People's War Research Articles

The Futility of Force and the Preservation of Power: British Strategic Failure in America, 1780-83

The first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and the commander have to make is [to] establish ... the kind of war on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its nature. This is the first of all strategic questions and the most comprehensive. (1) --Carl von Clausewitz In the spring of 1763 Great Britain, basking in the warm afterglow of decisive victory in the Seven Years War, presided over a vast and unprecedented global empire. The small island nation seemingly, and rather suddenly, found itself without peer--enjoying a level of military and political hegemony not seen since the days of the Roman Empire. (2) It was a unique, albeit fleeting, position. In the span of a mere twenty years, the world's preeminent global power, despite enjoying a considerable advantage in almost every conceivable category used to calculate military potential, found itself disgraced and defeated by a start-up nation possessing a markedly inferior conventional military capability. Crippled by a grossly burgeoning national debt, diplomatically isolated, and politically divided at home, the North Ministry became embroiled in a protracted and unpopular global war that its policymakers and military leaders seemed incapable of understanding--much less winning--until it was far too late. (3) The War for American Independence, especially if viewed from the British perspective, retains extraordinary significance for contemporary practitioners of national and military strategy. The conflict contains many valuable and exceedingly relevant insights regarding the rise, prevention, and challenges of insurgency, the perils of a people's war for a foreign power, and the absolute imperative of a thoughtful, coherent, and proactive national strategy that integrates all instruments of national power prior to, not just after, the commencement of hostilities. The British experience also provides timeless lessons regarding the difficulties of balancing ambitious political ends with limited military means, civil-military relations, and sustaining national will in democratic societies during protracted and unpopular wars. Finally, the conflict serves as a conspicuous example of the potential for irregular warfare to thwart the application of conventionally superior military force and thereby decide or influence the political outcomes of wars and campaigns. In that regard, Great Britain's experience in the War for American Independence provides an important prologue for many of the contemporary challenges associated with the application of coercive force in a postcolonial and postnuclear world. While predicting the future remains problematic, the United States should, in all likelihood, expect both the character and conduct of its future wars to more closely resemble that of the American revolution, albeit from the British perspective, than those of a bygone era where industrialized nation-states waged near-total wars of annihilation. (4) This article uses an abbreviated examination of the Southern Campaign (1780-82) to explore the principal causes of British strategic failure in the War for American Independence. The subject demands more attention than it traditionally receives, especially from the nation that has, in the span of a mere two generations, overtaken and largely assumed Great Britain's once dominant role on the world stage. America's ascendancy, however, has not come without cost. Ironically, several of the major political, economic, and military challenges confronting the United States today bear a remarkable similarity to those that plagued her one-time colonial master. (5) Chief among them is perhaps the most daunting and perplexing military issue of our time--how to translate supremacy on the conventional battlefield into enduring political success in an age of austerity and limited war. In a conflict full of dubious assumptions and missed opportunities, the pinnacle of British political and strategic miscalculation occurred in the South. …

The Lost Boys: Citizen-Soldiers, Disabled Veterans, and Confederate Nationalism in the Age of People's War

The Lost Boys: Citizen-Soldiers, Disabled Veterans, and Confederate Nationalism in the Age of People's War

The Clausewitzian and Heuristic Evolution of the ANC' s Armed Struggle: A Dependent Pillar of the South African Revolution

The paper tries to address the armed struggle as one of the pillars of the South African revolution, especially its adoption, together with the underground component, after all other avenues had been restricted. The argument emphasises the centrality of the political struggle, particularly the other two pillars of the revolution: mass mobilisation and international isolation of the racist government. The armed struggle and the underground are regarded as extension pillars necessitated by objective conditions, which demanded the ANC to reveal its existence through other means, since it was banned as a legal political force internally. This argument is stressed by looking at the nature of the adoption of the armed struggle, its heuristic evolution, from armed propaganda until the late 1970s, and particularly the 1980s, when there was more focus on revolutionary people's war, its protracted nature, the role and structure of the people's army, and the armed seizure of political power through insurrection. Thereafter the paper discusses the debate that emerged with the realisation that there were possibilities of a negotiated settlement, the subsequent contest between absolute and relative victories, and the preparation of the cadres for integration into the new SANDF. The paper concludes with the need to revisit the Integration Process, especially the need to re-orient the uniformed members' political attitudes towards a common cause.

The Plight of the Forgotten Ones: Civil War and Forced Migration1

Adding value to existing aggregate cross-national analyses on forced migration, I use subnational-level data to investigate circumstances that affect people's decisions of whether or not to flee their homes during civilian conflicts. Building on existing literature, I argue that conflict by itself is not the sole factor affecting people's decisions to flee or stay. Apart from a direct physical impact, civil war can destroy economic infrastructure and expose people to economic hardships, which can contribute to displacement. In addition, flight may be impeded or facilitated by such factors as geographical features, physical infrastructure, and social conditions under which people live. Using count data from the Maoists “people's war” in Nepal, a subnational analysis of displacement is conducted to provide a more refined test of existing large- n studies on the causes of forced migration. The empirical results are consistent with the major hypotheses developed in the field. With more precise measures of conflict, economic and physical conditions, and presence of social networks, I demonstrate the importance of a rationalist framework in understanding the choice of flight.

Death in War and Peace: Loss and Grief in England, 1914-1970. By Pat Jalland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. xii plus 317 pp. $55.00)

Introduction Part I: War and Peace 1914-1939 1. Death, the Great War and the influenza pandemic 2. Violet Cecil and communities in mourning 3. The Bickersteths' sacred pilgrimages to the Great War Cemeteries, 1919-1931 4. Death, disasters and rituals among the northern working classes, 1919-39 5. Sir Sydney Cockerell: cremation and the modern way of death in England Part II: The Second World War 6. The people's war: Death in the blitz 7. Missing airmen and families in anguish: 'There could be no mourning' 8. Experiences of wartime grief Part III: A changing culture of death and loss since 1945 9. Hidden death: Medicine and care of the dying, 1945 to 1970 10. Widowhood, grief and old age 1945-1963 11. Gorer's map of death: Declining rituals and prolonged sorrow, 1963 12. Observing grief: C.S. Lewis and the psychiatrists 13. Epilogue: Change and continuity since the 1970s

Britain Finds Andy Hardy: British Cinema Audiences and The American Way of Life in The Second World War

The years 1942 and 1943 saw great concern, on both sides of the Atlantic, about Anglo-American understanding. Almost one million American servicemen were to arrive on British shores by the end of 1...

Picturegoer: The Fan Magazine and Popular Film Culture in Britain During The Second World War

‘What agent of Chancellor Hitler is it who has suggested that we should all cower in darkness and terror “for the duration”?’, demanded George Bernard Shaw in a letter to the Times. Published on 5 ...

Yugoslav Propaganda Film: Early Works (1945–52)

THE BIRTH OFTHE NEW YUGOSLAV COMMUNIST state from the ashes of World War Il announced a new era of the Yugoslav film, its life starting from the whirlpool of the revolution. The devastated country lived to see liberation from the German occupation, but with an almost completely destroyed infrastructure, demolished cinema facilities, and a lack of qualified professionals. Immediately after the end of combat activities, the new communist regime decided to tackle the film issue seriously, having in mind prewar and war experiences and especially the experiences and legacy of its grand mentor, the Soviet Union. Organization of the national cinematography commenced slightly before the end of the war on July 16, 1944, when the film section within the Propaganda Division of the Serbian National Liberation Army general staff was established. The primary objective of this section was rehabilitating the remaining cinemas, organizing film projections, and reviewing and censoring existing films. After the liberation of Belgrade, in December 1944, the film section was established within the Propaganda Division of the National Liberation Army and Partisan Units of Yugoslavia, with the purpose of organizing the procurement and projection of films in addition to their production, sale, and distribution in the liberated territory. At the same time, in November 1944, the State Film Company of the Democratic Federal Yugoslavia (DFY) was established; its mission was to work on cultivating cinematography in the country, to monitorthe importingand distribution of films, and to supervise operation of cinemas. In the course of the following year, in November 1945, the Film Company of the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia was established, whereas the film sections within Supreme Headquarters and the general staff of the National Liberation Army and Partisan Units of Yugoslavia and Serbia were terminated. In parallel, the new personnel structure of professionals to be involved in designing the national film in this initial period was being established. The enthusiasm of many prewar film and literary authors, painters, and other artists (AleksandarVucho, Radosh Novakovich, Branko Belan, Franc Kosmach, Nikola Popovich, and others), many of whom were active participants in the People's Liberation War, was employed in the manner of outstanding workmanship for rehabilitation of the national cinematography. In the early period of Yugoslav film, propaganda was a high-ranking institution, taking into account a need for mobilization of the masses for the purpose of rehabilitation and reinforcing the newly established revolutionary regime. In accordance with the proclaimed objectives of the Communist Party, the propaganda was related to many segments of social activities, media, and communication, including film. With respect to the fact that the regime was well-versed in the Soviet propaganda model, in this early period of Yugoslav cinematography, immediate steps were taken to utilize film for propaganda purposes. The administrative period in managing the national cinematography commenced with the establishment of the new Film Company at the federal level. This company had the same responsibilities as the previous one- that is, the exclusive right to import and distribute films, organize mobile cinemas, and produce national films. The administrative period of Yugoslav cinematography, according to Petar Volk, was the most interesting phase from the propaganda point of view, considering that the foundation for development and implementation of the propaganda film was set during this period; Yugoslav cinema would record dynamic growth in the years to follow, until the breakup of Yugoslavia (10-34). The major role in this state-owned film enterprise was reserved for Agitprop of the Central Committee of the Yugoslav Communist Party (i.e., its department of culture), in trying to establish- following the Soviet propaganda model- absolute control in the fields of culture and film. …

More Inequality, More Killings: The Maoist Insurgency in Nepal

The hypothesis of inequality as the source of violent conflict is investigated empirically in the context of killings by Nepalese Maoists in their People's War against their government during 1996–2003. The dependent variable is the total number of people killed during that period by Maoist rebels in each of 3,857 villages. Inequality is measured by the Gini, the Esteban‐Ray polarization index, and four other between‐groups indexes. Using models with district fixed effects, and instrumenting for endogeneity of the inequality measures, we find strong evidence that greater inequality escalated killings by Maoists. Poverty did not necessarily increase violence. Education moderated the effect of inequality on killing, while predominance of farmers and of Nepali speakers exacerbated it. We find evidence that more killings occurred in populous villages, lending support to the idea that violence was directed at expanding the Maoist franchise by demonstrating that opposition to the monarchy and elites in power was possible to achieve.

Dangerous, courageous, invisible: Non-white seafarers in the Merchant Navy of the 1940s and 1950s

Presenting the conflict as a ‘people's war’ was the dominant theme of films made in Britain during the Second World War, implying equality of involvement and sacrifice. In tandem with this was the presentation of the imperial war effort as one based on shared values – and partnership not paternalism. The limitations of these models are apparent, however, in the case of films portraying the Merchant Navy. Non-white merchant mariners are not seen on-screen. Instead, they are positioned outside the templates of the ‘people's war’ and the ‘people's empire’. Even in films made after the end of hostilities, when non-white seafarers do appear on-screen they remain as outsiders, this time associated with contemporary anxieties about British society.

India Rising? The Indian Miracle and its Dark Side

There is no doubt that the Indian economy is one of the fastest growing in the world. However, such growth has been socially unbalanced, benefitting only a minority of the population. This, in turn, has brought about huge and increasingly dangerous social and political problems, such as an epidemic of suicides among farmers and the resurgence of the Maoist ‘people's war’. Nevertheless, while Indian growth is limited to a minority of the population, it is real and important. Only the future can tell if, true to some projections, India will become the third or first world economy by 2050. What is certain however is that, because of the rapid economic development of the past three decades, India has already become a key world player.

‘Technology Determines Tactics’: The Relationship between Technology and Doctrine in Chinese Military Thinking

Does ‘doctrine drive technology’ or does ‘technology drive doctrine’? For the United States with its advanced industrial and technological base, many examples of ‘doctrine driving technology’ can be found. For the People's Liberation Army (PLA), however, most evidence from military sources indicates that ‘technology drives doctrine’ or, as the Chinese say, ‘technology determines tactics’ (but not necessarily strategy). Within an overarching Chinese strategic framework, tactics and doctrine will be developed appropriate for (a) the weapons and technologies that are actually in the Chinese armed forces and (b) the people who must operate and maintain them. The Chinese civilian and military leadership has designated 2049 for completion of the modernization of the Chinese armed forces, a date selected in conjunction with the target for achieving China's main strategic priority, national economic modernization. Barring a major change in the strategic or domestic environment, we can expect that Beijing will continue to pursue the development of new weapons and technology in a manner consistent with the larger goal of national economic development. Exactly how China fights in the future will be dependent upon the weapons and technologies available – and they will be employed within the parameters defined by active defense and People's War.

Education and conflict in Nepal: possibilities for reconstruction

This paper analyses the nexus of the ‘People's War’ and education in Nepal and argues that education was one of the main causes of the violent conflict. Despite ‘modernisation’ efforts and increased participation, schools in Nepal continued to embody socially and culturally prejudiced values and institutionally legitimised the inequitable practices through the education system. Drawing on qualitative interviews with educational stakeholders from six diverse districts across the country, this paper shows how manifold deficiencies in the education system contributed to generate and fuel the ‘ideology-led’ Maoist rebellion and subsequently how schools thus became a key battlefield of the violent conflict.

British Culture at Mid-Century: Wartime Writing and Intermodernism

British Culture at Mid-Century:Wartime Writing and Intermodernism Patrick Bixby Bluemel, Kristin A. , ed. Intermodernism: Literary Culture in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009. 264pp. $95.00. Deer, Patrick . Culture in Camouflage: War, Empire, and Modern British Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. 320 pp. $125.00. Miller, Kristine . British Literature of the Blitz: Fighting the People's War. New York: Palgrave, 2009. 240 pp. $85.00. Mid-twentieth-century British culture has long been underappreciated and under-analyzed. Falling into the chronological and taxonomical gap between modernism and postmodernism, the writers of the 1930s and 40s have received only scant critical attention compared to the canonical figures of high modernism or the generation that appeared on the scene after the Second World War and the end of the British Empire. The three studies considered here participate in a broader effort to fill in the blank spaces of literary scholarship by turning our attention to a singular moment in British cultural history, when the creative energies of modernism were being rerouted into alternative modes of cultural production, especially those emerging in response to wartime experience. In this effort, the volumes join other significant recent studies, including Jed Esty's A Shrinking Island, Marina McKay's Modernism and World War II, and Bluemel's own George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics, to map the [End Page 258] central terrain of twentieth-century British cultural history in all its variety and complexity. Despite the emergence of an immensely powerful mass media and culture industry dedicated to unifying the British people around the war effort, the period witnessed the rise of other forms of expression that contested widely held notions about national identity and the nature of war. Together, the present studies vividly demonstrate that rather than presenting a lull in creative activity, the years of heightened political tension, global warfare, and imperial decline coincide with a remarkable cultural boom. It is not surprising, given the tumult of the war years, that each volume also gives ample attention to the historical forces that attended this cultural boom, viewing literature alongside propaganda filmmaking, sociological investigation, military strategy, war crimes prosecution, and a host of other contextual matters. In doing so, they cover a broad field of cultural production and open that field to further scholarly exploration, opposing the conventional critical wisdom that the war initiated a cultural decline that continued through the end of the 1940s. Kristine Miller's British Literature of the Blitz, for instance, sets out to challenge prevailing historical accounts of the so-called People's War, which have assumed that a coherent nationalist ideology united the British home front during the Nazi bombing campaign. In this revisionist project, Miller contributes to a new wave of historical scholarship that has begun to recognize the diversity of responses to the Blitz and the important influence of class relations and gender roles on those responses. She finds evidence of this diversity not only in literary representations of wartime experience, ranging from the innovative texts of Elizabeth Bowen and Henry Green to the genre fiction of Agatha Christie and Margery Allingham, but also in popular film and personal testimony. In fact, Miller concludes her study with an entire chapter on the Blitz-era cinema, addressing movies such as The Gentle Sex, Millions Like Us, and In Which We Serve, because their popularity demonstrated "the wartime British public's willingness to pay for films that were willing to question and experiment with the ideology of the People's War" (162). Throughout the study, the diaries and questionnaires of the Mass Observation project, gathered from thousands of British civilians beginning in the late thirties and now archived at the University of Sussex's Special Collections, prove an invaluable resource for this brand of cultural history, as indeed they do for each of the studies considered here. Miller's volume, in particular, makes ample use of the materials in order to demonstrate the range of responses to a radically new kind of civilian experience, commencing an important scholarly effort by giving a number of testimonies "the literary critical attention they deserve" (4). Another important resource for all three studies is the writing of...

“Civilians in Uniform”: Class and Politics in the British Armed Forces, 1939–1945

AbstractThe essay examines the British army's transformation from a small professional force into a mass conscript army between 1939 and 1945. Battlefield defeats and criticism of the nation's conduct of the war acted as a stimulus to reform in the early years. Examining such areas as officer selection, discipline, and the expansion of army education services (ABCA), the essay shows how the military adapted to the recruitment of millions of “civilians in uniform” and in some instances worked to contain or resist change. Special attention is given to class conflicts that arose between officers and “other ranks” and situations where perceived indifference to recruits' basic rights provoked protests and strikes, including protests over slow demobilization in 1946. A final section analyzes the role of ABCA and the forces press in creating a space for political discussion; the radical views prevalent among British servicemen; and the contradictions between the official ban on political debate in the forces, the rhetoric of “a people's war,” and the troops' growing focus on postwar reconstruction and the General Election of 1945.

The war for Korea, 1950-1951: they came from the north

for 1950-1951: They Came from the North by Allan R. Millett Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2010 644 pages $45.00 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] To military historian and one-time US Marine officer Allan R. Millett, the Korean not so much the forgotten war the neglected He opens by chastising his fellow historians for their Eurocentric studies of the Cold War, noting that one devoted eight pages to the Korean War, another a page and a half, and a third skipped over the Korean conflict from 1948 to 1953. Millett, to the contrary, asserts that strategic thinkers and serving officers could learn much from the Korean that applicable today. author, a professor at the University of New Orleans, asserts: I propose that the Korean an example of the one great lesson of twentieth-century warfare: that no conflict should be categorized simply an interstate war or civil war or even a limited insurgency. While such definitions may advance statistical analysis, they are not much help for field diplomats and soldiers. He adds: Understanding the Korean will provide even more relevant examples of a war that embodies almost every aspect of contemporary Particularly pertinent: The Korean conflict remains a major window on the Chinese way of war. most appropriate way to view it, Millett writes, would be as a Maoist people's war, the global socialist template for wars of national liberation and postcolonial succession. Phase One began in 1945 with the end of World II and the division of in which the Soviets took the Japanese surrender north of the 38th parallel and put Kim II Sung in power while the US took the surrender in the south--and then went home. Phase Two started in 1948 when North sent a column of 1,800 partisans into the south to take advantage of a rebellion there. But South Miller asserts, won the unknown war before the forgotten war. That brought on the North Korean invasion of June 1950, which had the backing of Joseph Stalin in Moscow and Mao Zedong in Beijing. Millett labels that Phase Three of the conflict in but contends that Stalin and Mao guessed wrong on the North Korean army's ability to conquer South which led to the intervention of the Chinese People's Volunteer Force (CPVF) in November of 1950. That, Millett says, is the subject of this book, the second in a trilogy on the Korean conflict. author, whose writing a model of clarity, doesn't say it outright but he might well have renamed the Korean the Sino-American War. Note the book's title, The for Korea, not the War in Korea or The between the Koreans. Both the South Korean and North Korean armies turned in spotty performances, to the dismay of their respective American and Chinese allies, leaving the brunt of the battle to the two foreign armies. Mao's motive, having come to power in Beijing just a year before, was to drive the United States off the Asian mainland. …

The Paradoxes of Journalism History

In order to extricate journalism from broader media history, we need to better develop ways of understanding the generic characteristics of journalism over time and across geo-political space. This paper will aim to address what could be termed certain paradoxes of journalism's history; paradoxes which relate to our definitions of the generic boundaries of journalism and flux across those boundaries. Engaging with the complexities of these historical paradoxes will, we may hope, contribute to our understanding of what makes this set of practices distinct in the present and also what we may want to retain of its range of features in some technologically reconfigured future. Journalism's current crises and opportunities, with their implications for the broader qualities of public communication, need us to consider it in all its historical complexity, not just as a profit-making machine which has broken down. Furthermore, the only way to fully begin to grasp journalism's current potential is to consider how it has formed and mutated over the centuries as a global phenomenon. Propelled by both intellectual and technological developments, journalism history is moving out from its confinement in the margins of other disciplinary areas. Journalism studies worldwide is providing a wealth of opportunities for scholars. This paper argues that we need to embrace more ambitious dialogues to clarify our understanding of journalism in itself as well as in its intersections with other fields, at the same time as becoming involved in methodological conversations about the exploitation of digital resources.

Other people's wars? Some thoughts on Australia's military involvements in the twentieth century

The idea that Australia's wars of the twentieth century were ‘other people's wars’ has been fashionable for a generation and appears to have become popular during the Vietnam War years. This paper examines Australia's various military involvements to show that at the time of each there was majority support for them as most of the electorate judged them to be in Australia's interests and usually in those of the international community as well. To argue otherwise is to deny earlier generations of Australians their agency.

British Literature of the Blitz: Fighting the People's War

British Literature of the Blitz: Fighting the People's War

Burying Culpability: The Killing Fields (1984), Us Foreign Policy, and the Political Limits of Film-Making in Reagan-Era America

Burying Culpability: The Killing Fields (1984), Us Foreign Policy, and the Political Limits of Film-Making in Reagan-Era America