Guerrilla Campaign Research Articles

Dispersing into the ether: a discourse on how the Ugandan government banished the LRA to the shadow realm

ABSTRACT When Yoweri Museveni took power in Uganda in 1986, the NRM administration was faced with a press of problems. Of the plethora of insurgencies that emerged, the LRA perdured staging a virulent guerrilla campaign. Its leader, Joseph Kony, has long been one of Africa’s notorious warlords. For over three decades, his group has struck terror. Today, Kony’s firm grip on the rebellion is loosening. Recent defectors have suggested that he no longer enjoys absolute control. Short of declaring the end of the LRA menace, this article establishes that the prospects of this group overthrowing Museveni from distant bases in the remotest Kafia Kingi enclave in western South Sudan, where they collect and sell honey and alluvial gold, are unfeasible. What led to this outcome in the Ugandan civil war? Inasmuch as the government’s counterinsurgency efforts were focused on the pacification of Acholiland through population concentration; and, elimination and containment approaches of the LRA; Museveni also managed to build a network of regional and international coalitions. This strategy isolated the LRA and allowed for overt military interventions in Southern Sudan, DRC, and CAR. It is the meld of these strategies which combined to expel the LRA from Uganda.

Mosaic; counter-insurgency approaches and the war against the Islamic state in Mozambique

ABSTRACT Following the defeat in Afghanistan there have been several discussions over the failure of western and western allied counter-insurgency strategies. These discussions often assume that winning a counter-insurgency is dependent on choosing the right strategy to win, and ideal type strategies are often sketched up to provide possible alternatives. However, in practice, counter-insurgency often becomes a process of arranging and organizing various goals, capacities, and organizational legacies. This article analyzes the counter insurgency in Mozambique and finds that it was formed by economic interests and organizational legacies, though it was not an entirely rational activity to win a war. On the ground practices have been the result of several approaches creating a dynamic counter-insurgency assemblage that transcends ideal type counter-insurgency strategies. The article suggests that this might be the cases for many counter insurgency campaigns.

Critical Analysis of the Nepali Army’s Counter Insurgency Campaign Against Maoist Insurgency in Nepal

Nepal witnessed an insurgency within its territory for a decade from 1996 to 2006. Nepali army, the national armed force, along with other security forces, conducted the counter-insurgency campaign within the broader campaign of the Nepalese government. This paper examines the growth of Maoist insurgency in Nepal, the government's initial response, and finally the army's campaign against the insurgents. Using the information presented in academic and government literature as well as the experience gained by the researcher himself, it concludes that the army was successful in tactical battles against the Maoists but could not gain complete victory at the strategic level. The paper also examines the challenges faced by the army during the campaign, and the wider concepts coming out from the overall critical analysis of the campaign.

The governance structure of Turkish-controlled Afrin

Since March 2018 Turkey and allied Syrian actors have controlled the Afrin region of northern Syria. The subsequent five years have been marked by acts of criminality and infighting incidents between the dozens of Turkish-backed militias in the region, an insurgency campaign, acts of terrorism, and dramatic demographic changes to the detriment of the region’s indigenous Kurdish population. This paper examines and outlines the Turkish-installed local governance structure, highlighting the relationships between Syrian civil and military actors and the various Turkish institutions present, what effects this regime has had on the region’s security situation, and it relates to broader Turkish policy within Syria.

Cold War Liberation: The Soviet Union and the Collapse of the Portuguese Empire in Africa, 1961–1975 by Natalia Telepneva

<i>Cold War Liberation: The Soviet Union and the Collapse of the Portuguese Empire in Africa, 1961–1975</i> by Natalia Telepneva

Bloody years of the Jewish Insurgency in British Mandatory Palestine 1939-1948: From the White Paper to the State of Israel

This review article focuses on Jewish insurgency under the British mandate for Palestine from 1939 to 1948. The Jewish guerrilla campaign represents a successful case study in the field of the research on small wars and insurgency, proxy wars. The authors analyze the early phase of the British Mandate in 1918-1939, referred to as the prelude to the subsequent Jewish uprising; a period when Jewish paramilitary groups including the Haganah, Irgun, and Lehi emerged and developed, emphasizing their ideological underpinnings, operational and tactical strategies of warfare, and the material capacities that these organizations possessed. The authors primarily emphasize the period from the initiation of the White Paper in 1939 until the establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948. British restrictions on Jewish immigration and the beginning of the Second World War stimulated the Jewish forces to a massive terrorist campaign against the British resulting in an unprecedented Zionist victory.

Toward a Global History of Latin America's Revolutionary Left

This volume is the latest contribution to a growing literature on the Latin American revolutionary Left, defined by Tanya Harmer and Alberto Martín Álvarez as antireformist forces who supported or engaged in armed struggle starting in the late 1950s and 1960s. The book traces some of the global connections that shaped Latin American revolutionary groups as well as those groups' global impacts. The contributors' use of seldom-tapped archives in Beijing, Moscow, Prague, and various Western European sites sets the volume apart from most studies of the Latin American Left.The first section focuses on Cuba's promotion of armed revolution and its interaction with other countries and movements in the 1960s. Michal Zourek, Blanca Mar León, and James G. Hershberg examine the Fidel Castro government's relations with Algeria, Brazil, China, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union. The second section traces the armed Left's connections with Western Europe between the 1960s and 1980s. Chapters by Gerardo Leibner, Eduardo Rey Tristán, Arturo Taracena Arriola, and José Manuel Ágreda Portero examine solidarity work among European leftist and social democratic parties, grassroots activists, publishers, and nongovernmental organizations.The book broadly supports the findings of prior scholarship on the Left. The newly consulted sources confirm that the Soviet Union and most Moscow-aligned Communist parties opposed armed struggle and that this position contributed to the well-known conflicts in the Cuban-Soviet and Sino-Soviet relationships. They also confirm the importance of Latin American initiative. Far from being puppets of external sponsors, armed revolutionaries acted of their own accord and controlled most of their own decisions. Latin Americans were also crucial in the growth of global solidarity networks, as other recent research has stressed.The chapters do add new details that enrich and sometimes qualify this picture. For example, Zourek documents Czechoslovakia's role in providing logistical aid to help Cuba's Latin American trainees return to their home countries. This story nuances the image of Soviet bloc countries as uniformly opposed to armed revolution. Czechoslovak aid was reluctant, however. Officials agreed to help as a way of keeping tabs on Cuba and because the Cubans were likely to pursue their efforts even without Soviet bloc support. The Cubans themselves financed the operation. And neither the Czechoslovaks nor the Cubans controlled Latin American guerrilla campaigns: “it was local revolutionary movements who were in charge” once the trainees returned home (p. 46).Some other Communist parties supported certain guerrilla movements, as when the Italians aided guerrillas in Venezuela and Brazil (in the latter case, in defiance of Brazil's official Communist party). Leibner argues that some Italian Communists were sympathetic to Latin American guerrillas given their own memories of resistance to fascism. They also deemed armed struggle a more viable option in Latin America than in Europe. But their support ceased when they began to fear that Latin American guerrillas were inspiring armed adventurism in Italy.Another highlight is Taracena Arriola's memoir of his time representing the Guatemalan guerrillas in Europe in the 1980s. He makes a strong case that European organizing and pressure campaigns helped force the Guatemalan regime to the negotiating table. The chapter is rich with detail. For instance, he recounts that his commitment to building a European solidarity network was inspired by the Vietnamese and Southern Cone revolutionaries who had done so previously. We learn how Amnesty International initially refused to get involved in Guatemala but was persuaded thanks to the work of organizers in Paris. Taracena Arriola also shows how events in Guatemala led to internal conflicts within the solidarity network by the mid-1980s, as the genocidal counterinsurgency made a guerrilla victory unlikely and as some Europeans were convinced by the new facade of democracy erected in Guatemala.As the book's title implies, it aims to encourage further research. Harmer and Martín Álvarez's introduction and Van Gosse's afterword are explicit about many of the unanswered questions, and I would add some others. Latin American revolutionaries' interactions with Vietnam, Algeria, and China have received relatively little attention, and their ties to other Third World countries even less. The same goes for relations among Latin American revolutionary groups. There is also much work still to be done on the global circulation of feminist and antiracist ideas, liberation theology, and differing conceptions of socialism. The political organizing work of certain armed groups, and how that work was shaped by global exchanges, remains neglected amid the overwhelming focus on their armed actions. The present volume offers a model for investigating these and other questions.

Che Guevara and guerrilla warfare

ABSTRACT Che Guevara’s life as a public figure (1959-1967) coincided with the golden years of the Cuban Revolution. Ernesto Guevara became Che Guevara, a glorified revolutionary guerrilla comandante and theoretician of guerrilla warfare in this short period. Especially during the sixties his texts on guerrilla strategy were studied and applied by many insurgents in Latin America and the Caribbean. Paradoxically, he supervised or was directly in charge of three ill-fated guerrilla campaigns in Bolivia/Argentina (1963/64), the Congo (1965), and again Bolivia (1966/67). The themes of this article are (1) a discussion about the use and evolution of the rural foco approach, for many followers the guiding doctrine of armed insurgency; (2) Che’s three guerrilla campaigns and the reasons for failure; (3) the rural foco approach as implemented by other Latin American guerrilla leaders; and (4) some concluding remarks about post-foco guerrilla warfare in the region.

Framing colonial war loot

Abstract This article investigates the provenance of four artefacts associated with the military commander Kunwar Singh (1777–1858), who fought a guerrilla campaign against the British during the Indian Uprising of 1857–8. By analysing how these objects were documented and inscribed, it can be shown that, through the invocation of what is characterized here as ‘martial discourse’, British officers framed the acquisition of the arms, armour and ceremonial possessions of an enemy commander in very specific ways. As an overlooked aspect of nineteenth-century British military culture, an examination of martial discourse helps to clarify how British officers presented acquisitions in colonial military contexts. Fundamental to the examples considered here – which include ‘taken in action’, ‘captured’ and ‘spolia opima’ – was an implicit and shared understanding within the British military establishment that artefacts deemed to signify victory and military prowess could be elevated above, and distinguished from those taken during acts of unsanctioned appropriation and looting.

Saving the State: Fine Gael from Collins to Varadkar by Collins (review)

Stephen Collins & Ciara Meehan, Saving the State: Fine Gael from Collins to Varadkar (Dublin: Gill Books, 2020), 469 pages. While many books and articles have been written about Irish political parties and their leaders at particular periods, there have been comparatively few complete histories. The first point to be made about Stephen Collins and Ciara Meehan’s book is that it provides an overview of the history of Fine Gael and fills a gap in the literature. Stephen Collins has been a long-serving political correspondent, latterly with The Irish Times, still active but now retired, who had excellent access to leading politicians. Having an inside track has enabled him to be a penetrating critic of the political scene. Ciara Meehan is currently a Reader in History at the University of Hertfordshire, who has specialised in the history of Fine Gael in its earlier decades. The narrative pre-1970, which accounts for about a quarter of the book, is coolly historical, whereas the post-1970 period has a feel of having been observed and commented on at close quarters. Understandably, no sympathetic historian of Fine Gael wants to start in 1933, the year it was formed under the transitory leadership of Eoin O’ Duffy, a maverick in uniform whose choice was a serious mistake that took a long time to live down. Nevertheless, notwithstanding other elements, it is legitimate to regard Fine Gael as being largely the successor party to Cumann na nGhaedheal, underlined by the resumption of the leadership by W T Cosgrave in 1934. As the authors admit, the invocation of Michael Collins in the Fine Gael pantheon of great leaders, reflected in the title of the book, is ‘a problematic, selective interpretation of the party’s history. Collins was dead almost eight months before Cumann na nGaedheal was founded and more than a decade before Fine Gael was created’. If Collins was going to be incorporated in the title (in preference to Cosgrave, whose merits never included charismatic appeal), perhaps both Collins and the pre-1922 Sinn Féin party, from which both ‘civil war’ parties sprang, would have benefited from a fuller discussion in the opening chapter. This is particularly the case, given that the first part of the title, Saving the State, clearly alludes in the first instance to the Pro-Treaty government’s success in establishing the Irish Free State, while on its way to winning the civil war. The Collins balance in 1922 is mixed. The issue in dispute was saving the state versus saving the republic, neither yet in existence, but arguably Studies • volume 110 • number 437 116 Spring 2021: Book Reviews as important as either was securing democracy. Dublin Castle was handed over on 16 January to the strongest man on the Irish side, Michael Collins, chairman of the Provisional Government.While the British army’s evacuation was his priority, enough remained to give him vital logistical support at the outbreak of the civil war. The main pitched battles had been won in the first two months before he died, even if there was still a prolonged and destructive rural guerrilla campaign ahead. Collins deserves credit for establishing an unarmed police force, for being the first Minister for Finance, who established the primacy of that department, and for overseeing the drawing up of a constitution, which despite its subsequent British-imposed royalist trimmings contained the essential ingredients of an independent state. On the debit side was his disastrously counter-productive attempt to subvert Northern Ireland, which contributed to the British ultimatum that preceded the civil war, and his repeated postponement of the meeting of the Third Dáil, promptly reversed by the civilian leadership after his death. His legacy to his successors was more problematic than they ever publicly admitted. Establishing a democracy and the primacy of a government elected by the people in the aftermath of the Irish revolution was not as straightforward as it looks in retrospect. While the underground administration established by the Dáil was vitally important, the ultimate decision-making power was more with the army, Michael Collins and Richard Mulcahy on the one side, the likes of Rory O’ Connor and Liam Lynch on the other...

Promoting Environmental Sustainability Through Guerrilla Marketing

Environment becomes major concern for all countries throughout the world since Sustainable Development Goals were promoted. However the target is impossible to achieve without awareness and participation of the public. Promoting environmental sustainability is difficult and costly, therefore a breakthrough is required. The concept of guerrilla marketing has been widely used and recognized as low cost, but effective marketing strategy, therefore it is also an appropriate innovative way of promoting environmental sustainability in public area. This study explores the successful application of guerrilla marketing for promoting environmental sustainability around the world. Three case studies were chosen to figure out how it works. The successful applications confirm that guerrilla campaign for sustainability needs element of humour, uniqueness, sensation, creativity, surprise and education. Both profit and non-profit organizations can achieve their goal in both effective and efficient way when they know how to apply guerrilla marketing properly

Comparison of influence of selected viral advertising attributes on shopping behavior of Millennials – empirical study

The study aims to evaluate the impact of selected factors of viral campaigns on Millennials customers’ consumer behavior. This goal was achieved in two steps: in the first step, the authors determined the impact of selected attributes on purchasing behavior in general, and in the second step, they compared the impact of the selected research campaigns – the guerrilla campaign of the company 4KA and the viral campaign of the company ABSOLUT. The inputs to the analyses were obtained through answers from 360 respondents, which completed the questionnaire on a sample of Millennials customers generation (1975–2000) – social generation, which collaborate and cooperate, expect technology to simply work for adventure and passionate about values (Smith, Nichols, 2015). The survey part of the questionnaire consisted of 8 attributes (Novelty, Relevance, Aesthetics, Clarity, Humor, Emotion arousal, Surprise, Design, Purchase intention). Data were collected based on participants’ availability and their will to participate in the questionnaire and quota selection. The PLS PM method was used to assess the impact, and the bootstrap-based parametric method was used to assess the difference in the impact. One of the most important findings is that attributes such as Novelty, Relevance, Humor, and Surprise significantly affect purchasing behavior. Concerning the company 4KA, significant impacts were seen in Relevance and Surprise, and with the company ABSOLUT, significant impacts were seen in Relevance, Humor, and Surprise. When analyzing the difference in the impact, there were no significant differences between the campaigns. Acknowledgment This article is one of the partial outputs under the scientific research grant VEGA 1/0694/20, VEGA 1/0609/19.

“Aspects of an anti-Trump guerrilla campaign”

Abstract During the 2016 presidential election debates, Donald Trump became the subject of a guerrilla campaign initiated by the anarchist group Indicline, through which five grotesque nude statues of the Republican candidate were installed in various cities in the United States. The message was not accidental considering that nude photos of Melania Trump from the beginning of her modelling career were re-published simultaneously. Through aesthetic antithesis, the image of the naked body was supposed to stigmatize the couple in public perception, starting from an artificial reality created in the everyday landscape, but which had to become viral in the online environment.

POVSTANIE PKK/KCK V ROKOCH 2015-2016 V TURECKU --- Z hôr do mesta a naspäť: Priebeh a poučenia z bojov

The text focuses on the PKK/KCK insurgency in Turkey in 2015-2016. Besides the description of the course of the conflict, the article provides a detailed picture of the urban warfare in southeast Turkey during the selected period. The urban guerrilla campaign of the PKK/KCK was a novelty in the 30-year conflict between the insurgent organization on one side and the Turkish state on the other. The aim is to identify key characteristics and tactical features used by the PKK/KCK and the Turkish security forces respectively. The conclusion of the text brings an analysis of the conflict together with recommendations for urban warfare and the lessons Turkey learned in 2015-2016.

A Cautionary Tale of Urban Media Art: Media-Bait, Planned Censorship and Its Repercussions

How do curatorial initiatives in public spaces balance the critical pursuit of art and the professional ethics of the exhibition context? What are the pros and cons of conducting attention-grabbing guerrilla campaigns versus infiltrating politically sensitive public arenas with long-term initiatives? What happens when corporate sponsors of art become trapped in the battlefield of art-fueled media controversy? This article expands on such inquiries by analyzing the collision of two artistic urban interventions, Open Sky Project and the Countdown Machine campaign—a collision that took place within the delicate political context of Hong Kong in 2016.

Victories from Insurgency: Re‐Negotiating Housing, Community Control, and Citizenship at the Margins

AbstractThis article considers how insurgent campaigns for housing the poor in New York City and Chicago succeeded in engaging the local state, non‐profits and financial institutions in the creation of community land trusts. These campaigns had long arcs in which victories and losses built from each other, neither as permanent as they initially seemed. The campaigns moved iteratively between spaces of “invited citizenship” (courtrooms, planning committees) and “invented” spaces of collective action (property takeovers). They found their greatest success when, exploiting state incapacity to defend abandoned property, they elicited a degree of complicity from local governments in their takeovers of housing and land. The article thus contests dichotomised accounts of social movements that oppose losses to victories, cooptation to resistance, and movements to institutions. Instead, we call for situated and dynamic accounts of insurgent practice, capable of theorising the long, messy, co‐constituted evolution of political contexts and popular struggle.

Ireland: rebellion and counter-insurgency, 1848–1867

ABSTRACT The period 1848 to 1867 witnessed what could be regarded as a very small-scale insurgency campaign in Ireland, waged by agrarian groups; the Whiteboys and Ribbonmen. 1848 and 1867 witnessed rebellions by the Young Irelanders and Fenians, which proved to be small-scale and of short duration but the British government had prepared for a nationwide counter-insurgency campaign. The government relied heavily on the militarised Irish Constabulary but in 1848 and 1867 troops were used in large numbers and there were concerns about how they could be best concentrated to meet the envisaged threat.

Civil Military Relation and Stabilization in Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), Pakistan

&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; The importance of civil military relations assumes seminal importance in ensuring the success of all phases of a counter insurgency campaign. In the true tradition of the Clausewitzian dictum that war is the continuation of policy and vice versa; Pakistan Army has been employed as a matter of policy in counter insurgency operations in the erstwhile tribal areas. They have also been used in the stabilization operations to bring about normality in the insurgency ridden areas. In fact the employment of Pakistan Army in the stabilization process defies any previous example in any other country. In all phases of the conflict cycle, the military has worked hand in glove with its civilian counterparts. The civil-military coordination (CIMIC) in the insurgency ridden areas has taken place within the framework of the established ground rules of an organized counter insurgency campaign. It would not be unfair to say that the return to normality in the erstwhile FATA has only been possible because of a well-knit CIMIC architecture. This paper briefly explicates the salient points of the CIMIC aspect of the counter and post-insurgency part of the operations in the conflict zones and highlights the importance of this aspect of dealing with insurgencies.&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D;

Cosmopolitanizing Colonial Memories in Germany

Cosmopolitanizing Colonial Memories in Germany

How they joined? Militants and informers in the armed conflict in Donbas

ABSTRACTThe effectiveness of recruitment strategies is crucial for sustainability of any insurgent campaign. This paper identifies eight mechanisms used to encourage overt and covert participation in the armed conflict in Donbas and shows that they varied depending on the type of service expected from a recruit. It relies on the original dataset compiled from studying 798 court cases of insurgents and informers convicted in Ukrainian courts in the period from October 2014 to March 2017. The paper finds that militants were more responsive to contractual or hierarchical mechanisms of recruitment, while informers who provided cover support were more likely to join through ideological appeals or activation of prior social ties.