Political Insurgency Research Articles

“This Independent Fight We Are Making Is Local”: The Election of 1920 and Electoral Politics in Black Baltimore

In 1920, William Ashbie Hawkins, an esteemed lawyer and veteran of the struggle for civil rights, became the first African American to run for the U.S. Senate in Maryland. Hawkins’s independent campaign reflected a growing political insurgency among African Americans in the local Republican Party which built upon a longer tradition of independent political action with roots in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. For black Baltimoreans, this movement was part of a plan to force white Republicans to acquiesce to black demands revealing fluidity in political activity on the local level. Although African Americans may have identified and registered as Republicans, party affiliation did not prevent them from building and sustaining independent political movements on the local level to advance a civil rights agenda.

“War of Position”: Liberal Interregnum and the Emergent Ideologies

What are the leading forces and ideas that are shaping our age? In the West, a decade of financial disruption, austerity, and stagnant wages has produced a popular rejection of market fundamentalism that prevailed for over forty years. Mass immigration and multiculturalism have contributed to rapid changes in both family and community life that leave many people feeling dispossessed or even humiliated. Unresponsive government is exacerbating people’s sense of powerlessness and anger. The revolt against the status quo is fuelling a political insurgency against the establishment that replaces the old opposition of left versus right with a similarly simplistic dichotomy pitting the people against the elites. We are witnessing the failure of dualistic thinking and this will not be resolved by substituting one binary for another. Our contemporary conjuncture is such a period of interregnum and a war of position between the hitherto hegemonic ideology of liberalism and its populist rivals. The popular revolt against liberalism, which is driving the political insurgency across the West, highlights the collapse of the authority of the professional political class dominated by liberals. In what follows I shall argue that the emergent ideologies which are vying for hegemony are hyper-liberalism, nationalist traditionalism, and tech utopianism. All of them are variously anti-humanist, to which one can oppose updated versions of one-nation conservatism and ethical socialism. Before setting out the unfolding ‘war of position,’ I will first explore the new anti-humanism that underpins the main ideological movements.

Geopolitics and Oil, Insurgent Politics, Nuclear Politics, Basing Politics, and Norm Politics

This issue launches the third volume of the Journal of Global Security Studies. It begins with an article by Cullen Hendrix arguing that geopolitics conditioned the oil curse. Particularly, he claims that the negative impact oil production has on a country's democratic tendencies is less a timeless result of market dynamics and more a particular consequence of geopolitics in the transition from the Cold War. His reanalysis of data and case examinations of Azerbaijan and Georgia provide compelling evidence supporting both the magnitude of oil's post–Cold War effect and the logic of his claims. The next two articles look at the politics of insurgent groups. Rebecca Best and Navin Bapat examine the way that infighting among insurgents can lead to commitment problems that frustrate government-insurgent negotiations. Using game theory logic alongside case studies of the Nigerian government's negotiations with MEND and Boko Haram, respectively, they spell out the logic behind some rebel intransigence.

Challenges to the Western Liberal Order: The End of ‘the West’?

The liberal order that prevailed in the West after the end of the Second World War has recently been challenged from within as much as by external forces. The liberal internationalism and liberal democratic politics that defined the idea of 'The West' is now threatened on several fronts: by insurgent politics, not least the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom; by economic and ideological challenges to its role as the singular paradigm of globalization; and most recently by unilateralism from the present incumbent of the White House. Turbulent politics raises serious questions about the capacity of the western liberal order to survive. Some commentators assert that to claim this is 'crisis' is exaggeration. Yet there is a case to answer.

Traditional Folk Media: Its Importance, Awareness and Attitude towards Drug Abuse among Hmar Youth in Dima Hasao District of Assam

Traditional folk media are indigenous media form based on sound, images and sign languages. It exists in the form of folk lore, folk tale, dance, song, drama puppetry, folk art customs traditions, celebration, festivals and so on. It emerged from the needs of the various caste, communities and linguistic and ethnic groups, hence deeply associated with the grass root culture and social practices. When information or awareness is given to the native people, they feel very easy to understand or know when it is given in their own traditional media. Hmar is a tribal community mostly inhabited in Dima Hasao district of Assam. Earlier, this district badly suffered from terrorism, which resulted in an increase in illegal activities and drug abuse. This research paper is an attempt to understand how the native and uneducated people of the villages would be given education as well as awareness against drug abuse in order to stop it. The study is carried out among the Hmar youth of Umrangsuo with population of 78 individuals and Hmunthazao with population of 65 individuals. Apart from political conflicts and insurgency, these people are one of the most venerable groups for HIV-AIDS, human trafficking and drug abuse. It has been observed by many groups and government organisations that tribal population of the Dima Hasao District of Assam is suffering from the problem of drug addiction. This paper is an attempt to understand the importance of traditional folk media to stop or create awareness in the usage of drug abuse among the youth. This study is based on primary data from selected villages of Dima Hasao District. Primary data were collected using questionnaire, schedules and personal interview. Purposive sampling method was applied to collect data.

When is the Time of Revolution? Critical Reflections on Political Insurgency

AbstractWe tend to imagine revolution as a vivid tableau of uprisings and armed conflicts. Much less notice is taken of the complex layers of meaning that shape our understanding of these events: why some are seen as just expressions of a popular will, while others are condemned as wild disruptions of political order. A critical understanding of politics must grapple with these subtle, often unnoticed normative issues. This essay tries to understand some of the processes that create political normativity, investigating the way revolutionary movements use time to endow themselves with normative value. I sketch a genealogy of revolution across three centuries, noting changes in its meaning, observing the rise of discourse as an important mode of revolutionary activity, and tracing a shifting mosaic of temporalities that are politicized in important ways. Time is instrumentalized to justify political insurgency in this history. Time, in short, becomes a tool of revolution.

Compressing Politics in Counterinsurgency (COIN): Implications for COIN Theory from India’s Northeast

Counterinsurgency (COIN) has long been recognised as a political phenomenon, but current theoretical understandings of politics in COIN reflect ideal types, overlooking the depth and complexity of the politics of insurgency and COIN. Drawing from India’s experience in its northeastern region, this article argues that COIN theory overlooks the political agency and multiplicity of actors, as well as overlooking the fundamentally political scope of interactions that take place between them. It calls upon COIN theorists to begin to map out this complex picture by urging greater integration between academics and practitioners studying COIN and theoretical inputs from wider academic disciplines.

Inside the Karen Insurgency: Explaining Conflict and Conciliation in Myanmar’s Changing Borderlands

Since 2012 Myanmar’s oldest ethnic rebel group, the Karen National Union (KNU), has sought for considerable rapprochement with the government. To many, this seemed to be the direct outcome of wider political transition in Myanmar. This article proposes an alternative explanation. Based on extensive field research and an emerging literature on armed groups, it demonstrates that the group’s rapprochement with the government was driven by leadership struggles between two rival factions within the KNU. At the core of this contestation are shifting internal power relations, which resulted from military pressures and geopolitical transformations in the Myanmar-Thai borderlands. These findings point to significant shortcomings of Myanmar’s peace process. They also contribute to the field of Conflict and Security Studies with much needed primary source data on the internal politics of insurgency, which shows how dynamics of civil war are driven by an interplay between forces on different levels of analysis.

Uprising Nuances: Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan´s Social Mobilizations and Order Maintenance

Social mobilization in Central Asia comes in a rare form, alongside political, economic, social and ethnical overtones, aligned with post-Sovietic difficulties and dependencies. Although standing as independent nations, economic instabilities, political insurgencies and social inequalities are triggering circumstances of uprisings in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgystan. As countries still struggling to sustain and perpetrate democratic values, social mobilization resurface as a tool to establish political change. However, although understanding that the range of protests are regional and do not offer its nations a challenge concerning national security, the casualties and government accommodations were not as peaceful and organized as it was expected. The participation of the international community, specially playing a role in cooperating and co-opting with Central Asian insurgencies, is a crucial for the understanding of these protests as a way of its population to come in aid of their own political standards and voicing their grievances towards its ruling elites. Nevertheless, the necessity of social mobilization in Central Asian countries arrive in a time and place where its political standards can do no longer curb its dependencies and sufficiently generates instabilities that are most certainly, critical.Key-Words: International relations, Central Asia, social mobilization, political instability.

Spirituality and social work practice at historically Black colleges and universities

ABSTRACTIn 2011 the Council on Social Work Education Religion and Spirituality Work Group was organized “to promote social workers’ knowledge, values, and skills for ethical and effective practice that takes into account the diverse expressions of religion and spirituality among clients and their communities.” In this article we discuss how the mission, charters, and goals of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) addressed the domains of religion and spirituality from their inception. More specifically, the focus of this discussion is the epistemology of spirituality and religion at HBCUs from historical and contemporary perspectives. Content on the exploration of the related themes, religion and spirituality, as manifested in the curriculum, cultural milieu, and social environment of HBCUs will be described. Additionally, we document the role and influence of the African American community, church, and political insurgency. These forces, coupled with the inability or unwillingness of established social service agencies and other social institutions to address issues of inequality and marginalization of African Americans, influenced the essence of the content offered in HBCU schools of social work. Spirituality, advocacy for material aid, and critical race theory are themes that were prevalent in HBCUs curriculum. Finally we show that this “unique HBCU curriculum” was brought about primarily by environmental factors such as racism, segregation, and financial uncertainty, leading to what Du Bois referred to as a double-consciousness.

What has African Cultural Studies done for you lately? Autobiographical and global considerations of a floating signifier

This essay poses and attempts to answer the central question: ‘What does African Cultural Studies do?’ It takes an autobiographical approach to address the genealogy, status quo and the potential future of the floating signifier that is African Cultural Studies. It unpacks and multiplies African Cultural Studies and contextualises it as a form of African studies and as both interventionist in and contributory to transnational cultural studies. African Cultural Studies’ marginality in the global discourse is rearticulated as both a positioning of disempowerment on the one hand and one of generative and insurgent politics on the other. Stressing the need for continental and diasporic Africans to self-identify issues to be addressed (in place of Eurocentric, imposed preoccupations), the essay identifies as examples the always already complex nature of identity and belonging (and the irony of emergent xenophobia); continental and diasporic relations that trouble the taken-for-grantedness of what constitutes Africa(ns), and queer Africa in the face of institutionalised homophobia. Whether local nativist or globally engaged approaches are taken, the essay concludes that African Cultural Studies ought to be self-reflexively dedicated not only to doing Cultural Studies but to what the doing of African Cultural Studies does for Africa(ns) and for Transnational Cultural Studies.

A Hercules in the Cradle: War, Money, and the American State, 1783–1867 by Max M. Edling

Reviewed by: A Hercules in the Cradle: War, Money, and the American State, 1783–1867 by Max M. Edling William H. Bergmann (bio) A Hercules in the Cradle: War, Money, and the American State, 1783–1867. By Max M. Edling. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Pp. 336. $45.00 cloth) With A Hercules in the Cradle, Max Edling expands on some central themes he developed in his first monograph, notably the centrality of war and finance to early American state-building. His latest [End Page 243] book explores the fiscal institutions and fiscal politics of the federal government that helped propel the United States through several wars ultimately to emerge as a burgeoning state of the first order at the close of the Civil War. With occasional forays into comparative analysis, Edling argues that “more than most other nineteenth-century governments, the national government of the United States became unusually good at finding the money it needed to pay for its territorial acquisitions, its military, and its wars” (p. 13). Among the financial challenges facing the young nation were the extensive debts of the state and national governments and the unwillingness of American citizens to tolerate high taxes, which they believed threatened the security of their property. Edling traces the origins of the first fiscal regime that used powers embedded in the Constitution to erect a national revenue administration modeled on European strategies for debt management. Students familiar with this transformation will see few surprises here, as Edling describes the Federalist consolidation of the debt and its transformation into long-term securities with the interest paid by customs duties. It is at this point that Edling begins to provide a new understanding of American fiscal history by revealing how federal consolidation allowed state governments to reduce taxes sharply to pre–Revolutionary War levels during the 1790s, which paralleled significant declines in political insurgency. He then demonstrates continuity rather than change across shifts in party power. Not only did the Jefferson and Madison administrations carry out Federalist plans to retire the Revolutionary debt, they took on new debts to fund the Louisiana Purchase and go to war against Britain. Indeed, through the core of the book, Edling produces granular analysis of fiscal strategies to demonstrate convincingly that it “was the self-proclaimed enemies of central government and public indebtedness, politicians in the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian antietatist tradition, who made the most extensive use of the federal government and its capacity to raise money in order to realize policy objectives” (p. 14). [End Page 244] Indeed, Albert Gallatin established through “a process of trial and error . . . a formula for raising loans that proved to be both workable and durable and served as the model for financing both the Mexican War and the early stages of the Civil War” (p. 126). This formula included raising customs duties—thus keeping internal taxes low—and selling temporary bank loans, short-term Treasury notes, and long-term securities. Only when the enormous costs of the Civil War outpaced the capacity of the loan market to support it did Congress turn to direct taxation and the creation of legal tender notes (greenbacks). Moreover, northerners demonstrated a willingness to accept a new tax regime, initially to preserve the Union and then as a permanent solution to support the much larger government that existed in the aftermath of war. A Hercules in the Cradle is an important and readable book that recontextualizes political and policy debates through the Civil War by employing skillful analysis of enigmatic financial records. He also carves out new historiographic territory, bridging arguments about the strength of the federal government that have largely focused on the bookends of the period. For his comparisons to the Mexican and British financial strategies and capacities, he relies primarily on secondary sources and he is not as critical of those historiographies as he might be. But this is not a meaningful detraction from what is otherwise a significant contribution to our understanding of the early American national state. William H. Bergmann WILLIAM H. BERGMANN is an assistant professor of history at Slippery Rock University and author of The American National State and the Early West (2012). Copyright © 2016...

Compatible cultural configuration: One secret of international project management

Six decades long planned economy of Nepal passed through a large number of socio-economic development projects, which heavily relied on financial and technical assistance of advanced countries and international organizations. However, the outcomes of the development projects could not address the primary concern of the people, and eventually the entire efforts of development resulted in political insurgency, economic turmoil, and chaos in the country. One of the main reasons behind the scenario was incompatibility between the development project specifications and the socio-cultural configuration in the country. This study reviewed the attempts of six decades of developmental project management perspectives. An assessment of the execution pattern of the projects provided insight about the services composition in the projects at one part, and an effort of identifying social processes, events and festivals helped to describe the cultural configuration and value system of the society at the other part. An analysis of the project specifications indicated a wide incompatibility in composition of the services in relation to the projects. The value system, cultural configuration, and outcomes of the projects indicated a high level of importance of compatibility between project specification and cultural configuration. This paper concludes with determination and description of cultural configuration and services composition that are taken as an integral part of international project management.

The role of lifelong learning on political stability and non violence: evidence from Africa

Purpose– Education as a weapon in the fight against conflict and violence remains widely debated in policy and academic circles. Against the background of growing political instability in Africa and the central role of the knowledge economy in twenty-first century development, this paper provides three contributions to existing literature. The purpose of this paper is to assess how political stability/non-violence is linked to the incremental, synergy and lifelong learning effects of education.Design/methodology/approach– The authors define lifelong learning as the combined knowledge acquired during primary, secondary and tertiary education. Principal component analysis is used to reduce the dimensions of educational and political indicators. An endogeneity robust dynamic system Generalized Methods of Moments is used for the estimations.Findings– The authors establish three main findings. First, education is a useful weapon in the fight against political instability. Second, there is an incremental effect of education in the transition from secondary to tertiary schools. Third, lifelong learning also has positive and synergy effects. This means that the impact of lifelong learning is higher than the combined independent effects of various educational levels. The empirical evidence is based on 53 African countries for the period 1996-2010.Practical implications– A plethora of policy implications are discussed, inter alia: how the drive towards increasing the knowledge economy through lifelong learning can be an effective tool in the fight against violence and political insurgency in Africa.Originality/value– As the continent is nursing knowledge economy ambitions, the paper is original in investigating the determinants of political stability/non-violence from three dimensions of education attainment: the incremental, the lifelong learning and a synergy effect.

Book Review: More than Maoism: Politics and Policies of Insurgency in South Asia and Ordinary People, Extraordinary Violence

Robin Jeffrey, Ronojoy Sen and Pratima Sen, eds, More than Maoism: Politics and Policies of Insurgency in South Asia. New Delhi: Manohar. 2012. 470 pages. ₹ 1,250. Chitralekha, Ordinary People, Extraordinary Violence. New Delhi: Routledge. 2012. 348 pages. ₹ 795.

Working in a South African Politics Department During the 1980s: Recollections

This memoir opens with a discussion of the author's recruitment as a junior lecturer in African government at Wits in 1978, exploring his motivations in leaving Britain to work in South Africa. Politics was taught in ways at Wits that were distinctive for their theoretical orientation and empirical content as one of the major concerns was to consider how people without power act politically. Teaching was shaped by the wider background of national insurgent politics in which many students arrived at Wits with a deep distrust of pedagogic authority. In other ways academic work was shaped by this politics and the second part of this article explores the author's engagement as an expert witness working for defence lawyers in political trials. A concluding section addresses the degree to which these experiences were typical or exceptional at South African universities during the decade.

A Question of Izzat: Honor, Shame, and Ownership Among Sunni Muslims in South Asia and the British Diaspora

This paper is part of a larger project that looks at Asian writers in the English-speaking world. It focuses on literature representing British-Muslim identities in relation to post-9/11 and post-7/7 debates on national identity, cultural and religious expression, and the future of multiculturalism in Britain. While the postcolonial paradigm offers a rich site for examining the long-term consequences of colonialism in relation to first- and secondgeneration writers, the complex politics of location in recent British-South Asian fiction points to the emergence of a new set of positionalities. I argue that much contemporary minority writing has come to reflect a significantly altered context in which secularism, cosmopolitanism and hybridization are being challenged by a politics of faith and insurgency—a politics that is at once defined and contested within specific communities and along transnational lines. At the fulcrum of these political debates spurred by minority writing are questions of honor and shame articulated on the physical location and moral evaluation of women in diasporic communities.

Globalised rebellion: the Darfur insurgents and the world

ABSTRACTThis article is concerned with the rebellion in Darfur as a way to illustrate the politics of insurgency in the era of globalisation. We first show how the Darfur rebels have projected their struggle onto the world stage, before examining the effects that this has engendered. On the one hand, Darfur's global profile solidified the rebels' cause and co-opted international actors in support of it. This translated into real leverage for the rebels, and it constrained the Sudanese government by reducing its ability to use brute force. At the same time, internationalisation encouraged the Darfur rebels to make maximalist demands at the expense of articulating a broader political vision addressing the root causes of conflict. Moreover, the substitution of local legitimacy for international connections lowered the barriers of entry for new groups and thus promoted fragmentation. The combination of these effects makes for intractable conflict scenarios, the current situation in Darfur being a case in point.

The Kurdish question in the context of Turkey and Middle East politics: an interview with Noam Chomsky

This interview was conducted by Dilan Yildirim on January 22nd, 2013. Dilan Yildirim is a Ph.D. student in Anthropology at Harvard University, also pursuing a secondary degree in Critical Media Practice at the same university. Geographically located in the Kurdish-Qizilbash region of Turkey, her research is concerned with questions of political violence, state formation, insurgent politics, politics of space, landscapes of memory, narrative theory and visual anthropology. Dr. Noam Chomsky is one of the preeminent intellectuals of the United States and a worldrenowned linguist. A tireless advocate for peace, he has been writing about and fighting against U.S. imperial polices across the globe for the past four decades. He has been an important critical voice on Kurdish, Palestinian, and other struggles in the Middle East. The Forum editor and Journal editors wish to acknowledge his invaluable contribution to this forum.

Populism in the South revisited: new interpretations and new departures

The Populist Movement was the largest mass movement for political and economic change in the history of the American South until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The Populist Movement in this book is defined as the Farmers' Alliance and the People's Party, as well as the Agricultural Wheel and Knights of Labor in the 1880s and 1890s. The Populists threatened the political hegemony of the white racist southern Democratic Party during populism's high point in the mid-1890s; and the populists threw the New South into a state of turmoilPopulism in the South Revisited: New Interpretations and New Departures brings together nine of the best new works on the populist movement in the South that grapple with several larger themes--such as the nature of political insurgency, the relationship between African Americans and whites, electoral reform, new economic policies and producerism, and the relationship between rural and urban areas--in case studies that center on several states and at the local level. Each essay offers both new research and new interpretations into the causes, course, and consequences of the populist insurgency. One essay analyzes how notions of debt informed the Populist insurgency in North Carolina, the one state where the Populists achieved statewide power, while another analyzes the Populists' failed attempts in Grant Parish, Louisiana, to align with African Americans and Republicans to topple the incumbent Democrats. Other topics covered include populist grassroots organizing with African Americans to stop disfranchisement in North Carolina; the Knights of Labor and the relationship with populism in Georgia; organizing urban populism in Dallas, Texas; Tom Watson's relationship with Midwest Populism; the centrality of African Americans in populism, a comparative analysis of Populism across the Deep South, and how the rhetoric and ideology of populism impacted socialism and the Garvey movement in the early twentieth century. Together these studies offer new insights into the nature of southern populism and the legacy of the Peoples' Party in the South.