Insurgency in the Modern World

Bard E. O'Neill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429709197
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

While all instances of insurgency have elements in common, the circumstances that precipitate them and the forms they take vary immensely. The editors of this book synthesize the literature on insurgency to provide an analytical framework that outlines categories of insurgent movements (secessionist, revolutionary, restorational, reactionary, conse

1
Insurgency: A Framework for Analysis

Bard E. O'Neill

It is hardly an exaggeration to suggest that a good deal of conceptual confusion obtains in the existing corpus of literature on internal political violence. In large part, this is due to the lack of agreement on the definitions of major terms such as insurgency, revolution, guerrilla warfare, terrorism, protracted struggle, and the like. As a result, it is not uncommon to find these terms used imprecisely, indiscriminately, and, at times, interchangeably.

In view of this unhappy situation and the problems it engenders for those interested in the systematic study of internal political violence, it is imperative that the principal concepts employed in our comparative analysis of insurgency be defined as carefully as possible. Accordingly, we begin by addressing the meaning of insurgency, its relationship to the political system, and six types of insurgency. Thereafter we turn to a commentary on the political resources and forms of warfare the insurgents utilize. Once the discussion of terminology is completed, we are ready to proceed to the principal foci of the framework for analysis: the variables that have a major bearing on the outcomes of insurgent conflicts, and insurgent strategies.

The Nature of Insurgency

Insurgency can be defined as a struggle between a nonruling group and the ruling authorities in which the former consciously employs political resources (organizational skills, propaganda, and/or demonstrations) and instruments of violence to establish legitimacy for some aspect of the political system it considers illegitimate. Legitimacy and illegitimacy refer to whether or not existing aspects of politics are considered moral or immoral (or, to simplify, right or wrong) by the population or selected elements therein. For our purposes politics is defined as the process of making and executing binding decisions for a society; therefore, all behavior associated with this enterprise comprises the "political system." On a general level, the major components of the system may be identified as: the political community, the regime, the authorities, and policies. Any or all of these may be considered immoral by insurgents, and it makes a great deal of difference precisely which one is at stake.¹

The political community consists of those who accept interacting together in a situation where binding decisions will be made for all. In the contemporary international system this is, for the most part, equivalent to the nation-state. On this very basic point, violent conflict may result from considerations of legitimacy. The current uprising in the Eritrean sector of Ethiopia is illustrative here since the insurgents reject any notion that they should be an integral part of Ethiopia. Consequently, the Eritreans have sought through violent means to separate themselves from existing arrangements and to establish a separate political community. In the United States, Great Britain, France, and Japan, by contrast, there is a general acceptance of the morality of the political community rooted in common history, tradition, and language.

Where a consensus on the morality of the political community obtains, there may be other grounds for violent internal conflict. For instance, there can be considerable discord over the salient values and structures that provide the basic framework within which binding decisions and policies are made. Thus, while the Marxists in Afghanistan accepted the political community, they used violence to expunge the traditional political values and patrimonial structures of the regime in order to replace them with a system in which binding decisions would be made within the framework of a one-party regime, in which the value of equality would replace ascriptive values that reflect private and aristocratic interests.

On another level some groups may grant legitimacy to the regime but reject the specific individuals in power. This is exemplified by coups in which insurgents seize the key decision making offices without changing the regime of their predecessors. Besides the well-known Latin American cases of the 1950s, one could point to the 1970 overthrow of the Sultan of Oman, Said bin Taimur, by his son Qabus in this regard.²

Finally, violence may be used by nonruling groups in an effort to change existing policies that they believe have prevented them from acquiring their fair share of the collective political and economic product. One example is the terminal phase of the recent insurgency in the Sudan, where the blacks in the south demanded a change in policies to enable them to obtain a greater share of the political and economic benefits in society. Another is provided by the periodic attempts by Muslim and Druse elements in Lebanon to redress the perceived maldistribution of political and economic assets that clearly favors the Christian community.

The important thing to remember up to this point is that insurgency is essentially a political legitimacy crisis of some sort. The first task of the analyst, therefore, is to ascertain exactly what the issue is. In seeking an answer to this question, it is useful to carefully examine the articulated long-term aims of the insurgents.

By focusing on the ultimate goal of the insurgents and relating it to the aspects of politics discussed above, one can identify six types of insurgent movements: secessionist, revolutionary, restorational, reactionary, conservative, and reformist. Secessionist insurgents, such as the aforementioned Eritreans in Ethiopia, reject the existing political community of which they are formally a part; they seek to withdraw from it and constitute a new autonomous political community. Revolutionary insurgents seek to impose a new regime based on egalitarian values and centrally controlled structures designed to mobilize the people and radically transform the social structure within an existing political community (e.g., Marxist insurgents).³ While restorational insurgent movements also seek to displace the regime, the values and structures they champion are identified with a recent political order. In this case the values are ascriptive and elitist while the structures are oligarchical ones that have little or no provisions for mass participation in politics. The National Front for the Rescue of Afghanistan and Sultan Ali Mirrah's Afar Liberation Front in the Haoussa region of Ethiopia are contemporary manifestations of this type. Historical examples are provided by noncommunist partisans in Europe during World War II. Although reactionary insurgents likewise seek to change the regime by reconstituting a past political order, their repristination relates to an idealized, golden age of the distant past in which religious values and authoritarian structures were predominant. The Moslem Brotherhood in Egypt and other Arab countries, which seeks to recreate the flowering Islamic society of centuries ago, is a case in point. Conservative insurgents, on the other hand, seek to maintain the existing regime in the face of pressures on the authorities to change it. This type of insurgent movement was exemplified in the early 1970s by Protestant organizations in Ulster that wished to retain the regime in Northern Ireland that they saw as threatened by the Irish Republican Army, Catholic moderates, the Irish Republic, and "British capitulationists."⁴ Finally, reformist insurgents, such as the Kurds in Iraq and the Anayanya guerrillas in the southern Sudan, have attempted to obtain more political, social, and economic benefits without necessarily rejecting the political community, regime, or authorities. They are primarily concerned with policies that are considered discriminatory.⁵

To accomplish their objectives, insurgent movements use political resources and instruments of violence against the ruling authorities. As far as political resources are concerned, organisation is the critical dimension. This can be one of two types: conspirational, where small elite groups carry out and threaten violent acts; or internal warfare, where insurgent elites attempt to mobilize large segments of the population on behalf of their cause.⁶ While internal warfare is the most familiar to students of insurgency, because of the well-known Vietnamese, Cambodian, Chinese, Algerian, and Portuguese colonial conflicts, there are also ample cases of conspiratorial insurgencies, such as those led by the Bolsheviks in Czarist Russia, the Red Army in Japan, and the Moslem Brotherhood in Egypt. Since some conspiracies gradually evolve into internal wars, the two are best viewed as ends of a continuum between which there are many intermediate cases.

In conspiracies the organizational effort necessary for coordinating both violent and nonviolent activity is not as demanding as in an internal war setting, since there is far less concern with linking the insurgency to the mass population. This neglect of the population, however, often renders such groups impotent and, hence, has provided one of the key issues dividing insurgent strategists.

Turning to the violent aspect of insurgency, one can identify different forms of warfare. A form of warfare may be viewed as one variety of organized violence emphasizing particular armed forces, weapons, tactics, and targets. Naval blockades, ground combat, air campaigns, and guerrilla operations are forms of warfare. Three forms of warfare have been associated with insurgent conflicts: terrorism, guerrilla war, and conventional warfare.⁷

Terrorism, a form of insurgent warfare conducted either by individuals or very small groups, involves the use of systematic, arbitrary, and amoral violence-for example, murder, torture, mutilation, bombing, arson, kidnapping, and hijacking-in order to achieve both long- and short-term political aims. Unlike conventional soldiers and guerrillas, terrorists direct their operations primarily against unarmed civilians rather than enemy military units or economic assets.⁸ Although such terrorism has generally occurred within the borders of the political system whose community, regime, authorities, or policies have become the target of insurgent violence, there has been an increasing tendency over the past several years to strike at targets outside such boundaries. Since these acts are carried out by autonomous, nonstate actors, they have been referred to as transnational terrorism so as to distinguish them from similar behavior on the part of individuals or groups controlled by sovereign states (international terrorism).⁹

The long-term goal of terrorism has been not so much the desire to deplete the government's physical resources as it has been to erode its psychological support by spreading fear among officials and their domestic and international supporters. Though the general purpose of terrorism has been to alter the behavior and attitudes of specific groups, this has not excluded the simultaneous pursuit of more proximate objectives, such as extracting particular concessions (e.g., payment of ransom or the release of prisoners), gaining publicity, demoralizing the population through the creation of widespread disorder, provoking repression by the government, enforcing obedience and cooperation from those inside and outside the movement, fulfilling the need to avenge losses inflicted upon the movement, enhancing the political stature of specific factions within an insurgent movement, and undermining policies of rival insurgent groups.¹⁰ Since the particular aims being pursued will vary from incident to incident (even in the case of actions that are similar), great care must be exercised in generalising about terrorist acts.

Julian Paget has characterized guerrilla warfare as a form of warfare based on mobile tactics used by small, lightly armed groups who aim to harass their opponent rather than defeat him in battle.¹¹ Guerrilla warfare differs from terrorism in that its primary targets are usually the government's armed forces, police, or their support units and, in some cases, key economic targets, rather than unarmed civilians.¹² As a consequence, guerrilla units are larger than terrorist cells and tend to require a more elaborate logistical structure as well as base camps. Like terrorism, however, guerrilla warfare is a weapon of the weak; it is decisive only where the government fails to commit adequate resources to the conflict. In many cases it has been necessary to accompany guerrilla warfare with other forms of violence or to evolve mobile conventional warfare (the direct confrontation of large units in the field) in order to achieve success.

Whether or not an insurgent organisation will have to move to the familiar conventional warfare mode is, in part, related to whether or not the insurgency is auxiliary or independent in nature. In the former case, suggests Otto Heilbrunn, the insurgents pursue only tactical aims, for they do not have to defeat the enemy; a regular army will be charged with that mission (e.g., Yugoslavia in World War II). Independent insurgent movements, on the other hand, have strategic aims, because they often must regularize their forces in order to be successful on their own. Even if regularisation of forces is unnecessary, the independent insurgent movement must still rely largely on its own capabilities if it is to succeed.¹³

Major Analytical Variables

In their quest for victory, insurgents have devised various strategies intended to maximize the effectiveness of political techniques and violence. These strategies can be differentiated by examining the relative importance they ascribe to six general variables-popular support, organization, cohesion, external support, the environment, and the effectiveness of the government.¹⁴ Since these variables have a major impact on the outcome of insurgencies, they will constitute the criteria for assessing the political and military achievements, as well as strategies, of the insurgent groups in the case studies.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• The Contributors
• 1. Insurgency: A Framework for Analysis
• 2. The Irish Republican Army and Northern Ireland
• 3. People's War in Thailand
• 4. The Guatemalan Insurrection
• 5. Urban Terrorism in Uruguay: The Tupamaros
• 6. Iraq: The Kurdish Rebellion
• 7. Revolutionary War in Oman
• 8. Armed Struggle in Angola
• 9. Summary and Conclusions
• Selected Bibliography
• Index