2 - Insurgency — characteristics and responses

Summary

The historical theme

A considerable literature developed in the 1960s and 1970s on the subject of insurgency, peasant wars and national liberation struggles. The contemporary importance of a wide range of movements from the Malayan insurgency and the Algerian War of Independence to the war in Indo-China and the Cuban Revolution has accounted for this interest. It has joined the existing and continuing body of literature on the subject of the historical conditions of revolution and methods of waging a revolutionary struggle. We have now a number of studies that attempt to explain what insurgency implied and to compare it with the more familiar types of rebellion or revolution.

Rebellions are not revolutions: they result from specific, often limited localised grievances, though they are certainly capable of generating an intensity of feeling that can spread over a wide area and last for a long time. This, perhaps, distinguishes them from riots, which are usually spontaneous protests against a single action. In spite of their frequent social conflict characteristics, rebellions generally do not constitute movements for structural change. Their strategic objective rarely tends to be the capture of political power at the centre of decision making. On the contrary, their aims are usually tactical, in that, by a demonstration of force, they seek to push the established power from the course of action which had given rise to the discontent in the first place. As such, rebellions represent a form of armed protest, which, in themselves, constitute only a limited challenge to authority.