often directed at civilians. The Union high command responded with an equally lethal counterinsurgency that created a tragic crossfire. Both sides concluded that the established laws of war allowed them to take hostages, imprison civilians, mistreat prisoners of war, depopulate entire regions, execute guerrillas, and seek to limit greater violence through tit-for-tat killing. Emancipation meanwhile led to murderous white-on-black attacks, especially when Confederate troops encountered African American soldiers in the heat of battle. Threats of retribution from Washington lessened but could not prevent racial atrocities. Both sides embraced mayhem at times, but Sheehan-Dean concludes that Confederate racism engendered more abandon. Sheehan-Dean's learned and measured narrative is grounded in deep research and a thorough understanding of the international and intellectual context. It successfully complicates the familiar linearity of the war's apparent descent into violence. By placing guerrilla...

The Culture of New Wars

The article analyses the dominant trends in contemporary armed conflicts that are referred to as the “new wars.” Rather than debating the empirical aspects of the concept, the author focuses on its conceptual content, which provides a theoretical framework for understanding the military actions that came after the end of the Cold War. She traces the genealogy of irregular wars, which is a concept known since late antiquity, although it was not at that time a definitive part military theory. Traditional military conflicts often took place between armies of states that officially declared war on each other. They were limited in time and space and had clear goals that, once achieved, left open the possibility of a return to peace. The term “small war” came into use by theorists only at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to describe the processes taking place on the periphery of classical conflicts. However, that term seems to be the most relevant for understanding the irregular nature of combat actions in the twenty-first century. New wars add a dimension of biopolitics to the traditional realm of geopolitics. Drawing examples from the conflicts and armed revolutionary movements of the second half of the twentieth century, the author argues that there were fundamental transformations that set irregular warfare apart: a shift of strategic emphasis, the insurgent and guerrilla nature of the conflicts, the redefinition of “collateral damage,” the spread of terrorist methods for waging war between unequal forces, and private financing of paramilitary groups. The characterization of the essential features of the new wars concept includes an analysis of the factors that led to reformulating war; the key factor was the combination of authoritarianism with economic openness and neoliberal economic policy. The conclusion reached is that, against the background of ongoing global integration, the changes in the conduct of armed conflicts are creating a new culture of security that is justifiably labelled “new wars.”

A felkelés ellenes műveletek elmélete és gyakorlata francia megközelítésben: Roger Trinquier és a modern hadviselés

This study shows through the work of a French soldier – Roger Trinquier – the main characteristics of asymmetric, low intensity irregular warfare. The author delivers through French historic examples the need for novel approaches to professional military education of officers, the introduction of new concepts, solution and methods, and initiates further research on operational-level command-andcontrol, and employment of force.

The British Superpower, Irregular Warfare, and Military Honor

The British Superpower, Irregular Warfare, and Military Honor

An Acceptable Level of Violence: Assessing the Development of the British Government’s Security Approach to ‘The Troubles’ From 1969-79


 
 
 
 Those seeking to engage in warfare against organised governments in the 21st century are increasingly relying on such governments being unable to respond in an appropriate manner. The latter half of the 20th century in Northern Ireland is a perfect example of a ruling authority modifying its approach to the security issues it was confronted by throughout the conflict. “The Troubles”, as the three decades of guerrilla warfare has now become known, was dealt with by the British establishment through three specific policies – all of which saw changes implemented during the first ten years of the landmark conflict. These were: the implementation of Direct Rule, the so-called “Normalisation” of asymmetric warfare, and the reliance on the local paramilitaries over the British Army. All of these policies can be seen to have failed in particular ways, although careful examination shall explain the logic behind these shifts in British reactionary policy and their effects in the regions of the province of Ulster affected by the conflict. Being a very brief survey of this conflict, this paper does not address other policies enacted – nor does it encompass every aspect of the evidence available. It merely aims to act as an overview.
 
 
 

Boko Haram’s increasingly sophisticated military threat

ABSTRACT 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.

Maroon In/Securities

This essay uses the concept of “Maroon in/securities” to refer to a number of creative practices of survival and a range of experiences and feelings that converge in the Maroon narrative. These two terms, when brought together, productively facilitate a dialogue between Maroon studies and security studies that might lead to keen interventions in both fields. The concept first allows us to talk about military praxis (and in particular, guerilla warfare) as a key part of the Maroon experience and narrative but also, at the same time, allows us to link this to strategies of survival. It discusses Maroon insecurity as a feeling forged in the unsettled intimacies of colonial relations. This feeling, in several ways, structured relations between Maroons and plantations and impacted the organization of daily life across both frontiers as well as the deployment of a range of surveillance assemblages. But even more than a feeling, Maroon insecurity might be said to describe an experience of precarity. This attention to these Maroon in/securities revises the grand narratives of marronage in heroic terms that have often been dominant in the cultural and popular imagination across a range of sites of representation. In attending to these different registers, the essay suggests that the concept allows us to think not only across Maroon studies and security studies but also across a range of experiences and relations that converge in the Maroon narrative and that resist and complicate easy categories and taxonomies.