Successful Rebellion Research Articles

Why the Strong Lose

The continuing insurgency in Iraq underscores the capacity of the weak to impose considerable military and political pain on the strong. Whether that pain will compel the United States to abandon its agenda in Iraq remains to be seen. What is not in dispute is that all major failed US uses of force since 1945--in Vietnam, Lebanon, and Somalia--have been against materially weaker enemies. In wars both hot and cold, the United States has fared consistently well against such powerful enemies as Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and the Soviet Union, but the record against lesser foes is decidedly mixed. Though it easily polished off Milosevic's Serbia and Saddam's Iraq, the United States failed to defeat Vietnamese infantry in Indochina, terrorists in Lebanon, and warlords in Somalia. In each case the American Goliath was militarily stalemated or politically defeated by the local David. Most recently, the United States was surprised by the tenacious insurgency that exploded in post-Baathist Iraq, an insurgency now in its third year with no end in sight. The phenomenon of the weak defeating the strong, though exceptional, is as old as war itself. Sparta finally beat Athens; Frederick the Great always punched well above his weight; American rebels overturned British rule in the Thirteen Colonies; the Spanish guerrilla bled Napoleon white; Jewish terrorists forced the British out of Palestine; Vietnamese communists drove France and then the United States out of Indochina; and mujahideen handed the Soviet Union its own Vietnam in Afghanistan. Relative military power is hardly a reliable predictor of war outcomes. Why do the strong lose? One must distinguish between general factors common to many cases of great-power losses to weaker adversaries and those that, I argue, may be peculiar to the United States. With respect to common causes of the stronger side's loss to the weaker, Andrew Mack, in his pioneering 1975 assessment, argued that the place to look was differentials in the political will to fight and prevail, which were rooted in different perceptions of the stakes at hand. Post-1945 successful rebellions against European colonial rule as well as the Vietnamese struggle against the United States all had one thing in common: the materially weaker insurgent was more politically determined to win because it had much more riding on the outcome of war than did the stronger external power, for whom the stakes were lower. In such cases: The relationship between the belligerents is asymmetric. The insurgents can pose no direct threat to the survival of the external power because ... they lack an invasion capability. On the other hand, the metropolitan power poses not simply the threat of invasion, but the reality of occupation. This fact is so obvious that its implications have been ignored. It means, crudely speaking, that for the insurgents the war is total, while for the external power it is necessarily limited. Full mobilization of the total military resources of the external power is simply not politically possible.... Not only is full mobilization impossible politically, it is not thought to be in the least necessary. The asymmetry in conventional military capability is so great and the confidence that military might will prevail is so pervasive that expectation of victory is one of the hallmarks of the initial endeavor. (1) Superior strength of commitment thus compensates for military inferiority. Because the outcome of the war can never be as important to the outside power as it is to those who have staked their very existence on victory, the weaker side fights harder, displaying a willingness to incur blood losses that would be unacceptable to the stronger side. The signers of the Declaration of Independence risked their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor in what became a contest with an imperial giant for which North America was (after 1778) a secondary theater of operations in a much larger war. …

RITUALWELL.ORG—LOADING THE VIRTUAL CANON, OR: THE POLITICS AND AESTHETICS OF JEWISH WOMEN'S SPIRITUALITY

����� ��� In the several decades since spirituality was rediscovered and popularized by a generation of middle-class Americans in rebellion against empty religious conventions and in search of meaning and self-expression, Jewish womenʼs spirituality has been manifested largely in creative prayers and innovative Jewish rituals. Sharing the ironic fate of many successful rebellions, religious expressions that once derived their appeal from their spontaneity and originality are now vying for formal recognition and acceptance in a spate of new publications, including rabbisʼ manuals and websites created with the purpose of sustaining inclusive, progressive Jewish communities and meeting the spiritual needs of mainstream American Jews. The pair of us are responsible for the content of the Jewish feminist website Ritualwell.org, (co-sponsored by Kolot: The Center for Jewish Womenʼs and Gender Studies at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, and Maʻyan: The Jewish Womenʼs Project, a program of the JCC in Manhattan), the purpose of which is to make contemporary feminist Jewish liturgy and rituals broadly accessible. It is from this perspective that we want to explore in these pages the relationship between womenʼs spirituality and the codifi cation of ritual. Our quick review of forces that combined to enable the emergence of a modern Jewish womenʼs spirituality movement reveals some underlying tensions in the project of expressing womenʼs spirituality through Jewish ritual. We hope to show how the theoretical and practical concerns we have confronted in considering material for the website have been informed by the gender analysis to which both spirituality and ritual have recently been subjected.

Roads to Yesterday: New Readings of L. M. Montgomery

Roads to Yesterday:New Readings of L. M. Montgomery Barbara Carman Garner (bio) Barry, Wendy E., Margaret Anne Doody, and Mary E. Doody Jones , eds. The Annotated Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1997. Thompson, Hilary , ed. Children's Voices in Atlantic Literature and Culture: Essays on Childhood. Guelph: Canadian Children's Press, 1995. Rubio, Mary Henley , ed. Harvesting Thistles: The Textual Garden of L. M. Montgomery, Essays on her Novels and Journals. Guelph: Canadian Children's Press, 1994. Rubio, Mary Henley, and Elizabeth Waterston . Writing a Life: L. M. Montgomery: A Biography of the Author of Anne of Green Gables. Canadian Biography Series. Montreal: E. C. W. Press, 1995. Waterston, Elizabeth . Kindling Spirit: L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables. Canadian Fiction Studies No. 19. Montreal: E. C. W. Press, 1993. The Annotated Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery, in addition to providing an excellent text, bears a striking resemblance to Montgomery's own scrapbooks, so carefully assembled, and brim-full of marginalia, photographs, and interesting tidbits about the material and popular culture of her day. It is the touchstone work among five recent studies of Canadian children's literature and its cultural contexts. The Annotated Anne, Harvesting Thistles: The Textual Garden of L. M. Montgomery, Kindling Spirit: L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables, Writing a Life: L. M. Montgomery, and Children's Voices in Atlantic Literature and Culture: Essays on Childhood address key issues: links between Anne's and Montgomery's social and cultural milieus; how decisions by and for her fictional characters are affected by a sense of community expectations; and the paradoxes, ironies, and subversive tactics Montgomery employs in mapping the construction of selfhood in her life-writing and fiction. Many of these issues are contextualized historically in essays treating the rights of the child in eastern Canada, collected in Hilary Thompson's Children's Voices in Atlantic Literature and Culture. The "real" experiences of children encountered in these essays enable readers to access new layers of meaning in Montgomery's fiction. Philip Girard's "Children, Church, Migration and Money: Three Tales of Child Custody in Nova Scotia," for example, uses legal documents to investigate how orphans were treated at different periods, while Sharon Myers's "Revenge and Revolt: the Boys' Industrial Home of East Saint John in the Inter-War Period" documents the successful rebellion of inmates at an industrial school in Saint John, New Brunswick, who took matters into their own hands rather than passively suffering the negligence of the supervisor and the tyranny of a few older boys. Myers's findings endorse the view that often children are not "passive, non-politicized victims," but "active agents and instigators, capable of managing and manipulating their history" (111). The literary essays in this collection treat regional differences in the portrayal of childhood. John Stockdale in "The Suitable Child: Norman Duncan's Literary Children" describes what it meant to be a suitable child in a Newfoundland fishing community, and Muriel Whitaker probes the tragic consequences for the child whose father is missing in maritime novels by Montgomery, Hugh MacLennan, and Kevin Major. Finally, David Creelman argues that MacLennan's Barometer Rising (1941) makes a persuasive transition from its depiction of regional uncertainty to its portrayal of national confidence" (70). The sense of place and the feeling for community so prominent in Atlantic literature as explored in Thompson's collection appear also in the materials assembled in the Annotated Anne and the studies of the life and writing of Montgomery to be considered here. These examinations of Montgomery and her world offer divergent opinions on both the Christian religion and the church as an institution. Patricia Santelmann in Harvesting Thistles observes that Anne "makes distinctions between faith and façade, between 'saying prayers' and praying'" (66). But Montgomery's own faith, as well as her doubts about her beliefs, need fuller explanation than these studies give. Gavin White's fragmented and somewhat disorganized musings in "The Religious Thought of L. M. Montgomery" (Harvesting Thistles) leave too much for the reader to surmise. In discussing predestination, White acknowledges in an aside that Montgomery was reading Bliss Carman by...

Rebellion, Violence and Revolution: A Rational Choice Perspective

There are many rebellions, fewer successful rebellions, and extremely few social revolutions. First, the relative frequencies of elite and mass rebellions are investigated. Because a rational choice approach finds it easier to explain elite rebellions and a deprivation approach seems tailored to the explanation of mass rebellions, the relative frequencies of these two types of rebellion favor rational choice. Second, the small number of mass rebellions is related to military issues, such as loyalty and defeat in war. Although military defeat in war is neither close to a necessary, nor to a sufficient condition of successful rebellion, it still might multiply its likelihood. Third, it is argued that the link between international rivalries and great revolutions via ruler discouragement and rebel encouragement is compatible with a rational choice approach. Because it is obviously so important in revolutions, nationalist and religious zealotry needs to be integrated into rational choice approaches to rebellion and revolution.

King Carson: an essay on the invention of leadership

For Ulster Protestants, riven by division since the fall of Terence O’Neill as prime minister of Northern Ireland in 1969, the recent troubles have seen their future steadily being conceded by default. Where there was certainty, there is now confusion; where there was once leadership, there are now only leaders. Not surprisingly, there have been wistful glances back to the mythical heroes of the past, in particular to Sir Edward Carson, who had steered them through the home rule crisis of 1912–14 to the promised land of Northern Ireland. Carson not only mobilised all Ulster Protestants, but also organised a largely successful rebellion and in time squared the circle to become one of the few rebels in English history to go on to be a law lord. Moreover, he was also a British leader, being four times in office, twice in the cabinet, and for twenty years one of the dominating figures in Tory politics. It is this duality that made Carson’s position exceptional in Anglo-Irish relations and contributed to the immense authority he periodically enjoyed. Indeed, in Ulster before the Great War his sway assumed near-charismatic proportions. Viewed as a case study in leadership, therefore, his career was, in terms of British politics, unique.

“Rising Out”: Medbh McGuckian’s Destabilizing Poetics

“RISING OUT”: MEDBH MCGUCKIAN’S DESTABILIZING POETICS MARY O’CONNOR there are, indeed, clues in her poetry that Medbh McGuckian is an Irish woman, even a Belfast woman. One gathers them as the children in the Brothers Grimm folktale must have gathered the crumbs that guided them back home through the forest, for want of a clearly delineated path. We Wnd Irish idiomatic expressions: “she gave it out that—”; “Live in the shelter of each other,” a direct translation of the Gaelic saying fé scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine; “Xitting,” or vacating a Xat without having paid the overdue rent. From history and mythology appear the poets of the bardic schools who “lie in the dark to compose / Verses as were taught”; Patrick, who comes to bless the house; Fergus, presumably the royal rival in the Queen Maeve story; Hugh O’Neill leading the Flight of the Earls in 1609 after an almost successful rebellion; the 1916 Easter Rising; and, closer to home, appear the Belfast phenomena of checkpoints; of having soldiers occupy your house, of being frisked, of being conscious of “apartness.” All these Wnd their way into the poet’s house of metaphor. Other passing references to, for example, sickly weather, tiny mountains , “blue sky rain,” “banding in volcanoes like potatoes,” “the women’s side of the chapel,” bespeak the mental furniture, the particular lived experience which the Irish share. But it is not a physical country to which McGuckian gives her allegiance, or which is most deeply imprinted on her for her native town land is the territory of the unconscious, especially as it emerges into the subconscious in dreams. Like Seamus Heaney’s “pioneers ,” she will strike “inward, downward,”1 though not in their eVortful , stalwart way, unearthing the makings of an identity from the prehistoric bogs. Rather, she will dissolve consciousness, volatilize the laws of “RISING OUT”: MEDBH MCGUCKIAN’S DESTABILIZING POETICS 154 1 Medbh McGuckian, Venus and the Rain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 46; hereafter cited parenthetically, thus: (VR 46). logic—even as they apply to the ordering of a normal sentence—and let her poems “weather into meaning” as they will. How may this Northern Irish writer, who is both a British subject and a Roman Catholic—and therefore, if she folows the stereotype, a Republican —situate herself in either conXicting tradition? McGuckian’s choice has been to elide that question, to ignore the very obvious borders in her life, psychosocial and sociopolitical, breaking the rules in ways the establishment cannot punish her for. Her solution to the intense pressures of living in Northern Ireland has been a Xight to the semiotic. Refusing questions of nationalism, McGuckian stakes her claims, in complex ways, to language, and to the encompassing power of the maternal body as paradigm for acts of inclusion. Liam O’Dowd’s account of his experiences as a lecturer in Queen’s University, Belfast, throws light on the situation of Northern Irish writers , most of whom are graduates of Queen’s, some of whom have taught there: [M]ost of my immediate colleagues at the University were English. While I saw the conXict against a backdrop of historical colonial conXict in Ireland , they knew little of that history and were seldom interested in it. . . . Our students, from both [Catholic and Protestant] communities, had suVered a type of enforced intellectual marginality. The conXict in which their families were embroiled was being represented to them by the media as irrational and incomprehensible, as a struggle between secular humanism and religious fanaticism, between peace and violence, even between good and evil. They had experienced an education system which, if it taught them any history, generally denied them their own. . . . The marginal role of moderates and intellectuals encourage them . . . to claim high ground “above” the conXict.2 It is clear that this syndrome has operated to diVerent extents in the lives of Northern Irish poets, or even within the working career of the individual poet, and their responses have ranged from savage indignation to physical Xight, from cautious interrogation to a retreat to the purely pastoral. McGuckian’s response is perhaps the least overt, the most subversive of any...

Suffolk and the Tudors: Politics and Religion in an English Country, 1500-1600

Suffolk was one of the most interesting counties in 16th-century England. The scene of the only two successful rebellions in Tudor England, Suffolk also underwent an incredible turnaround from being a haven of Catholic worship in 1500 to becoming one of the strongholds of radical Protestantism less than a century later. That same period saw the shocking ousting of its Duke in 1538, an influential landowner in the county and close confidant of Henry VIII. By investigating the historical background to such dramatic developments, this book throws new light on the relationship between the counties and the central government and on the changing political and religious views at the time of the English Reformation.

Prospects for Revolution in South Africa

The unprecedented violence that has engulfed South Africa's black townships since 1984, the creation of the United Democratic Front, and the emergence of large black trade unions have once again focused attention on the prospects for a revolutionary overthrow of the white government. Speculation has been further fueled by the relatively easy overthrows of dictatorships by popular rebellions in Iran, Haiti, and the Philippines. Indeed, some scholars and many inside the African National Congress now argue, in direct contrast to the strategic thinking of the Congress over the last twenty years, that a quantitative increase in the current form of popular protest may lead to a successful rebellion in South Africa. An examination of the revolutionary opportunities and constraints created by the most recent outbreak of protest is, therefore, necessary if the future evolution of South Africa is to be understood. After arguing that the present protest activities do not pose a threat to the continued existence of the white regime, the article will suggest what developments would indicate that a truly revolutionary situation is developing in South Africa.

John Stow and Tudor Rebellions, 1549–1569

In recent years, historians have brought into sharper focus the role of rebellion in the political, social, and religious life of sixteenth-century England. Indeed, the Tudor dynasty established itself on the throne in 1485 as a result of a successful baronial rebellion, and each succeeding generation experienced a major rebellion as well as numerous lesser stirs and riots. Until the revival of interest in Tudor rebellions, the majority of historians preferred to portray the century as an era of law and order in which a strong but popular monarchy ruled over grateful and largely obedient subjects. Although contemporaries living in the sixteenth century knew of rebellion and popular disorder, often through direct personal experience, the government quite understandably opposed anything resembling impartial and disinterested study of the rebellions. Government propagandists denounced rebellion vigorously in royal proclamations and manifestos, while the clergy echoed similar themes from the pulpit. Of the two histories of rebellion published during the sixteenth century, the first, John Proctor's history of Wyatt's Rebellion, was unadulterated government propaganda, and the other, Alexander Neville's history of Kett's Rebellion, was a polemic written in Latin to guarantee a select readership. Without specialized books on rebellions, the literate public had one primary source of historical information, the general chronicles that appeared with greater frequency and variety as the century progressed.Although best known for hisSurvey of London, John Stow was the most prolific chronicler of the sixteenth century. Beginning with the brief octavoA Summary of English Chronicles, which appeared in 1565, Stow published no fewer than twenty-one editions and issues of chronicles in three different formats, the octavoSummary, a sextodecimo abridgment of theSummary, and the more substantialChroniclesandAnnales of Englandin quarto.

Rational Choice and Rebellious Collective Action

A basic problem for a rational choice theory of rebellious collective action is to explain why average citizens would participate in such behavior, since they have nothing to gain (they will receive benefits of successful rebellion, in terms of public goods, regardless of whether they take part or not), but much to lose (rebellious behavior may be quite costly). According to the conventional private interest or “by-product” theory, the incentive to participate must come from the expectation of receiving selective benefits; but since average citizens in a general case cannot expect substantial private material rewards, the relevant selective benefits must be psychological in nature. In contrast to the model of private interest theory, a public goods model is proposed, stipulating that the value of rebellion in terms of public goods can be a relevant incentive for participation. Using data from surveys conducted in New York City and Hamburg, West Germany, we investigate the relationship between participation in rebellious political behavior and measures of the incentives of public goods and private interest. The results do not support predictions of the private interest model in regard to nonmaterial selective incentives. Hypotheses of the public goods model are supported.

3 Henry VI: Dramatic Convention and the Shakespearean History Play

3 Henry VI: Dramatic Convention and the Shakespearean History Play John D. Cox The third part of the Henry VI trilogy has long been re­ garded as the poorest of the lot. Dr. Johnson preferred the sec­ ond part, and his remark that all the plays "have not sufficient variety of action, for the incidents are too often of the same kind" is usually taken as a response to Part 3. Tillyard noted that 3 Henry VI "is Shakespeare's nearest approach to the Chronicle Play," and he left no doubt what such a comparison was meant to imply: "Shakespeare had a great mass of chronicle matter to deal with and he failed to control it; or rather in paring it to manageable length he fails to make it significant." Shakespeare, according to Tillyard, "is either tired or bored: or perhaps both."1 Though Tillyard's ideas about the history plays have long suffered the fate of the proverbial dead horse, it is remark­ able how persistently they haunt his revisionist successors. One of the play's most recent and incisive critics repeats Tillyard's theme with variations, attributing the "perfunctory" quality ot the plotting in 3 Henry VI to Shakespeare's loss of interest in mopping up the events of the civil war, especially now that he was anticipating the "brilliant scheming" of Richard III.2 3 Henry VI, then, is the real test of any critical approach to the early history plays. If we can discover a consistent and satisfying dramatic purpose in this ugly duckling of the first tetralogy, the exercise may enhance our understanding of the other plays, which are usually considered to be more successful in the first place. Tillyard's suggestion that Shakespeare was bored or tired, or that his "inclinations were at odds with his will and duty" (p. 196 ) , indicates an opinion that the playwright failed to order 42 John D. Cox 43 events intelligibly in 3 Henry VI, or mo.re important for a drama­ tist, that he failed to order his materials in such a way as to engage his audience intelligibly. Now it is certainly true, as several critics have noticed, that 3 Henry VI is a play without heroes-that is, it lacks characters of the stature of Talbot in 1 Henry VI or Humphrey Duke of Gloucester in the second play, who unambiguously engage our sympathy. Though a few characters successively win our uncertain pity in 3 Henry VI, no character ever has our wholehearted admiration and ap­ proval. It seems possible, therefore, that the play's peculiarity should be attributed to the ambivalence it invokes rather than to the quality of its plotting. If such an attribution can indeed be sustained, it is surely no cause for condemning 3 Henry VI, given the modern interest in ambiguity, ambivalence, and "the dramatist's manipulation of response" in general.3 I would sug­ gest that in 3 Henry VI the ambiguity can pretty certainly be traced to Shakespeare's combining various elements of his dra­ matic heritage for the purpose of holding the mirror up to history, that is, of revealing the nature of temporal order in human affairs. When 3 Henry VI is viewed in this way, more­ over, it can be seen not as an anomaly but as a paradigm of the Shakespearean history play. Let us first consider the most traditional aspects of Shake­ speare's dramaturgy, for in shaping our attitudes toward his characters he appeals to some remarkably archaic models. In the opening lines of 3 Henry VI we notice an unambiguous smearing of the Yorkists. Though this is not inconsistent with the attitude we have been invited to take toward Richard Duke of York in the first two plays, the process .is carried to unprece­ dented lengths at this point. The clan gathers in Westminster Hall, the very seat of parliamentary and royal authority, where they have "broken in by force."4 Their boldness is heightened by the reason for this gathering: to celebrate their first taste of successful rebellion, the Yorkist victory at St. Albans. They are blackened further by dramatically effective but literally impos­ sible details as they display their...

The signory and its supporters: the Este of Ferrara

The signory of the Este, like that of other contemporary signori, was officially inaugurated with a public election. The ‘people’ ( popolo) of Ferrara thereby instated an hereditary ruler who had absolute powers over the city. This election, together with the fact that there were no successful rebellions against the Este, has led some historians to argue that these signori achieved an implicit understanding with the ‘people’ of Ferrara. The evidence of contemporary chronicles, though often ambigous, does not support this view. Likewise, the legislation of the first Este signore demonstrates a desire to suppress the ‘people’ rather than to co-operate with them. The group whose support was essential to the Este was the nobility; chronicle and archival evidence indicates that the Este considered this group to be the very basis of their signory. The interests of the nobility, as well as the need to maintain good relations with Venice, made far more impact on Estense policy than did the wishes of the ‘people’.

Recessions and Rebellions in Argentina, 1870-1970

THE REVOLUTION of September 5, 1930, is generally considered a turning point in Argentine political development because it marked the first in a long series of military coups. During the fifty years prior to the revolution of 1930, there was not a single successful rebellion against the central government; national politics were characterized by civilian leadership and the regular constitutional change of presidents.' In contrast, since 1930 no civilian elected to the presidency has successfully completed a full term of office. Despite this remarkable change, it would be inaccurate to conclude that the use of force appears in Argentine politics only during the post-1930 years. Between 1870 and 1930 there were eight instances of armed rebellions against the central government, as well as various uprisings against local government. From 1930 to 1970 an additional i8 rebellions took place, making a total of 26. These are listed chronologically in Table 1.2 Armed rebellions serve as a useful starting point for examining political change in Argentina. As historical events, rebellions are relatively easy to pinpoint; at any given moment there either is or is not an armed rebellion under way, and its existence as an historical fact is not questioned.3 Rebellions are important for many reasons, not

A Theology of Rebellion

“A revolution is a successful rebellion; the victory has been won and the new system has been established. A rebellion is a continual revolution; the new system is ever in process of being established and the victory or victories are always still ahead. … Revolution becomes an absolute negation of the past; it absolutizes its present or future forms and so becomes demonic and nihilistic. … There is an historical connection between rebellious thought and Judeo-Christian thought.”

China: government by permanent rebellion

It was Mencius who taught that the people are justified in rebelling against a decadent dynasty. Since the Chou dynasty replaced the Shang at the dawn of China's history, successful rebellion has been the proof that the dynasty was decadent and the rebels not rebels but the new possessors of T'ien Ming, Heaven's mandate. For ‘Heaven sees as the people see and hears as they hear’.