Resisting Rebellion: The History and Politics of Counterinsurgency

Abstract

People's war. Popular revolt. Small war. Unconventional warfare. Insurgency. By whatever name you choose to call it, guerilla warfare claimed countless lives in the twentieth century and continues to confound the militaries of major world powers. In Resisting Rebellion: The History and Politics of Counterinsurgency, Anthony James Joes argues that an understanding of the origins and motivations behind guerilla warfare requires an examination of its long history. More important, in order to prevail against the tactics employed by these nonconventional warriors, military thinkers and policy-makers must understand that guerilla warfare is not just a military tactic but also a political strategy. Joes, one of the nation's leading scholars of guerilla warfare, argues that any effective response to guerilla warfare must be primarily political. In a discussion ranging from Napoleon's invasion of Spain in 1808 to the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, Joes examines the historical record to identify patterns in guerilla warfare and counterinsurgency that provide lessons to today's political and military leaders. He shows that communists did not invent guerilla tactics, which have been used from earliest times, and defines the fundamental elements of counterinsurgency that have been successful in the past. Resisting Rebellion is a major work that promises to redefine how we think about the politics of war and insurrection.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 72 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.