Military Wing Research Articles

U.S. Military Humanitarianism and the United Nations

While the United Nations (U.N.) is typically seen as a major humanitarian actor—that is, an organization committed to alleviating human suffering and improving human welfare, it is not often thought of as a military power. But that is one of the many functions that the U.N. has adopted since its origin in 1945. For over seventy years, the U.N. Secretariat—the international bureaucracy responsible for the U.N. organization's executive and administrative functions—has conducted long-term expeditionary military operations across the globe in the form of peacekeeping and observer missions. The military wing of U.N. operations has only continued to grow in the twenty-first century. As of July 2023, 87,544 peacekeepers were deployed on active operations. And that number is lower than in the recent past, down from a height of 107,805 in April 2015.1 During that time, only the United States has regularly maintained more foreign-deployed forces than the U.N.

The Failure to Predict the Hamas Attack: Insights from Artificial Intelligence

The failure to anticipate Hamas’s brutal attack on October 7 is multilayered and will be investigated for years to come. However, the preliminary consensus has blamed the konceptcia, the Hebrew word for paradigm, that guided the intelligence and security forces. With the advent of AI and its complex search algorithms, the resultant paradigm was shaped by an input imbalance that depicted Hamas transitioning from its jihadist past to a rational governance player. The politicization of the academic and lay Middle East discourse legitimized resistance to Israel, feeding the bias. Equally, the virtual absence of understanding of the military wing of Hamas and its role in Iran’s Axis of Resistance deepened the imbalance.

Operation al-Aqsa Flood: A Rupture in the History of the Palestinian Resistance and Its Implications

This paper argues that the al-Aqsa Flood operation launched by the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades –the military wing of Hamas– on the morning of October 7 has led to a psychological and epistemological rupture in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and Middle East politics as the operation marked a paradigm shift in the philosophy of the resistance. The infiltration of al-Qassam into the occupied territories by land, sea, and air was a clear sign of a change in the strategy of the resistance to continue the active struggle against the aggressive expansionism and aggression of the Zionist Israeli government. In this context, the study tries to frame Operation al-Aqsa Flood and analyze the dimensions of the rupture. Besides this, it will also outline the possible impact of the operation on global and regional politics, considering that the ongoing process will change the political balance in the Middle East.

The Realignment of Poqo as the PAC: A Remedial to South Africa’s Apartheid and Post-Apartheid Liberation Historiography

Post-apartheid South Africa’s liberation historiography has been constructed and curated in a manner that influences public and collective memory to assume that only one specific liberation movement (the African National Congress) was involved in the South African liberation struggle. The Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) and its military wing, the Azanian People’s Liberation Army (APLA), have largely been given perfunctory attention or ignored because of bias and the selective politics of memory. In instances where the history of PAC or APLA is given some attention pre and post-apartheid, the focus has been mainly on uPoqo as the paramilitary wing of the PAC, or on the leadership conflicts within it, at the expense of interrogating other important aspects within the movement. This article explores the development of the term Poqo, mapping its roots from the shorthand for “Umbutho wama-Afrika Poqo.” It then shows that the prohibition of the PAC in 1960 after the Sharpeville massacre led the movement to operate under the auspices of Poqo, an underground name. Furthermore, this article demonstrates that Poqo was not a paramilitary wing of the PAC but is/was the PAC itself in another form. Ultimately, this historical and historiographical contribution seeks to achieve a re-alignment of Poqo in South Africa’s post-apartheid history writing and public memory.

The Sharpeville Massacre, Violence, and the Struggles of the African National Congress, 1960-1990

During the long process of decolonization in South Africa, the Sharpeville Massacre was a turning point for the African National Congress' decision to begin using violence for the internal resistance to apartheid. Nelson Mandela and the ANC reacted to the Sharpeville Massacre by shifting their methods to incorporate the practicality of anti-colonial violence. In his 1964 "I Am Prepared to Die" speech, Mandela acknowledged that peaceful resistance was met with brutal force, and this could not go on. The ANC continued its strong non-violent resistance while also developing a military wing and conducting sabotage. This essay brings into question the realities of non-violence in the face of violent oppression.

1980 DARBESİ’NİN BATI ÜLKELERİNDEKİ YANKILARI

Türkiye’de 12 Eylül 1980 tarihinde yaşanan askeri müdahale ile yeni bir dönem başladı. Bu müdahale ile beraber ülkenin siyasi, ekonomik, sosyal ve kültürel hayatında önemli değişimler yaşandı. Yaşanan olaylar, getirilen sansür ve yasaklar gündemi meşgul etti. Ülke içinde yaşanan bu durumun dış politikaya nasıl yansıyacağı konusu en önemli gündem maddelerinden biri oldu. Milli Güvenlik Konseyi, Türkiye’nin içinde yer aldığı ittifaklara ve antlaşmalara bağlı kalacağını kamuoyuna duyurması üzerine gözler Batı ülkelerinin yapacağı açıklamalara çevrildi. Batı ülkelerinin, Türkiye’de yaşanan askeri müdahaleye karşı ılımlı bir yaklaşım sergilediği görüldü. Askerin seçilmiş hükümete müdahale etmek zorunda kaldığını savunan benzer nitelikte açıklamalar yapıldı. Bu açıklamaların yanı sıra dış politikada öne çıkan bir diğer önemli başlık Kıbrıs konusu oldu. Özellikle de Kıbrıs Rum yönetimi ile Kıbrıs Türk Federe Devleti arasında yapılacak görüşmelerin önemi üzerinde duruldu. Diğer önemli konu ise Türkiye’nin Yunanistan’ın NATO askeri kanadına dönmesi konusunda sergileyeceği tavrın nasıl olacağı sorusu oldu. Son önemli konu ise Türkiye’de yaşanan terör olaylarına karşı alınacak önlemlerdi. Alınacak önlemlerin yeterli olup olmayacağı batı ülkeleri tarafından takip edileceği açıklandı. 
 Bu çalışma, 1980 Darbesi’nin Batı ülkelerindeki yankılarını ele alarak incelemeyi amaçlamıştır. Bu amaçla Türkiye’de yaşanan 1980 darbesinin Batı ülkelerinde nasıl yankı bulduğu, dönemin süreli yayın organları incelenerek anlaşılmaya ve açıklanmaya çalışılmıştır.

Apartheid’s black soldiers: Un-national wars and militaries in Southern Africa

In his recent book, Apartheid’s black soldiers: Un-national wars and militaries in Southern Africa, Lennart Bolliger examines the history of black soldiers from Namibia and Angola who served in the security forces of apartheid South Africa from 1975 until 1989. He focuses specifically on the three all-male units that consisted predominantly of black troops that were commanded by white officers – 32 Battalion of the South African Defence Force (SADF), 101 Battalion of the South West Africa Territorial Force (SWATF), and the infamous paramilitary police unit, Koevoet. During this period, these soldiers primarily fought against the People’s Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN) – the military wing of the Namibian liberation movement, the South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO) – in the anticolonial struggle in Namibia, as well as the post-independence civil war waged in Angola. The book builds on some earlier works by Bolliger, as well as another work co-authored with Will Gordon.

Affluent and Well-Educated? Analyzing the Socioeconomic Backgrounds of Fallen Palestinian Islamist Militants

Existing literature argues that the militants and suicide bombers of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) come from relatively advantaged socioeconomic and educational backgrounds compared to the average Palestinian in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Analyzing 2,448 martyr biographies from Hamas's military wing and PIJ from 1992 to 2012, I argue that these militants reflect Palestinian labor divisions and educational enrollment rates. There is thus little to suggest that Palestinian Islamist militants are recruited from any particular socioeconomic stratum within the wider popula tion. I demonstrate that, instead, kinship and geographic clusters are more significant variables.

Loss of military equipment by the SADF at the Battle at Indungo during the Border War, 31 October 1987

This article takes the form of an investigation regarding the loss of military equipment by the South African Defence Force (SADF) at the Battle at Indungo, in an operation that was assigned the codename Operation Firewood, on 31 October 1987 during the Angolan Border War. The war was waged from 1966 to 1989 in Southern Africa. The case study of Operation Firewood illustrates some of the circumstances under which the SADF lost military equipment in Angola during the war. Operation Firewood was one of more than 300 SADF general operations201 that occurred in Angola. In the final stages of the war, the area north of Cuvelai provided the setting for the launching of Operation Firewood, some 285 kilometres north of the border with South West Africa/Namibia. The aim of this military operation was to eliminate an enemy base that housed elements of the People’s Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN), the military wing of the South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO).

Educating Palestine: Teaching and Learning History under the Mandate

Educating Palestine: Teaching and Learning History under the Mandate

Rebel Leadership and the Specialisation of Rebel Operations

ABSTRACT Rebels groups adopt different organisational structures, emerging in various shapes and sizes. Some rebel groups construct distinct military and political wings, delegating their military and political operations to specialised units. While recent studies have made great strides towards understanding militant groups’ activities on and off the battlefield, the literature has been less attentive to the root causes of the structural arrangements which groups form for these purposes. I argue that rebel leaders’ pre-war military and political experiences shape the structure of the organisations they lead into war. Using original data, I find that differences in leaders’ pre-war military experience, rather than political experience, are associated with discernible probabilities of rebel operational specialisation. In addition to offering practitioners and academics a comparative framework with which to evaluate the patterns of militant leadership, this study demonstrates how leaders wield independent agency over group structure and operations in the civil war environment.

The Military Factor in the Context of the Issue of the Social Support of Nazism in the Weimar Republic

The purpose of the article is to define the role of the military element in the formation of the social prerequisites for the supporting the National Socialist movement during the Weimar Republic in historyography. The novelty of this study lies in indentifying the nature and degree of participation of World War I veterans, servicemen, as well as members of paramilitarist organizations in the development of the NSDAP and its military wing. As a result of the study, the orientation of Nazi propaganda was identified to attract former servicemen as electoral support, to involve both broad strata of employed and representatives of the elite in leadership positions in the ranks of stormtroopers, and some features of the development of relations between the officers of the Reichswehr and the Nazi movement.

Extremism as a threat to the national security of Somalia

Al Shabaab is the largest militant organization fighting to oust the Somali government and the foreign military presence supporting it.1Al-shabab seeks to control the country in order to establish a society based on its rigid interpretation of Shariah law. Although based in Somalia, Al Shabaab also conducts attacks in neighboring countries, notably Kenya. Al Shabaab emerged as an independent organization around December 2006 after breaking away from the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), for which it had served as the military wing. Since the late 2000s, Al Shabaab has had close ties to Al Qaeda and other external extremism groups and has sought to frame the Somali struggle as part of a global jihadist movement. The group has engaged in bombings, suicide attacks, and armed assaults, especially against Somali government targets, private civilians, Christians, diplomats, foreign troops, and nongovernmental organization or aid workers .

Investigating the Outcomes of the Military Wing of The Civil Society in Enforcing Democracy or Cessation

In Hobbes’ Leviathan, he portrays man as a rationally angry and dangerous creature capable of hurting another in order to remain alive. He says human interpersonal relations are mostly characterized by brutality in what he called “Man against man” in order words man is another man’s wolf. According to him human interpersonal relations are substantiated by the fear of bad or sudden death and so, every human seeks for ways to either remain alive or to maintain his status quo. Anger, resentments, protests and violence are clearly part of the human life and one of the reasons every human must be careful to gather his human arsenal in order to deter another from killing him. Man cannot in any way deal with the other without these ingredients ever present in interpersonal human relations. Though pejorative with many negative defects as Hobbes sees it, they have also brought some common good to societies and countries whose governments are experts in crisis management. However, the same is not the case for countries with haughty governments ruled by mostly dictatorships, which underrate their citizens and use the military to deter them from fighting for their rights. This article shall seek to firstly understand the conceptual background of civil society by examining different definitions of what it means. Secondly, it shall look at two fundamental factors that make civil societies very important and powerful for state development as well as destruction, however, will discuss them separately as one will be deeply discussed in the later parts of the study. Thirdly, it shall shallowly review the relationship between the civil society and democracy in Nigeria which will serve as a preview to understand the foreseen projection that the civil society and democracy in tandem engenders development. Secondly, at the core lies the tireless and selfless service of a powerful civil society vis-à-vis to maintain social order, unity, and social cohesion as well as keep the spirit of nationalism aflame. Lastly, this article shall concentrate on the most vital part of the study which is the military wing of civil societies. This study will show that when the civil society organization is pushed to its limits, it has the power to bring no small trouble to their host governments and domestic affairs sometimes crossing international boundaries and leading to serious international security issues and humanitarian crises. To fully understand this part, the study shall stroll through political exclusion, isolation, opportunity, greed and violence as possible incentives to arouse the devastating military wing of the civil society. Furthermore, the most comprehensive and elaborate study to use to explain this will be the analysis of Collier and Hoeffler’s account of civil war studies but this will be mentioned in passing. To avoid auto repetition, an article earlier published by me titled “Investigating the causes of civil wars in Sub-Saharan Africa, Case study: South Sudan and the Central African Republic” shall be cited. More so, this study shall look at carefully localized independent and dependent variables which shall be used in the comparative method to review the verifiable effects of the military wing of the civil society in Cameroon and Burkina Faso.
 “When the enabling factor fails to a haughty government, then civilian enacted military action is the only solution. However, the effects of this civilian enacted military action differs from place to place and there is no assurance of how positively democratic or devastating they could be”
 The independent variables shall be political isolation, political exclusion and polarization. And the dependent variable shall be the democracy and secession.

The Turkish army at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s: from left-wing conspiracy to right-wing coup

This is the first paper in Russian historiography dedicated to the struggle of left and right groups in the Turkish army on the eve of a military coup on March 12, 1971. By 1970, an alliance of leftist intellectuals and officers was formed, led by the editor of the Devrim newspaper, Dogan Avjioglu and one of the organizers of the 1960 coup, a retired lieutenant general Jemal Madanoglu, received the conditional name of the organization of national revolutionaries. The members of the organization sought to approve the socialist system of the bassist type in the country and outlined the number of military coups March 9, 1971. However, the death of one and the opportunist position of two other leaders of the military wing led to the failure of the attempt of a leftist coup. On the contrary, on March 12, 1971, a right-wing military coup took place in Turkey. In the course of subsequent repressions, a powerful blow was dealt to the left groups in the army and in Turkish society as a whole. In an effort to end the repression and achieve consensus in society, moderately leftist forces led by B. Ejevit entered into a coalition with their opponents religious conservatives led by N. Erbakan.

El servicio meteorológico nacional y el nuevo paradigma de los servicios climáticos:

El Servicio Meteorológico Nacional de Argentina (SMN) es una de las instituciones científico-técnicas más importantes del país, su transferencia del ámbito militar a la esfera civil ha disparado mÚltiples transformaciones enmarcadas dentro del autodenominado "nuevo paradigma" que experimenta la institución. El siguiente artículo tiene como objetivo analizar y describir las mÚltiples dimensiones que abarca este cambio - institucionales, socio-culturales, políticas - cristalizadas en la apertura del SMN a la sociedad, teniendo como horizonte su (re)posicionamiento como autoridad meteorológica dentro del entramado social e institucional.

O. R. Tambo in the Period of the ANC’s Illegality

Oliver Reginald Tambo’s life is best known by his association with the African National Congress (ANC) and the struggle for liberation, and as having been the foremost leader of the ANC for most of the period of its illegality. Most accounts, however, do not mention O. R. Tambo’s religious beliefs, and in this they pass off an opportunity to highlight what could have been the source of his individual strength, his spirituality. It is this spirituality that this article seeks to highlight and whose depth it seeks to explore. It aims to show that Tambo’s personal religious beliefs were infused with his political outlook and concludes that this composite belief system provided the strength he exuded throughout his service to the struggle for liberation in South Africa. The article looks at how he related to and influenced those he came into contact with, both inside his organisation, the ANC, its military wing Umkhonto We Sizwe (MK), the broader alliance, and those who were outside his close political realm. It looks at how he exercised his leadership qualities, born of his beliefs, under the pressures thrown up by the struggle, and finally how he grasped the moment at the point of the conclusion of that phase of the struggle. This article is informed by a number of sources, including books written on the subject by scholars, those who shared space with O. R. Tambo, some of his speeches, interviews, and occasionally the author’s own experience as part of the MK contingent from the late 1970s.

The Construction of Containment Anxiety: A Critical Geopolitical Analysis of Turkey’s Military Intervention into Syria

The Turkish Armed Forces successfully executed two consecutive cross-border operations (Euphrates Shield and Olive Branch) in Syria following the failed coup d‘état in 2016. Turkey‘s supposedly traditional ―Kurdophobic‖ reflexes were widely deemed as the motivation behind these operations. However, these assertions are weak when it comes to Turkey‘s relatively harmonious relations with Iraqi Kurdistan and the significant portion of Turkish Kurds‘ endorsement of the incumbent Turkish government. Moreover, the fact that the Turkish government was not a hardliner against the Kurdish-led outlawed Democratic Union Party and its military wing People's Protection Units in the early days of the Syrian Civil War undermines these essentialist and reductionist contentions. This article proposes a geopolitics-driven and more holistic explanation to the Turkish military campaign into Northern Syria. Its objective is to provide a more comprehensive insight into Turkish geopolitical manoeuvres in Syria, to set the contextual and ideational background of the military operations and to present Turkey‘s cognitive horizon for its actions within its vicinity. The article anchors its theoretical basis in the ―critical geopolitics‖ approach in order to place the Turkish intervention into a broader geopolitical context.

Zimbabwe’s Liberation War and the Everyday in Honde Valley, 1975 to 1979

This paper examines the wartime history of Zimbabwe’s Honde Valley, which is located between Inyanga and Mutare, along the Zimbabwe-Mozambique border. It covers the period between 1975 and 1979 when ZANU’s military wing, the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA) opened military bases in Mozambique. We seek to understand how regular or ‘everyday’ practices such as beer brewing, hunting, and other social solidarities highlight the ways in which Honde Valley society functioned beyond the riveting experiences of war. In doing so, the paper deploys the concepts of ‘conviviality’ and ‘the quotidian’ to examine the lives of civilians in wartime. Although Zimbabwe’s liberation war transformed the Honde Valley into a new and bitterly contested frontier, characterised by hardships in ‘Protected Villages’ for instance, civilians were innovative and realigned their lifestyles in response or in opposition to the state's routine controls and guerrilla incursions. The inhabitants of the Honde Valley took advantage of their proximity to the Mozambican border and the existence of relatives and acquaintances in Mozambique to evade the pressures of war in colonial Zimbabwe.

Small Diplomacy: Cultural Cooperation As a Factor Alleviating Societal Tensions. The Case of Lviv and Its Polish Partner Cities

ABSTRACTPoland and Ukraine share a long and complicated history with some really dramatic events which still overshadow relations between both nations, especially those which took place in Volhynia and other areas with a mixed Polish–Ukrainian population during 1943–1945 when soldiers of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), the military wing of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists – Bandera faction (OUN-B), planned and carried out the extermination of the Polish population. What is more, the nationalists killed several hundred Ukrainians as all manifestations of friendliness towards Poles were regarded as acts of collaboration with the enemy and a betrayal of national ideas. The main difference between the approach of Polish and Ukrainian historians is the terminology which they use to describe and evaluate those events. The endless public discussions, often accompanied by negative emotions, continues to heat up the historical debate. The Volhynia massacre, as it is often called in Poland, or the Volhynian tragedy, the term used by more moderate Ukrainian researchers, still overshadows Polish–Ukrainian relations. The echoes of this historical conflict (some historians claim that the Volhynian events were a continuation of the Polish-Ukrainian war of 1918–1919 for control over Lviv and Eastern Galicia) also exert a significant influence on the political decisions made by both countries with regard to commemoration of the victims – for indeed, they have become an element of the Polish–Ukrainian conflict of memory. During the communist period, there was no opportunity to talk openly about the history and conflict that divided the two nations. Nowadays, there are many initiatives aimed at reconstructing the past and building a new future. Many of these are inspired by culture and take advantage of its various forms. This article discusses detailed research on how city twinning and cultural cooperation can become a tool of small diplomacy. The case of Ukrainian Lviv and its six Polish partner cities has been studied.