Political Insurgency Research Articles

"Like a Yam Between Two Stones": Remembering Healthcare at War in Nepal (1996–2006)

Abstract: The Nepal civil war (1996-2006) opposed a rural Maoist insurrection and a succession of monarchical regimes and governments. Despite a shift in perception of the conflict post 9/11, the conflict remained largely internal to Nepal with limited international involvement. Over that same period, health indicators in most domains recorded significant improvements including in the areas most affected by the conflict. Building on human rights datasets of violent incidents and systematic oral history in three regions affected to varying degrees by the conflict, this article argues that the health care facilities were instrumentalized by both sides of the conflict as one element of their political and military strategy, while medical practitioners had to juggle the demands of insurgents and security forces. Through 80 interviews conducted in 2020-2021 in situ, this article engages with the apparent paradox of a conflict which did not have detrimental effects on health care overall despite its violence. It then considers how the war, violence and mental health consequences of a decade of terror are now recalled and made sense of some fifteen years after the end of the war. With the former insurgents now running the new republic, grassroots militants remember the war in sometimes nostalgic ways when it comes to their centrality in the Maoist objectives and vision. The healthcare provisions arising from the war sometimes do not match some of the wartime resources deployed by insurgents and counterinsurgents keen to demonstrate their commitment to health provisions as a common good that needed to be made more accessible. Finally, this article reflects on the absence of the concept of attacks on healthcare in contemporary analyses, at a time when the concept was gathering support internationally. In this sense this article charters a paradox of violence and resourcing of health care as well as a pre-paradigm shift analysis of a seemingly outmoded political insurgency.

Weddings amidst War: the intimate and insurgent politics of marriage

ABSTRACT Putting insights from feminist political economy into conversation with the scholarship on legal identity, this article explores the use and effects of military marriages in reproducing the Kachin revolution. I argue that the organisation of weddings reproduces the revolution in both material and legal ways by creating new legal and political subjects with loyalties and responsibilities towards Kachin authorities. I suggest that the public nature of the weddings creates bonds of allegiance, expectations regarding the performance of particular gendered roles for men and women, and feelings of obligation towards Kachin authorities. These practices also stem from efforts by the KIO to encourage childbirth; although marriages across clan-lines are sanctioned, weddings outside the Kachin community as less acceptable to a leadership invested in reproducing a particular kind of Kachin citizen. This allows me to illustrate how the conferring of legal identity does not rely on documents alone, and turns our attention to how the practice of marriage ceremonies and their effects on everyday married life is generative of legal identity. This in turn shapes the organisation of daily lives in ways that both promote the continuance of the armed revolution and bind people to the nation-in-making.

State international income position, trade openness, and mass antigovernment protests

This research provides a state-level systemic explanation for antigovernment insurgencies. We posit that state international income position influences antigovernment movements, which effect, however, hinges on the level of trade openness. By analyzing 157 states from 1990 through 2018, it is found that for a state having an unclosed market, its internationally relative income level is negatively associated with mass antigovernment protests. This study implies that trade liberalization may exert a context-specific impact on domestic political insurgency, which helps understand why trade liberalization seems to be a reason for mass anti-government movements in some contexts while enhancing a regime in other cases.

Black Ephemera: The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive

Black Ephemera: The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive

The intimate politics of insurgency

ABSTRACT How is women’s engagement in armed insurgency shaped by intimacy? This article seeks to answer this question by exploring how political struggle for women is caught up in the entanglements of the intimate and the political. Drawing on fieldwork on the Bangsamoro conflict in Mindanao, Philippines, it analyzes four women’s stories about their trajectories as insurgents. Their accounts reveal that relational ties of kin, community, and marriage bound them to the insurgency and preceded ideological commitment; however, these relational ties also ruptured their involvement. Moreover, collective and personal closeness with war made political struggle an inevitable part of growing up and surviving. Contradictory commitments, dilemmas, and disruptions in their relational lives caused by critical events of conflict are read in the women’s political participation. The article’s conceptual answer is an intimate politics of insurgency, which underwrites women’s engagement and, more importantly, their maneuvers to fulfill conflicting political, ideological, relational, and gendered obligations. Intimate politics, I argue, brings attention to women’s work of unsettling and remaking boundaries between the intimate/private and the political/public, which allows them to reconcile continued political action and life as a whole inside conflict.

Assamese Identity Issues: A Chapter Review of ‘India’s North-East: Identity Movements, State and Civil Society’

This commentary article discusses the chapter titled ‘Assam: Identity Movements and Insurgent Politics’ – ‘Assamese Identity Issues’ in Udayon Misra's book "India’s North East: Identity Movements, State and Civil Society" (2014), focusing on the Assam movement and its implications for Assamese identity. The author sheds light on how the movement was centered around the issues and questions between foreign migrants and indigenous people, highlighting the struggle for linguistic identity and the yearning for a unified homeland. The commentary also underscores the need for social and political cohesion, effective conflict management, and inclusive governance to ensure a peaceful resolution and foster the development of Assamese society. It provides a comprehensive analysis of the historical context, starting with rich debates spanning over many decades.

The colonial roots of counter-insurgencies in international politics

Abstract There is a state-centrism in the way insurgencies are conceived in international politics. Herein, policy and practice targeting insurgencies draw on the long-established scholarly perception that war-making is the vocation of the state and that the violence of non-state insurgent factions is a source of insecurity. However, this state-centrism also has a colonial legacy and is an outgrowth of the colonial hostility towards anti-colonial factions. In this article, I establish the colonial roots of the current standing of insurgencies in international politics. Empirically, I focus on the European Union's (EU) peacebuilding efforts in the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt). These efforts are largely premised on the notion that state-building is synonymous with peacebuilding and are focused on furbishing the state-like institutions of the Palestinian Authority (PA). But, in doing so, this manner of peacebuilding also replicates the scholarly antagonism towards non-state armed factions and, with it, the logic of colonial counterinsurgencies, as it de-legitimizes the varied forms of insurgent politics that occur outside the institutional limits of the PA. In the end, it is not entirely surprising that this mode of engagement has not secured peace—especially since it is premised on a certain antagonism towards insurgent politics. Therefore, I conclude, a substantial understanding (and incorporation) of the political grievances that drive insurgent politics, and their appeal, is essential for effective peacebuilding.

Book Review of "The Cities, Security and Poverty"

The 2013 Meeting of the World Society for Ekistics was held in Ankara, Turkey around the theme of ‘The Cities, Security and Poverty’1. The proceedings from this international meeting, edited by Meltem Yılmaz and H. Çağatay Keskinok, form an overarching account of the changing power relations in a globalized world, discussing their socio-spatial implications for human settlements with particular reference to the key issues of the weakening public sphere and communality, increasing socio-spatial fragmentation and inequalities, and emerging security problems related to both political insurgencies and environmental degradation. Although the content of the book is not structured around certain sub-headings or themes, it is possible to categorize the 18 distinctive contributions as follows: (i) changing power relations and their implications on the public sphere; (ii) spatial manifestations of changing power relations and urban segregation; (iii) crime and security problems in urban spaces; (iv) ecological transitions, sustainability issues and environmental disasters.

The Shining Path of Peru: An Organizational Theory for Conflict

Violent political insurgencies display resilient structures that allow their growth and success. They must provide incentives to avoid internal rent-seeking among the members and, at the same time, discourage coalitions from undermining the direction and control of the insurgency. I study how insurgencies’ response to these trade-offs determines their political and military structures. A vertical and centralized hierarchy will prevail to minimize monitoring costs. However, a horizontal hierarchy will emerge within the insurgency to cede part of the insurgency surplus to solve their collective action problems and effectively coordinate violence. The evidence rests on the analysis of the Shining Path, the most radical face of the Communist revolution in the Western Hemisphere and a pioneer organization for the most recent insurgencies. I argue that the variation of this internal hierarchy played a significant role in its dramatic growth from a small group of students to a lethal terrorist organization with international outreach.

Decentering Listening: Toward an Anti-Discriminatory Approach to Accent and Dialect Training for the Actor

ABSTRACT This article reports on the findings of practice-based research into the development of anti-discriminatory accents and dialects training for actors with diverse intersecting identities. The author reviews an earlier strand of research into speech training within a UK conservatory that identified a bias toward Received Pronunciation reinforced by colonized listening practices. This article explores the impact of those listening practices on accent and dialect training. The author responds to the challenges inherent in providing training that both develops high-level skills and meets industry needs, while aiming to center the experiences of somatically othered students. The author develops their previous decolonizing model into a decentering framework for an approach to training actors that draws on critical pedagogy and asks students to cross the border from the conservatory into the community. This approach to accent and dialect training builds on verbatim and documentary theatre-making techniques, resulting in a practice that values empathy, listening, embodied practice, and autonomy, and the approach allows actors to perform “multiple authenticities,” while offering the potential for political insurgency within the performing arts industries.

The End of the English Department: Decolonizing Futures

The End of the English Department: Decolonizing Futures Ronald Cummings (bio) Call this apocalyptic propaganda if you must:The World Ended in the Spring of 2006.But how much you are willing to accept this storydepends on how far your minds can stretch. Kei Miller A Light Song of Light The epigraph which opens this brief discussion is taken from a poem by the Jamaican writer Kei Miller. The poem begins with a declaration of the end of the world, which Miller locates in 2006. Although he is not specific in identifying any single apocalyptic event, he references a confluence of happenings: “America, Iraq, Korea; / the pressing of buttons; the detonation of bombs / from one pole to the next; the grand explosion / of people” (32). He declares “what we most feared / would happen has happened.” If 2006, in Miller’s narrative, marks one end of the world, it proves interesting now to look back on that time from a fearful and unsettled present. We can find another accounting of that time and of the detonation of lives daily in Dionne Brand’s book Inventory, published in that fateful year, 2006. She closes that volume with an important declaration about [End Page 1] the need for truth telling in times of crisis: “I have nothing soothing to tell you, / that’s not my job” (100). My own attempts here to reflect on what I am calling the end of the English department is similarly saying soothing things in these troubled times. It is a call to attend urgently to the fraught and precarious present in relation to the work we do as scholars within universities and in literature departments. But to understand the end of the English department as an event, or a singular moment, is also to miss the point. Rather, this work is joining a call, one variously echoed, revisited, and reframed in the essays in the discussion forum by Nadine Attewell, Sonnet L’Abbé, and Aubrey Hanson, where they each urge us to think collectively about and, even more importantly, to meaningfully and purposely engage in the decolonization of the study of literature. They ask us to think seriously about the terms on which we continue to do literary studies as well as about the institutional contexts that enable and, even more tellingly, constrain decolonizing work. While they each extend a keen invitation to dialogue and deeper thinking about our individual and collective praxis, in my own reflections here I want to further suggest that what might be at stake in ongoing calls for decolonization is perhaps also an end of the English department. At the very least, we are being asked to think seriously about the restructuring of our discipline, its function, purpose, and interventions. In our current moment of Black and Indigenous political insurgency, with calls to decolonize the curriculum and diversity initiatives within the university, what does it mean to continue to do work under the sign of English studies? What new formations and possibilities might our current moment of institutional precarity and change, including the panic of the pandemic, allow us to imagine? Whither the future of the English department? In Miller’s poem, referenced above, what he calls the end of the world is not a finite end of things. It is the end of a particular formation of things. Much like Francis Fukuyama’s haunting notion of the “end of history,” which attends to the end of a particular structuring of the geo-political world (the historic organization of political and economic life and futures through the ideological divide of communism and capitalism), Miller’s “end of the world” is importantly and strategically rendered as a potential opening to “parallel universes” (32). He offers an invitation to think about “the one thousand lives we lived simultaneously / and which could only be glimpsed through magic / mirrors or déjà vu” (32). This is also a rejection of linear formulations of histories. Particularly in his attention to déjà vu, as structuring affect, Miller asks us to sense and remember how the world, as one might know and feel it and as it has been ordered, has ended several [End Page 2...

How not to Occupy Bartleby

This article aims to discuss how Bartleby, the character from Herman Melville’s homonymous story, Bartleby, The Scrivener re-emerged in the Occupy Movement in Wall Street. Here, I intend to argue that Bartleby has been wrongly appropriated, which in turn, may explain the shortcomings of the movement. The Occupy Wall Street took possession of Bartleby because in Melville’s story, he occupies the premises of a lawyer’s office in Wall Street. However, this appropriation has dismissed the political 'inefficacy' of Bartleby’s formula, 'I would prefer not to'. As I shall argue, the formula exposes instead a residual political emancipation, generating a contingency. Rather than attempting to find some political agency within Melville’s figure, we should recognise the capacity of his formula for political insurgency. With this perspective in mind, I shall revise this appropriation to suggest that despite the political contingency of Bartleby’s formula, this should not be regarded as a means to a political outcome.

“There Is NoNewBlack Panther Party”: The Panther-Like Formations and the Black Power Resurgence of the 1990s

“There Is No<i>New</i>Black Panther Party”: The Panther-Like Formations and the Black Power Resurgence of the 1990s

‘A Secret, Melodramatic Sort of Conspiracy’: The Disreputable Legacies of Fenian Violence in Nineteenth-Century London

‘A secret, melodramatic sort of conspiracy’: The disreputable legacies of Fenian violence in nineteenth-century London. This essay assesses the cultural and historical legacy of the ‘Dynamite war’, a campaign waged predominantly in London by Irish-American Republicans organised under the banners of Clan-na-Gael and Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa’s Skirmishers from 1881 to 1885. The war was, and, to a degree, remains, a contentious event in Irish history principally because its instigators were willing to use extreme violence against civilian targets, and so demonstrated a disposition to transgress codes of martial honour which had previously been regarded as largely sacrosanct. While the history of the campaign, the degree to which it was innovative in its methods as a precursor for urban terrorism, and the manner in which the war has been represented in popular culture and literature have been the subjects of compelling recent research, the extent to which the campaign has been understood within the context of Irish London and its problematic status within narratives of nineteenth-century Irish political insurgency more broadly have been less fully considered. This paper considers these aspects in greater detail, highlighting the disreputable status of the campaign and, subsequently, the manner in which allusions to it are often deeply embedded in Irish literary and cultural texts. The essay concludes with a discussion of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), a work which uses fictionalised autobiography to locate the war in the wider history of nineteenth-century Irish nationalism. In so doing Joyce acknowledges the ethical complexity of the campaign in a manner which becomes both an intervention in historiography and an experiment in literary aesthetics.

The role of cultural production in celebrity politics: Comparing the campaigns of Jesse ‘The Body’ Ventura (1999) and Donald Trump (2016)

This article draws out the significant similarities between the political insurgencies of Jesse Ventura in 1999 and Donald Trump in 2016, charting their own premillennial political collaborations as members of the Reform Party, before identifying wider lessons for studies of contemporary celebrity politicians through a comparison of their individual campaigns. Its analysis is based upon the concept of the ‘politainer’, introduced by Conley and Schultz, into which it incorporates Mikhail Bakhtin’s conception of the carnival fool. The heterodox nature of both Ventura and Trump’s political campaign styles, it argues, is in part explained by the nature of the cultural spheres within which their public personas were produced; specifically, the fact that these personas, which they carried over from the entertainment to political spheres, were produced within genres of popular culture generally positioned as having ‘low’ cultural value. This, it argues, furnished both with an anti-establishment ethos as ‘no bullshit’ straight-talkers, marking them as outsider candidates able to act as conduits for political protest by an electorate alienated from mainstream political elites. It concludes by emphasising the potential importance that political celebrities’ specific cultural production can play in shaping a subsequent political campaign in general.

Mysticism, Enchantment and Charisma Reincarnated: Nineteenth-Century Islamic Talismans, Vernacularization and Heritage Values in Contemporary Asante

Condensed, concealed, inconspicuous material embodiments of mysticism, enchantment, and charisma, nineteenth-century Islamic talismans traveled the trans-Saharan caravan trade routes, circulating widely among the non-Muslim Asante, reflecting a tradition illustrative of the movement of people, objects, texts, ideas, and imaginations. Produced by migrant Muslim merchant-clerics and consumed by non-Muslim Asantes, they demonstrate the ways in which Islamic and non-Islamic traditions are inextricably intertwined. Deemed exceedingly efficacious, nineteenth-century Islamic talismans were conscripted for the Asante imperial project, chiefly, imperial expansion by combatting opposing social and political forces, namely, local insurgencies and British colonialism. Today, nineteenth-century Islamic talismans remain highly popular, continuing to circulate in local, regional, and national arenas as part of a contemporary living social tradition. Employing archaeological ethnography, this article examines how Muslims and non-Muslims mobilize nineteenth-century Islamic talismans in the present, critiquing Western Eurocentric heritage values that are oblivious to, and disregard Islam in Asante as a lived social and material praxis.

Passing through difference: C.L.R. James and Henry Lefebvre

ABSTRACTThis essay offers a comparative analysis of the work of Henri Lefebvre and C.L.R. James, both key contributors to the emergence of a humanist form of Marxism in the twentieth century. Independently of each other, both writers, I show, developed a mode of critique which emphasised capitalism’s dehumanizing social effects, and which rejected a merely instrumental or utilitarian political response. Consequently, both writers placed critical emphasis on those longings and demands made evident in the insurgent politics of everyday life and popular culture; in what both conceptualised as a search for ‘happiness‘. But at the same time, the comparison is important because it makes evident the extent of the divisive intellectual legacies of empire within European Marxism. Lefebvre’s work bears in itself the marks of a racialised understanding of human relations; the ’human’ of which he speaks is limited in ways that James challenged consistently.

Paradox of Poverty in the Midst of Abundant Resources: The Politics of Oil Resources and Renewed Insurgency in the Niger Delta Region of Nigeria

Nigerian state depends majorly on oil resources for her economic survival. Over 85% revenue generation to the Nigerian government are derived from oil production in the Niger Delta. In spite of this, Niger Delta region illustrates a paradox of poverty in the midst of abundant resources. The region remains one of the poorest and least developed parts of the country. The region suffers from environmental pollution, pervasive poverty and underdevelopment. These culminated to series of peaceful agitations to draw the attention of the government for solution to their challenges but due to the insensitivity of the government and oil companies operating in the region to their plight it degenerated to violent agitations, hence the insurgency and militancy in the region. The effects of all these were the disruptions of oil and gas production, reduced national revenue, withdrawal of foreign capital, kidnapping of expatriate oil company staff and so on. In a bid to curb the insurgency and militancy in the region, the Federal Government initiated the amnesty programme in 2009. Seven years after, the issues of environmental degradation, youth unemployment, poverty and underdevelopment that led to militancy and insurgency in the region remain unresolved. Thus, there was renewed insurgency from January to December, 2016 in the region. The paper argues that, granting of amnesty to the militants is a temporarily solution to the problems and until the grievances of the region are sincerely tackled by the government, the issues of militancy and insurgency will remain unabated and may degenerate.

Resistance or resignation to welfare reform? The activist politics for and against social citizenship

Since 2008, mature welfare states have, to varying degrees, pursued a strategy of welfare reform that has reconfigured the dominant praxis of social citizenship. Drawing on qualitative data from two studies, this paper explores what bearing this has had on the political subjectivity of welfare claimants in the New Zealand context. The findings suggest welfare claimants engage in diverse political struggles for and against social citizenship to resist, reconfigure and resign themselves to the prevailing socio-political settlement. In light of this, conclusions are drawn about the insurgent politics of low-income social security claimants as political agents in the citizenship-making process.

“Unhitching the Oxcart of Delhi”: a Mughal-Period Hindi account of Political Insurgency

AbstractThis article is part of a larger effort to broaden the source-base for understanding Mughal-period India by engaging with the Hindi literary archive. I analyze the vignettes of Aurangzeb and other Mughal figures that are available in Lāl Kavi's Chatraprakāś (Light of Chatrasal, c. 1710), a Brajbhasha (classical Hindi) historical poem commissioned by the Bundela ruler Chatrasal (1649–1731). Written shortly after Aurangzeb's death, the Chatraprakāś is in part a retrospective on Aurangzeb's reign. It is also a valuable source of regional history that gives voice to how the Mughal Empire was perceived from a local court that went in and out of political favour. In places, Lāl Kavi engages in trenchant political critique, expressing the court's strong disillusionment with the Mughal manṣabdārī system as well as more local grievances. While by no means the dominant tone of the work, there are occasional hints of the court's outrage at Mughal offenses against what Lal Kavi explicitly terms “Hindu dharma.” Parsing the Chatraprakāś as both poetry and history, I probe the text's complex perspectives on Mughal rule.