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Does the Emergence of Insurgencies Provide Lessons for Terrorism?
Pages 128-132

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From page 128... ... The scope of activities as it was then anticipated is largely reflected in the publication of the proceedings of a U.S.-Russian workshop, Conflict and Reconstruction in Multiethnic Societies.1 This concern for relatively diffuse and heterogeneous sources of violence has been somewhat but not completely overtaken by the impacts of rapidly developing international networks of a generally Islamist, more specifically terrorist, character. By design, the binational group was composed of scholars seeking to establish broad patterns with a comparative approach, and not with individuals having the real-time concerns of national policy makers and those charged with the active suppression of terrorist acts. Read the entire page →
From page 129... ... Insurgents have to make use of the crude, low-tech, not very selective weapons they can readily seize or have at hand. Organized military forces, on the other hand, make use of much more powerful and destructive weapons, particularly air and heavy artillery bombardment, and then too frequently dismiss attendant civilian casualties as mere collateral damage. Read the entire page →
From page 130... ... Typically the contexts involve what is locally perceived as longstanding, repressive discrimination in access to land, employment, education, and other resources, or military occupation that forecloses other, less violent types of civic protest or even involvement. This clearly does not provide an acceptable rationale for what committed terrorists are trying to do, but it drastically loosens all existing restraints on the wider communities in which they move. Read the entire page →
From page 131... ... I refer to a very recent monograph by Elisabeth Wood, Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador.2 On the basis of sensitive, long-continuing fieldwork, she traces evolving forms of militant peasant collective action in a series of representative Salvadoran case-study areas. Collective violence first occurred there in connection with a mass social movement in the mid-1970s. Read the entire page →
From page 132... ... I am very skeptical of any overall pattern of congruence, as noted earlier, but at the level of a newly emergent organizational structure that generates its own identities and loyalty, this at least deserves serious consideration. Efforts to deal with indigenous practices or occasions of terrorism may need to have the same flexibility of structure, goals, and tactics and a readiness both for sudden, resolute advance and strategic compromise or withdrawal, as was characteristic of other insurgencies like the wellreported one in El Salvador. Read the entire page →

From page 128...

... The scope of activities as it was then anticipated is largely reflected in the publication of the proceedings of a U.S.-Russian workshop, Conflict and Reconstruction in Multiethnic Societies.1 This concern for relatively diffuse and heterogeneous sources of violence has been somewhat but not completely overtaken by the impacts of rapidly developing international networks of a generally Islamist, more specifically terrorist, character. By design, the binational group was composed of scholars seeking to establish broad patterns with a comparative approach, and not with individuals having the real-time concerns of national policy makers and those charged with the active suppression of terrorist acts.

Read the entire page →

From page 129...

... Insurgents have to make use of the crude, low-tech, not very selective weapons they can readily seize or have at hand. Organized military forces, on the other hand, make use of much more powerful and destructive weapons, particularly air and heavy artillery bombardment, and then too frequently dismiss attendant civilian casualties as mere collateral damage.

Read the entire page →

From page 130...

... Typically the contexts involve what is locally perceived as longstanding, repressive discrimination in access to land, employment, education, and other resources, or military occupation that forecloses other, less violent types of civic protest or even involvement. This clearly does not provide an acceptable rationale for what committed terrorists are trying to do, but it drastically loosens all existing restraints on the wider communities in which they move.

Read the entire page →

From page 131...

... I refer to a very recent monograph by Elisabeth Wood, Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador.2 On the basis of sensitive, long-continuing fieldwork, she traces evolving forms of militant peasant collective action in a series of representative Salvadoran case-study areas. Collective violence first occurred there in connection with a mass social movement in the mid-1970s.

Read the entire page →

From page 132...

... I am very skeptical of any overall pattern of congruence, as noted earlier, but at the level of a newly emergent organizational structure that generates its own identities and loyalty, this at least deserves serious consideration. Efforts to deal with indigenous practices or occasions of terrorism may need to have the same flexibility of structure, goals, and tactics and a readiness both for sudden, resolute advance and strategic compromise or withdrawal, as was characteristic of other insurgencies like the wellreported one in El Salvador.

Read the entire page →

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Does the Emergence of Insurgencies Provide Lessons for Terrorism? Pages 128-132

Does the Emergence of Insurgencies Provide Lessons for Terrorism?
Pages 128-132