THE FUTURE OF INSURGENCY

Steven Metz

December 10, 1993
*******

The views expressed in this report are those of the author

and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of

the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense, or the

U.S. Government. This report is approved for public release;

distribution is unlimited.

*******

Comments pertaining to this report are invited and should be

forwarded to: Director, Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army

War College, Carlisle Barracks, PA 17013-5050. Comments also may

be conveyed directly to the author by calling commercial (717)

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FOREWORD

Security professionals and strategists are discovering the

post-cold war world is as rife with persistent, low-level

violence as its predecessors. In fact, many regions are

experiencing a rise in the amount of conflict in the absence of

restraints previously imposed by the superpowers. Since

frustration in many parts of the Third World is actually

increasing, insurgency--the use of low-level, protracted violence

to overthrow a political system or force some sort of fundamental

change in the political and economic status quo--will be an

enduring security problem.

Unfortunately, most existing doctrine and strategy for

dealing with insurgency are based on old forms of the phenomenon,

especially rural, protracted, "people's war." But as this type of

insurgency becomes obsolete, new forms will emerge. It is

important to speculate on these future forms in order to assist

in the evolution of counterinsurgency strategy and doctrine.

In this study, Dr. Steven Metz uses a psychological method

of analysis to argue that two forms of insurgency, which he calls

the "spiritual" and the "commercial," will pose the greatest

intellectual challenges to security professionals, military

leaders, and strategists. The specific nature of such challenges

will vary from region to region.

The Strategic Studies Institute is pleased to offer this

study as a foundation for future analysis and recommendations on

the development of doctrine, force structure, and strategy for

countering insurgency.

JOHN W. MOUNTCASTLE

Colonel, U.S. Army

Director, Strategic Studies Institute
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF THE AUTHOR

STEVEN METZ has been Associate Research Professor of National

Security Affairs at the Strategic Studies Institute since 1993.

Prior to this, he served as Associate Professor of Low Intensity

Conflict and Third World Studies at the Air War College, and

Professor of International Relations and National Security

Affairs at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. He

has also taught at several universities and been a consultant to

political organizations and campaigns. Dr. Metz holds a B.A. and

M.A. in international studies from the University of South

Carolina, and a Ph.D. in political science from the Johns Hopkins

University. He is the author of many articles on world politics,

military strategy, and national security policy.
SUMMARY

Insurgency will persist even after the end of the cold war.

But as insurgent strategists recognize the bankruptcy of old

techniques, especially protracted, rural "people's war," they

will innovate. It is vital for those interested in preventing or

controlling insurgency to think creatively, speculate on the new

forms that will emerge, and craft new frames of reference to

serve as the foundation for strategy and doctrine.

The key to post-cold war insurgency is its psychological

component. The greatest shortcoming of Third World states

(including most of the former Soviet bloc) is their inability to

meet the psychological needs of their populations, especially a

sense of meaning during the stressful periods of rapid change

associated with development. This shortcoming will generate

frustration and discontent which can be used by insurgent

strategists.

Two forms of insurgency are likely to dominate the post-cold

war world. Spiritual insurgency is the descendant of the cold

war-era revolutionary insurgency. It will be driven by the

problems of modernization, the search for meaning, and the

pursuit of justice. The other form will be commercial insurgency.

This will be driven less by the desire for justice than wealth.

Its psychological foundation is a warped translation of Western

popular culture which equates wealth, personal meaning, and

power.

The dominance of one of these two forms will vary from

region to region. Latin America is likely to suffer more from

continued and expanded commercial insurgency than from spiritual.

Sub-Saharan Africa will be particularly prone to insurgency.

Initially the spiritual form will be pervasive, with the

potential for commercial insurgency to develop later. The

likelihood of spiritual insurgency is also high in the Middle

East (including Arab North Africa). The Asia/Pacific region and

the former Soviet bloc will probably experience both spiritual

and commercial insurgency.
THE FUTURE OF INSURGENCY

Introduction.

Writing in 1970, Richard H. Sanger suggested that the modern

era has experienced seven great waves of revolts from the English

Revolution of 1648-88 to the cyclone of violence that swept the

Third World after World War II.1

 Today, this assessment is still

accurate, but incomplete. We now stand on the cusp of the eighth

wave of modern revolt.

There will be many forms of low-level, protracted violence

as the post-cold war global security system coalesces. Of these,

insurgency--the use of low-level, protracted violence to

overthrow a political system or force some sort of fundamental

change in the political and economic status quo--will certainly

persist. After all, it has been one of the most pervasive types

of conflict throughout history and today is epidemic.2 For many

countries of the world, simmering internal war is a permanent

condition.3 As long as there are people frustrated to the point

of violence but too weak to challenge a regime in conventional

military ways, insurgency will persist. It will, however, evolve

from its cold war form.

A number of factors will drive or force the evolution of

insurgency. Internationally, the most obvious is the demise of

the Soviet Union and its proxies. This dried up the assistance,

training, inspiration, and ideological unity which, during the

cold war, sustained insurgencies.4 Insurgents will still search

for outside assistance in the post-cold war world, but the source

and motives of outside supporters will be more complex than

during the cold war. Ironically, the revitalization of the United

Nations may serve to make insurgency more attractive to

frustrated power seekers. At the height of the cold war,

insurgency tended to be a win or lose proposition. But with U.N.

activism in settling internal conflict, insurgents may see the

possibility of making gains short of outright victory through a

U.N. mediated peace.

Within Third World states, escalating urbanization,

population growth, ecological decay, and the explosion of

communication technology will change the nature of insurgency.

The growing economic cost of insurgency is also an important

factor. With the decline of outside patrons to supply insurgents,

they are forced to purchase arms and other supplies. To do this

they develop other funding sources whether cocaine trafficking

for Peru's Sendero Luminoso or the diamond trade for Angola's

UNITA.5 Perhaps the most important change--and one easily

overlooked--is the improving counterinsurgency capabilities of

many Third World regimes. After nearly four decades of successful

revolutionary insurgencies, counterinsurgent strategists appear

to have caught up and even surpassed their antagonists.
Sensing that insurgency will evolve is easy. Charting the

direction of this change is more complex. Traditionally the

evolution of insurgency is like that of a species. Through

success, one variant became dominant and was emulated. By the

1960s, this was rural, protracted, "people's war." Then, as

emulators of that variant failed, insurgency variegated waiting

for a new dominant form to emerge. That is where we are today.

None of the old models, whether Maoist people's war, Cuban-style

focquismo, or urban insurrection in the Russian, Nicaraguan, or

Iranian fashion, are dominant. Edward Luttwak noted that since

strategy pits two thinking antagonists in conflict, success has a

finite lifespan.6 The chance of failure increases as the other

antagonist begins to understand and counter successful

techniques, approaches, and stratagems. Today, the methods that

generated revolutionary success from Algeria to Angola are

obsolete. But insurgent strategists are both intelligent and

creative. They will innovate. The question is: How?

The Context.

Insurgency is born, lives, and dies in a specific strategic,

historical, and psychological context. In the broadest sense, its

environment is the Third World. Knowing this is only of limited

help to the analyst. The "Third World" is a monumentally diverse

place. It includes the vast majority of all humans and states,

each unique in a number of ways. This makes generalizations

difficult and dangerous, but not necessarily worthless. There are

common structural, institutional, and psychological features

which combine to form the preconditions for insurgency (although

not necessarily the causes). These include the macro-level

maldistribution of wealth, un- and underemployment, poverty,

anxiety and confusion generated by rapid modernization, the

collapse of traditional social structures, corruption,

factionalization, and inefficiency within the regime, frustration

brought about by unrealistic expectations concerning the

government's capabilities, repression, weak or nonexistent

national identity, and inadequate political mechanisms for

peaceful change.

During the 20th century, all of the inherent weaknesses and

problems of the Third World have been exacerbated by the

destabilizing influence of modernization and development.

Americans instinctively consider modernization and development

good. In the long run, they are. But in the short term, they

create and amplify tensions and conflict. Thus, rapid economic

growth "is a profoundly destabilizing force," and the

transformation of culture and society that accompanies

development often spawns disturbances of one kind or the other.7

"Modernization," Samuel P. Huntington explained, "is a

multifaceted process involving changes in all areas of human

thought and activity. . .At the psychological level,

modernization involves a fundamental shift in values, attitudes

and expectations."8 During modernization knowledge expands,
physical mobility increases, and all patterns of life change

dramatically. This generates security problems when the pace of

social change outstrips the development of political institutions

through which the newly mobilized population can seek redress of

problems. And, clearly, the quicker the change, the greater the

instability and the propensity for violence.

Ironically, the increasing capacity of Third World

governments to provide goods and services to their populations

can also lead to violence. In premodern or traditional states,

people expected little tangible rewards from governments except

physical protection and, in some cases, construction and

maintenance of basic public works such as irrigation canals.

Other than that, the government's primary job was to appease the

gods--a task with few discernible standards of measurement.

During modernization, governments began to provide more tangible

goods and services, and thus increased the expectations of their

populations. Often, expectations rose faster than a government's

ability to meet them, thus generating what Ted Robert Gurr

labeled "relative deprivation."9

 This is an important

precondition for political violence, and again is exacerbated by

radical improvements in electronic communications and

transportation.

Psychologically, modernization tends to destroy traditional

value systems without a fully developed and appealing

replacement. This often leads to some degree of anomie--a

widespread sense of normlessness bordering on moral chaos. The

tangible outcomes are frustration and a propensity to look toward

ideologies, some of them violent, for alternative value systems.

Given this, a full understanding of the nature of insurgency must

be grounded in the psychology of value systems and personal

meaning. Viktor E. Frankl, one of the pioneers in this field,

wrote, "Man's search for meaning is the primary motivation in his

life. . ."10 He concluded that the absence of a sense of meaning

can only be ameliorated by action or suffering--both part of the

psychological context of insurgency.

During the post-World War II wave of insurgency Frantz Fanon

described the "cultural estrangement" felt by colonial people and

their search for new myths to construct a system of meaning.

Intellectuals such as Georges Sorel had earlier noted the

psychologically liberating effects of violence but Fanon, who was

formally trained as a psychiatrist, was especially astute in

placing this in the context of the modern Third World. "At the

level of individuals," he wrote, "violence is a cleansing force.

It frees the native from his inferiority and restores his

self-respect."11 Today, colonialism is gone but the search for

meaning and its violent expression is unabated. From Iran to Sri

Lanka to Peru, revolution and personal meaning are inextricably

linked. Witness the resurgence of religious fundamentalism

(Islamic and others) and of atavistic forms of identity such as

ethnicity. The world is also swept by a type of nationalism less

like the American variant which grows from shared interests and
values than the Fascist or Nazi form where some sort of

metaphysical or spiritual bond--whether ethnic, racial, or

religious--defines the polity.

There are groups in nearly every Third World state who

associate modernization with frustration. Just as the Nazis

looked to mythical early German heroes and Mussolini's Fascists

pursued the glory of Rome, these groups often seek a new

framework of identity and personal meaning in their nation's

pre-modern past. For instance, Michael Radu argues:

Even in Latin America, the trend seems to be toward a

nostalgia for the pre-Colombian past. The Mexicans'

love affair with the Aztecs and their sentimental

preference for Cuauhtémoc over Cortés is a symbolic

reminder of this trend; the obsession of white,

middle-class, educated young Uruguayans, Peruvians, and

Argentinians with Túpac Amaru, a defeated Indian chief

of eighteenth century Peru, is another; and Sendero

Luminoso's profoundly reactionary politico-economic

program is centered on a return to the pre-Colombian

"golden age" of the Tehuantinsuyo, the Inca Empire.12

And, in Guatemala, there has been a resurgence of a native

Maya movement with congressional approval of a standardized Maya

alphabet.13 Similar things are happening throughout the Third

World. Admittedly these appeals to a mythical past may not

accurately reflect the objectives of the insurgent elite. The

white and mestizo leaders of Sendero Luminoso, for instance, have

no intention of actually returning to Inca socialism, yet find it

a valuable tool for mobilizing Indian support.

Before the modern era, there was an unspoken contract

between the state and its population defining the obligations of

each. Outside of theocracies, the state provided basic needs,

especially protection, and people sought meaning through other

organizations, usually family, village, tribe, clan, or church.

As an aspect of modernization, the state assumed growing

responsibility for higher level needs such as psychic fulfillment

and personal meaning. In recognizing this the Fascists, Nazis,

and even Bolsheviks were ahead of their time. Today, many Third

World states are being asked to provide these higher level needs,

but are unable to do so. This lays a foundation for insurgency

and provides the opportunity for insurgent strategists to provide

the other elements of the equation such as a unifying ideology,

leadership, and weapons.

The global electronics revolution also exacerbated

frustration among the citizens of the Third World. As Gurr

demonstrated, it is not absolute poverty or deprivation that

leads to political violence, but relative deprivation. Through

television, movies, and increased literacy, the "blissful

ignorance" that kept a repressive peace in much of the developing

world was shattered. All of a sudden, the poor (and even the
not-so-poor) with access to Western entertainment recognized the

extent of their deprivation. In the Third World (as in the West),

personal satisfaction was defined by material possessions.

Naturally, the government was expected to meet these new demands.

When weak and poor regimes could not do so, another stone was

laid in the foundation of insurgency. Victor Perera's description

of young Guatemalans living in a city garbage dump is accurate

throughout the Third World:

Jazz, Hollywood, baseball, half-eaten Big Macs in

plastic containers, TV reruns in shop windows are most

of what they know of gringo culture, refracted through

the glittering shards of a thousand spent and shattered

dreams.14

Exploding populations and rapid urbanization have made the

demands spawned by Western entertainment exceedingly difficult

for governments and economies to satisfy. In the Third World,

urbanization has been much more rapid than during the earlier

process of modernization in North America and Europe, thus

amplifying the immiserization of those newly arrived in the

cities.15 Usually they find very limited economic opportunities

and an infrastructure unable to provide adequate housing, medical

care, transportation, or even potable water and sewer facilities.

 Rapid urbanization also contributes to environmental decay. In

the cities of the Third World, the air and water are often

dangerously polluted. In the countryside, deforestation

contributes to drought, desertification, soil erosion, declining

fertility and, subsequently, further urbanization and immigration

by people unable to eke out a living through farming. At the same

time, the decline of labor-intensive industry limits economic

opportunities in the cities. The tangible outcome is the

horrendous slum belts populated by the un- or under-employed

circling many Third World cities, all of which are incubators for

political violence. Demographic trends exacerbate this. By some

estimates, more than 50 percent of the citizens of the Third

World are under 15 years old.16 It is during late adolescence and

early adulthood that people are most amenable to extremism, thus

providing an endless sea of potential recruits for insurgent

leaders. Ominously, there is no sign that this will end soon.

All of this misery and frustration is made even more

explosive by the widespread availability of arms. Through the

playing-out of the cold war in the Third World, and through the

desire of weapons manufacturers to sell their goods, there is a

global profusion of arms useful to insurgents from the

omnipresent AK-47 to the shoulder-fired anti-air missiles, rocket

propelled grenades, and night vision goggles. During the cold war

a number of states deliberately engineered Third World

insurgencies as part of their national security strategies. This

included both the superpowers and smaller states such as South

Africa, Iran, Pakistan, Nicaragua, and Cuba. The result is a

proliferation of not only the physical legacy of the cold war--

arms--but also of the knowledge of how to foment, organize, and
sustain insurgency. Neither the physical nor intellectual legacy

of the cold war will disappear soon.

Finally, the physical enlargement of the Third World changed

the context of insurgency. Put simply, much of what was once

labeled the "Second World"--the former Soviet bloc--became part

of the Third World. This means that regions which once seemed

immune to insurgency are now either susceptible or, as in the

cases of Georgia, Tajikistan, and, of course, Bosnia,

experiencing it.

New Forms.

The tendency toward variegation in insurgency existed even

during the height of the cold war. Marxism simply served as an

artificial homogenizer partially overcoming local peculiarities.

Insurgents usually adopted Marxism because of their need to

attract external support and to construct a common ideological

lexicon for various elements of the insurgent coalition. But

Marxism's importance was always overestimated by opponents of

insurgency, whether the United States or Third World governments.

Although the ideological predilections of a revolutionary

leadership had some utility for determining the overall strategic

significance of the revolt, it was usually not vitally important

for the course of an insurgency itself, and now is wholly

irrelevant.

Analysts of insurgency have long recognized that ideological

rhetoric provides a poor tool for categorizing and understanding

insurgency. In response, they crafted other analytical

frameworks. Most of these relied on one of two variables: the

goals of the insurgency, or its strategy. More sophisticated

schemas combined the two.17 But both of these variables generate

analytical problems. Frameworks based on the goals of insurgents

assume a Western, linear, and proto-Marxist notion of

development. A revolutionary insurgency is thus one seeking

socialism; a reactionary opposes the Western model of

development. This means that a framework based on this variable

is only as valid as the model of development it assumes. Using

the insurgents' strategy is equally problematic, in large part

because the strategy reflects the external training and sponsors

of the insurgent leadership.

In an attempt to bypass this Western bias and understand

insurgency the way its proponents do rather than the way we would

if we were in their position, this study examines insurgency

using an essentially psychological framework. I assume that it is

not a particular social, political, and economic system or

condition that sparks insurgency, but a particular way of

understanding this system or condition. Phrased differently, it

is not repression, poverty or misery as we define it that

inspires insurgency, but as the insurgents define it. 

Psychological factors rather than structural ones are preeminent.
Using this psychological approach, then, what forms will

insurgency take in the post-cold war international system? Of

course every insurgency will be unique, reflecting the history,

geography, and culture of the society in which it occurs. Still,

there are likely to be two dominant forms. One can be called

spiritual insurgency. This is the descendant of the cold war-era

revolutionary insurgency. It will be driven by the problems of

modernization, especially anomie, the search for meaning, and the

pursuit of justice. The other form will be commercial insurgency.

This will be driven less by the desire for justice than wealth.

Its psychological foundation is a warped translation of Western

popular culture which equates wealth, personal meaning, and

power.

Spiritual Insurgency and the Search for Meaning. Spiritual

insurgency is the evolutionary descendant of traditional

revolution. Its predecessors are not only the Marxist

insurgencies of the cold war, but also the slave and peasant

rebellions that occurred throughout recorded history. But these

past rebellions were essentially about power. Rebellious peasants

and slaves seldom questioned the basic sense of personal meaning

defined by their culture. What will distinguish many post-cold

war spiritual insurgencies is an explicit linkage to the search

for meaning. Anomie as much as poverty or repression, the desire

for a more broad-based sense of fulfillment rather than the

simpler needs-based motives of past popular uprisings, will drive

insurgents.

This is not totally new. There was usually some spiritual

element in traditional revolutions. While most peasant rebellions

were inspired by specific local grievances, they "often included

millenarian elements, views of the apocalypse, messianic

upheavals offering the anticipation of a world purged of

wickedness and suffering. . ."18 Even during the cold war, the

spiritual content of insurgency was important. Part of the appeal

of Marxism was that it served many of the same psychological

functions as religion during a time of widespread

secularization.19 Successful Marxist revolutionaries from Lenin

to Kim Il Sung created personality cults to provide a framework

of personal meaning for their followers. In the future, the

spiritual dimension will markedly increase in importance,

amplifying an aspect of insurgency that was there all along.

At least two psychological factors undergird the

relationship of insurgency and the search for meaning. One is the

linkage between violence and liberation observed by Fanon.

Participation in political violence is a spiritually liberating

event by someone who feels abused, repressed, or alienated by a

socio-political system. By viewing themselves as agents of

justice struggling against injustice, political violence gives

meaning to the lives of its advocates. For the first time in

their lives, revolutionaries find that they are taken seriously

by the system. As rebels they may live in danger, but at least
they are not insignificant, a condition which many find far worse

than danger. The second factor deals with tolerance of

psychological stimuli. Modernization forces an increase in this.

Stimulation becomes like an addictive drug where ever larger

amounts are needed to satisfy the individual. Violence can

provide such satisfaction. And, unlike street crime, political

violence can provide stimulation in a morally uplifting way.

The essence of spiritual insurgency is rejection of a regime

and, more broadly, of the social, economic, and political system

associated with that regime. In most cases, this system is

derived from the Western model. Insurgents often blame imported

Western ideas and practices--borrowed and imperfectly applied by

the local elite--for the discontent, misery, and frustration

which accompanies modernization. While direct colonialism has

ended, theorists of spiritual insurgency see a form of cultural

and economic imperialism every bit as insidious and exploitative

as the old form. Spiritual insurgents thus use discontent with

what they consider the alien Western ideas of their elite to

mobilize support, but must offer alternative ideas and practices.

Often they look to their nation's past for these things and to

create a more "authentic" model of development based on a

fictional or mythical notion of history. The violent and

extremist forms of Islamic fundamentalism provide the clearest

contemporary example of this sort of rejection of Western

culture, but the same phenomenon is occurring throughout the

Third World. Most ongoing insurgencies have some nativist

element, and this is likely to continue and grow.

In the future, some spiritual insurgencies will accept the

political boundaries of their nations, but simply seek to replace

their regime and elite and thus alter the social, political, and

economic system into one deemed more authentic and just. Other

spiritual insurgents will reject the composition of the nation

itself, and seek secession or partition based on ethnicity,

tribalism, religion, or some other atavistic or primal form of

identity. The post-cold war era has seen the failure of a whole

plethora of unifying ideologies. This includes not only Marxism,

but also others such as Pan-Arabism and Pan-Africanism. This

failure spawned the resurgence of nativist ideologies based on

primal identities such as ethnicity or religion. This, too, is

not a new phenomenon. Many cold war insurgencies, especially in

Sub-Saharan Africa, had ethnic overtones. What precisely has

changed then? One thing is the collapse of limitations or

constraints on primal conflict imposed by the cold war. Russians

are no longer able to, or are interested in, controlling the

monsters they helped unleash. In fact, for Russia, exploiting

ethnic conflicts as a means of consolidating regional influence

has a long tradition.20 Today, according to John P. Hannah, this

is continuing in Georgia, Moldova, and Azerbaijan.21 Although

originating at the periphery of Russia, this process spread to

the Third World during the cold war, thus exacerbating

long-standing enmities. Similarly, the United States has only

sporadic concern with regional conflicts born of the cold war. A
second change is the amplification of primal conflict due to the

strains of modernization. Throughout the Third World "ethnic

identity is strongly felt, behavior based on ethnicity is

normatively sanctioned, and ethnicity is often accompanied by

hostility toward outgroups."22 These primal schisms will shape

insurgency for the next few decades.

One of the crucial interfaces for spiritual insurgency is

between political violence and religion. Development was long

associated with secularization, but throughout the world, the

strains of modernization spawned a religious renaissance.

Sometimes this takes militant or violent forms. Of the religious

movements connected to political violence, Islamic fundamentalism

receives the most attention, but there is a plethora of similar

phenomena from liberation theology in Latin America and the

Philippines to militant Sikhism in India. Religion is especially

important as a vehicle for defining the concept of justice which

is itself central to spiritual insurgency. In cultures as diverse

as those of Peru, Sri Lanka, and Lebanon, justice plays an

integral role in the construction of an ideological framework for

political violence and thus is a recurring theme in revolutionary

ideologies. This is an easy connection. Because the notion of

justice implies punishment, it can be used to validate violence.

And all the world's great religions deal with justice in some

form. This can be distorted by revolutionary and terrorist

leaders, whether Muslim, Christian, or any other religion, to

justify their actions.23

Revolutionary leaders--at least the skillful ones--

interweave the notion of justice and personal meaning. For their

followers, the pursuit of social justice becomes a way to define

personal meaning. Yasser Arafat, for example, argued in the

1960s:

The UN charter gives all peoples the right to

self-determination. Not only are we deprived of this

right, but of our country itself. So every Palestinian,

wherever he is, is a victim of the same injustice

practiced against him. This feeling was the common

motive for all Palestinians to regain their identity,

their nationality, and their homeland through armed

struggle.24

In summary, most Third World nations have attempted an

emulative form of development for the past several decades. Most

emulated the West and pursued either a capitalist or mixed

economy, while some emulated the Soviet Union or China. Most have

been at least partial failures, unable to stem the increasing

misery of their expanding populations and, many cases, actually

adding to it through corruption, inefficiency, and ill-conceived

policies. The people of the Third World often associate their

discontent with what they see as the misguided models of

development. At the same time, the people of the Third World are

searching for new frameworks of personal meaning to replace
obsolete traditional ones. As universalist ideologies such as

Marxism and radical Pan-Arabism failed, people looked to

nativistic frameworks. This, in combination with a stress on the

concept of justice with its implication of punishment for the

unjust, oppressive, and corrupt, creates the environment for

revolutionary violence. For insurgent leaders, the struggle is

actually about power. They want it but do not have it. For their

followers, however, the struggle is about personal meaning, the

amelioration of discontent, and the punishment of injustice.

Commercial Insurgency and the Search for Wealth. In the

pursuit of personal meaning in the developing world, there is an

alternative to violent nativism or other forms of spiritual

insurgency. When the discontented define personal meaning by

material possessions rather than psychic fulfillment, they create

the environment for commercial insurgency. This was made possible

when Western materialism penetrated nearly every corner of the

Third World via electronic communications and widespread travel.

Commercial insurgency is a quasi-political distortion of

materialism. When relatively unsophisticated and discontented

audiences (whether in the Third World or the inner cities of the

West) are bombarded with Western or Western-style advertising, it

is easy for them to associate the personal satisfaction evident

among the actors and models who populate the commercials,

television programs, and movies with their material possessions.

Personal meaning is thus defined as owning a flashy car, clothes,

and audio and video equipment. When the citizens of the Third

World contrast this artificial image of Western life with their

daily existence, the result is frustration and discontent. This

can inflame the revolutionary impulse when the poor of the Third

World recognize that the lives of their own indigenous elites

appear closer to the idealized Western lifestyle than to their

own, and when they expect their government to ameliorate the

ensuing frustration.

The quickest and easiest path to material possessions and

the satisfaction they appear to bring is crime. And, since the

discontented of the Third World feel little attachment to the

dominant system of values in their societies anyway, moral

restraints on criminal activity are limited. In situations of

perceived deprivation and frustration--and again this holds for

American inner cities as well as the Third World--the possession

of wealth and power is more important than the techniques used to

acquire them. In this psychological context, commercial

insurgency is essentially widespread and sustained criminal

activity with a proto-political dimension that challenges the

security of the state. In the modern world, its most common

manifestation is narco-insurgency, although it may also be based

on other forms of crime, especially smuggling. The defining

feature is expansion of the criminal activity into a security

threat, especially in the hinterlands where government control is

limited.

This has a very long history. Its antecedents are the
eternal problems of banditry and piracy. Despite contemporary

arguments that the "war on drugs" is not an appropriate conflict

for modern militaries, it is likely that armies and navies

throughout history have spent more time fighting banditry and

piracy than any other kind of security threat. Banditry and

piracy were traditionally seen as security threats not only

because of the tangible danger they posed to commerce and public

order, but also because of what they might become. As Eric

Hobsbawm pointed out in his classic work on social banditry, it

often served as a precursor for revolution by illustrating the

weakness of the regime and galvanizing discontent.25 And,

according to Desai and Eckstein, "The line between the criminal

activity of rural bandits (who defy established authority) and

their political mobilization (in attempts to alter or destroy

such authority) has always been thin and has often been

crossed."26

The same relationship holds in modern developing societies.

Organized criminals find that in order to mobilize sufficient

power to resist the state, they must move their organizations

beyond pure criminalism with its limited appeal to most citizens

and add elements of political protest. In this way, they

legitimize their activities in the eyes of many people not

otherwise inclined to support them but who are frustrated by the

existing politico-economic system. From Robin Hood through

"Pretty Boy" Floyd to Carlos Lehder and Pablo Escobar, criminals

have swathed themselves in vaguely populist, anti-establishment

political rhetoric to generate sympathy or outright support.

Their immediate followers find personal meaning through wealth,

and their sympathizers find fulfillment though seeing the regime

made to look impotent and helpless.

Today, a number of Third World regimes face severe security

threats from commercial insurgencies or, as in Peru and Colombia,

from the marriage of spiritual and commercial insurgencies. Given

their vast wealth, commercial insurgents are often able to match

the technological sophistication of the government's

counterinsurgent forces as they purchase items such as rocket

propelled grenades and night vision goggles. They also weaken

governments through bribes and corruption. Furthermore, they have

developed extensive international linkages, making them an even

more persistent and formidable foe. While commercial insurgents

may not seek the outright capture of political power like

traditional revolutionary insurgents, they can pose serious

security threats. Just as simple illnesses such as mumps or

measles can kill someone already stricken with another disease,

commercial insurgency can prove deadly to regimes weakened by

other forces.

Regional Patterns.

To this point, I have focused on generalities, on a

macro-level paradigm of the ongoing variegation of insurgency.
Yet it is obvious that insurgency is characterized by

region-specific patterns derived from tradition, history,

culture, and economics. The nature of regimes, their security

forces, and counterinsurgency strategies also varies from region

to region. International relations are also important since the

presence or absence of external sponsors can influence an

insurgency's chance of success. So while all regions of the Third

World will experience both spiritual and commercial insurgency,

the proportions between the two forms will vary as will the

strategic challenges posed by each form.

In general, spiritual insurgency will predominate in regions

composed of states that are heterogenous in primal identity such

as ethnicity, race, tribe, clan, or religion. Spiritual

insurgency will be especially common where there are extensive

cultural differences or variation in primal identity between the

elite and nonelite. Put simply, stark differences between groups

help overcome natural constraints on violence by dehumanizing of

the enemy. To the extent that differences are based on more than

simply wealth and power, violence is easier. Moreover, spiritual

insurgency will occur where whatever model of development the

elite attempted has clearly failed, thus leading to anomie and a

sense of moral and spiritual decline. By contrast, commercial

insurgency will largely be determined by geography. For organized

crime to grow to the point that it poses a security threat rather

than simply a challenge to law and order, there often is some

sort of geographic factor which allows the accumulation of

extensive wealth by the criminal organization. Additional

preconditions include weak legal and criminal justice systems,

security apparatuses which do not consider commercial insurgency

a security threat, and a tradition of both organized crime and

political violence. The geographic factor may be a climate

amenable to the production of drugs as in Peru's Upper Huallaga

Valley or Southeast Asia's Golden Triangle, or location on a

logical route for drugs. The geographic factor may also be a

location and topography that contribute to nondrug related

criminal activity such as smuggling. This geographic limitation,

however, is not absolute. Some forms of criminal activity which

can support commercial insurgency such as arms trafficking can

occur almost anywhere, especially in the electronic age when the

need for local communications and banking centers is limited.

Latin America. Latin America is likely to suffer more from

continued and expanded commercial insurgency than from spiritual.

With a few exceptions, Latin American nations do not have the

ethnic, racial, or religious schisms that characterize many other

parts of the Third World. Recent positive developments including

the emergence of democratic political systems and the

resuscitation of the region's economy after a decade of

stagnation have, at least temporarily, ameliorated some of the

class conflict that undergirded past insurgency. The strategic

situation in Latin America makes external sponsorship of an

insurgency unlikely. In addition, Latin America's long tradition

of revolutionary insurgency forced the region's militaries to
develop extensive counterinsurgency and counterterrorism skills.

These will make it difficult for future insurgents to guide their

movements through the vulnerable gestation period.

Still, there is at least the potential for the re-emergence

of widespread spiritual insurgency in Latin America. Population

pressures will mount, urbanization will continue to concentrate

discontent, and economic stagnation could return, thus increasing

discontent and intensifying the search for personal meaning. And,

spiritual insurgency is likely to persist in ethnically divided

nations such as Peru and Guatemala where existing insurgencies

are built on the split between Indians and mestizos. Even among

non-Indian provincial elites in Peru, there is a tradition of

indigenismo, or glorification of Indian customs and traditions,

which provides an ideological foundation for spiritual

insurgency.27 Bolivia and Mexico also have unassimilated or

partially assimilated Indian populations with a limited role in

the existing economic and political system and a tradition of

support for political violence. Spiritual insurgency may also

emerge in racially heterogenous states like Brazil and most of

those along the Caribbean littoral. Finally, a reactionary form

of spiritual insurgency could coalesce in the most rapidly

developing Latin American nations, especially Mexico, where

institutionalized glorification of the pre-Colombian past could

provide an ideological foundation for insurgent strategists.

Commercial insurgency, however, is likely to remain the more

persistent problem for Latin America. In a sense, the region is a

victim of geography. Not only does it have the proper climate and

topography for the production of coca, marijuana, and opium, but

it is also located near the North American drug markets and has a

web of economic and personal connections with the United States.

The geography of countries like Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, and

Colombia also makes it difficult for the state to fully control

the hinterland regions. This often gives organized crime time to

gestate and grow before it is recognized as a security threat.

And, in both Peru and Colombia, the blending of narco-insurgency,

traditional rural communist revolution, and, in Peru,

racially-based spiritual insurgency is a particularly insidious

tendency.

The major determinant of the extent of insurgency in Latin

America will be the ability of the governments there to sustain

the construction of democracy and economic growth, and to control

corruption and military involvement in politics. None of these

will be easy tasks in a region were democracy and economic growth

are precarious and corruption and military involvement in

politics--as well as revolution--are long-standing traditions. In

addition, the ability of the United States to successfully

control its demand for narcotics will play a major role in

determining the extent of insurgency in Latin America.

Sub-Saharan Africa. Geography, population growth,

urbanization, endemic corruption, governmental inefficiency, and
economic stagnation make Sub-Saharan Africa prone to insurgency.

With the possible exception of South Africa and Zimbabwe, African

militaries have not proven effective at counterinsurgency. The

governments of Sudan, Angola, and Mozambique, for instance, have

been unable to defeat relatively weak insurgencies and the

Marxist regime of Ethiopia suffered outright defeat. Furthermore,

the tendency of neighboring states to provide assistance and

sanctuary to African insurgents makes them difficult to defeat.28

The weakness of state institutions, the personalization of

politics, the pervasiveness of cultures with a strong spiritual

content, and, most of all, ethnic and tribal heterogeneity open

the way for the spiritual form of insurgency. Most Sub-Saharan

African states were European colonies until recently. As

documented by writers such as Joseph Conrad, Frantz Fanon, and

Kwame Nkrumah, this exacerbated the search for a structure of

identity among Africans. In fact, many African insurgencies of

the past such as the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya, the Simba movement

in Congo (now Zaire), and the Mozambique National Resistance

(RENAMO) had strong mystical or spiritual dimensions.

As Huntington pointed out, one indicator of development is

the strength and number of political institutions. By this

standard, most African nations are particularly underdeveloped.29

This gives charisma an important role in politics. In fact, the

dominant political form in Sub-Saharan Africa for the past few

decades has been "personal rule."30 This means that spiritual

insurgencies which do develop will likely be built around a

charismatic leader. Spiritual insurgency in Sub-Saharan Africa

will likely take one of two forms. One is separatist or

secessionist violence based on ethnicity, tribalism, or religion.

This has traditionally been the most common pattern in the

region. The second form is urban insurgency with a spiritual

dimension, for in urban areas the search for personal meaning is

most intense. While Africans who migrate to the cities tend to

retain contacts with the their traditional villages to a much

greater extent than in other parts of the Third World, the sense

of moral dislocation and frustration felt by new urban dwellers

is acute. In combination with the strains of rapid urbanization,

government corruption and bureaucratic inefficiency, this will

create all the preconditions for spiritual insurgency. All that

is missing is a dedicated and skilled insurgent leadership.

Eventually, one will appear.

Despite a long tradition of smuggling, Sub-Saharan Africa

has not seen widespread commercial insurgency. With the exception

of some drug smuggling rings headquartered in Nigeria, African

criminals have not developed the extensive organization and

quasi-political agenda that defines commercial insurgency. Still,

they could. Many African nations have rugged hinterlands where

government control is minimal or nonexistent, and many African

societies, especially those in the traditional trading zones

along the Atlantic and Indian Ocean coasts, have the same sort of

strong entrepreneurial traditions that made Colombia fertile

ground for commercial insurgency. In much of the continent,
smuggling of goods such as ivory and rhinoceros horn spawned an

intricate criminal network with ties to the Asian underworld.

This suggests that it may be simply a matter of time before the

agricultural and industrial processes of narcotics production are

learned by African farmers and commercial insurgency spreads to

the region.

In general, Sub-Saharan Africa is ripe for insurgency. In

fact, no nation is immune. The region is composed of relatively

weak states, heterogenous societies, and nations with exploding

populations, economic stagnation, and rapid urbanization. As part

of the legacy of the cold war, Africa is full of experienced

insurgents. All of this does not bode well for the future

stability of the region.

Middle East. The likelihood of spiritual insurgency is also

high in the Middle East (including Arab North Africa). It is

composed of many ethnically heterogenous states where discontent

and frustration are high. "Across the Middle East," Augustus

Richard Norton writes, "there is growing evidence of widening

dissatisfaction with the reigning regimes."31 More importantly,

Islam provides an existing coherent ideological alternative to

both Western-oriented models of development and Marxism.32

Islam's emphasis on justice and the state's duty to pursue it has

historically provided a powerful forum for reform and protest.33

This is especially true of shi'ia Islam which is imbued with the

concepts of the repression and suffering of believers.

Furthermore, shi'ism's use of a type of clergy provides a

counter-elite which, as the Iranian revolution showed, can focus,

politicize, and organize discontent.

 Much of the resurgence of Islam in recent decades has been

driven by a search for authenticity outside the framework of

Western liberalism.34 Equally important, Islam does not recognize

the separation of church and state integral to Western

liberalism, but assumes the state is "only the political

expression of an Islamic society."35 Since Islam defines

governments who do not rule according to the sharia or Islamic

law as illegitimate, it can be made to justify the violent

overthrow of a regime deemed unjust or unIslamic. In the words of

Ruhollah Khomeini:

Both law and reason require that we not permit

governments to retain [a] non-Islamic or anti-Islamic

character. . .We have in reality, then, no choice but

to destroy those systems of government that are corrupt

in themselves and also entail the corruption of others,

and to overthrow all treacherous, corrupt, oppressive,

and criminal regimes.36

This political dimension of Islam greatly simplifies the job

of mobilization for potential insurgents since their recruits are

already familiar with the key concepts used to construct the

revolutionary ideology. Unlike cold war era Marxist
revolutionaries, Islamic insurgents need expend little effort

"educating the masses." All insurgents need to do is somehow cast

their struggle as a jihad, a notion which literally means

"exertion in Allah's cause" but which has been used throughout

the history of Islam to justify the use of violence against

heretics or nonbelievers. Of course this alone is not sufficient

to inspire an insurgency. From the Omani insurgents of the 1960s

and 1970s to modern demagogues such as Saddam Hussein and Muammar

Qaddafi, Arab radicals have found that jihad cannot spark

widespread and protracted violence unless it is used in

conjunction with other factors such as widespread discontent. But

if these other factors obtain, jihad can be an important element

of a spiritual insurgency.

Furthermore, the overall militarization of the Middle East

facilitates insurgency. Both weapons and military expertise are

common. Especially germane for insurgency was the involvement of

many young Muslims in the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan.

It fostered not only the development of insurgent skills, but

also the sort of ideological framework necessary for spiritual

insurgency. According to Hamid Gul, a retired Pakistani general,

The Afghan jihad. . .became an ideological obsession

among Islamic youth who were studying in the United

States and Europe. They had liberal ideas, but they saw

that Western liberalism was not the answer for what

they were looking for. They tried to discover

themselves. The instrument for discovery was the

jihad.37

In may parts of the Middle East, these veterans of the Afghan war

form a potential (or actual) insurgent cadre.

There are, however, several constraints on the spread of

spiritual insurgency in the Middle East. Most important is the

relative effectiveness of the regimes. Many governments have

taken steps to avoid being perceived as "un-Islamic" even if not

reverting to the extremism of the Iranian and Sudanese regimes.

In addition, the security forces of most Middle Eastern states

are more effective than their counterparts in Sub-Saharan Africa.

This includes intelligence agencies, security police, and

militaries. Urbanization in the Middle East has concentrated

frustration and discontent in the cities. From the Battle of

Algiers through Marighella's movement in Brazil to the terrorist

campaign in Belfast, urban insurgency has historically proven

more susceptible to repression by an effective state than rural

insurgency or rural insurgency with an urban element.38 This is

largely due to the difficulties of raising and maintaining a

large insurgent force in an urban environment. As Aaron Karp

notes, "Without territory, a group can neither acquire nor keep

large weapons inventories."39 Rebels who attempt a rural strategy

in response to the effectiveness of the security forces in the

cities find that the inhospitable climate prevents them from

organizing large forces.40 Spiritual insurgency is thus likely to
remain a serious threat in the Middle East, but not one likely to

bring down regimes which avoid internal factionalization and

conflict.

The effectiveness of the security apparatus also limits the

growth opportunities for commercial insurgency in the Middle

East. The region's geography is unpropitious since the

hinterlands tend to be uninhabitable or arid. This means that the

widespread production of narcotics only occurs with the tacit or

explicit support of the government as in parts of Lebanon and

Afghanistan. Other forms of commercial insurgency may emerge

sporadically, especially those based on the smuggling of arms.

Overall, the Middle East has the potential for insurgency, but to

a much smaller degree than Sub-Saharan Africa, where it is almost

inevitable.

Asia. Like the Middle East, Asia is ripe for spiritual

insurgency. It includes many heterogenous societies, and is

experiencing the precipitous erosion of traditional life. South

Asia in particular "is in danger of being overwhelmed by

ethno-religious conflict."41 In heterogenous nations such as

India, Indonesia, Malaysia, and China, spiritual insurgency may

take religious or ethnic forms as the worldwide wave of

nativistic religious movements spawns things like militant

Hinduism.42 It could also blend the two. Insurgencies can be

separatist as in the ongoing conflicts in Sri Lanka, eastern and

northwestern India, and the southern Philippines. Often these

movements seek autonomy for a religious group, thus attracting

outside support as in Jammu and Kashmir where Afghan mujahadin

are fighting alongside Muslim separatists.43 Or they could, in

predominately Islamic nations, seek to replace regimes utilizing

a proto-Western model of development with one more like that of

Iran or Sudan. In the rapidly developing nations of the Pacific

rim such as Thailand, Singapore, Taiwan, and Malaysia, spiritual

insurgency could emerge if economic growth, which has deflected

internal tensions, stalls. Insurgent strategists would then

attempt to mobilize the discontented and frustrated by

emphasizing the uneven distribution of the rewards of economic

development. To do this, they would craft a revolutionary

ideology claiming to seek a more "authentic" model of development

to replace the proto-Western one. This would not be difficult

since throughout Asia a deep spiritual tradition--be it Islamic,

Hindu, or Buddhist--helps create fertile ground for spiritual

insurgencies.

Since Asia contains all but one of the remaining Marxist

states, there is also the potential for a form of spiritual

insurgency that would pit Western-oriented, democratically

inclined rebels against tottering totalitarian states. The

predecessor of such movements would be the American and French

revolutions rather than traditional peasant revolts or the

communist insurgencies of the 20th century. In such a movement,

personal meaning would be defined in terms of freedom rather than

by justice or some other spiritual concept. These insurgents
could probably count on some kind of external support, thus

making them especially difficult to counter.

Parts of Asia also contain the preconditions for commercial

insurgency. Forms of it already exist in the Golden Triangle

region of Myanmar, Thailand, and Laos. The Philippines,

Indonesia, and Malaysia also have appropriately uncontrollable

hinterlands. If Latin American nations ever come to grips with

their domestic drug producers, Asian heroin may see a

resurgence.44 Then other Asian nations may find themselves

confronting serious commercial insurgencies.

Former Soviet Bloc. Finally, the amorphous area known as the

former Soviet bloc is ripe for insurgency in both its spiritual

and commercial forms. Spiritually, the framework for personal

meaning and social organization engineered by the communist

regimes is shattered. Throughout the region, anomie or

near-anomie reigns. On top of this, ethnic and religious tensions

suppressed by the communist regimes are boiling over. The

militarization of the former Soviet bloc means that a large

proportion of the male population has some military training, and

that there are huge amounts of arms throughout the region. All of

these things create the proper environment for spiritual

insurgency, particularly its nativistic separatist/secessionist

variant.

Commercial insurgency is a possibility for the future. The

former Soviet bloc is experiencing a wave of organized crime

arising from the weakness of law enforcement systems and, as in

the United States during Prohibition, from an inability of the

legitimate economy to meet consumer demands. The geography of

much of the region, however, is not amenable to organized crime

growing into commercial insurgency as it did in South America. In

this, the former Soviet bloc is more like the United States of

the 1930s than Colombia of the 1970s.

The former Soviet bloc is in the process of bifurcation.

Some parts are, with uneven success, becoming part of the

developed world. Most of eastern Europe is not likely to

experience insurgency. But other parts are becoming part of the

Third World. Those sections--especially the ones that are

ethnically or religiously heterogenous--will probably face it in

the near future.

Conclusions.

The preeminent task of those who would use insurgency as a

roadway to power is mobilization of support. It takes a powerful

incentive for people to place themselves in serious danger,

whether as active participants in an insurgency or passive

supporters. In the modern world, this incentive is often

discontent and frustration born of a failed search for personal

meaning. When large numbers of people define personal meaning
through psychic fulfillment, the outcome may be spiritual

insurgency. When people define personal meaning materially, the

outcome may be commercial insurgency.

The end of the cold war changed the normative structure of

international politics. The United Nations and the values it

represents are experiencing a renaissance. This has eroded the

international support network for insurgency, and thus made it

less likely to actually overthrow a regime. In addition, most

Third World regimes appear stronger than in previous decades and

their security forces more effective. The democratic revolution

in the Third World deflated a number of insurgencies and, so long

as it lasts, helps forestall the emergence of new ones. But

trends indicate that Third World regimes will face escalating

challenges. As they fail to meet these challenges, insurgencies

will appear. The most likely result is a spate of stalemates as

regimes are unable to prevent the rise of insurgencies or to

fully defeat them once they appear, but insurgents are unable to

seize power without external support or the internal collapse of

the regime.

All this could change if insurgent movements are able to

find external sponsors and to cooperate as they did during the

cold war. This will be difficult given the nativistic nature of

many forthcoming insurgencies, but not impossible. International

politics occasionally spawns unusual, even bizarre alliances. It

is possible, then, that insurgency may again become part of

interstate conflict, a form of indirect aggression made

attractive by the inability of states to use conventional

military power. The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction

may be the trend that leads to this. In a nuclearized world,

indirect aggression--including the creation and sponsorship of

insurgencies--would be infinitely safer for aggressive states

than more conventional uses of military force.

Frustration and discontent will persist and even increase in

the Third World. So will the physical equipment and skills needed

to make insurgencies. What the counterinsurgent strategists of

the world must now do is recognize that much of their

understanding of insurgency is dated and rapidly approaching

obsolescence. After all, insurgency itself will continue to

change. It is not difficult to imagine additional forms emerging

further in the future. For example, what can be called

"neo-inclusionist" movements could arise in opposition to

exclusionist governments based on ethnic, tribal, or religious

identities. The evolution of insurgency thus demands great mental

flexibility on the part of those who oppose it. New forms require

new mental constructs. To date, these have not appeared.
ENDNOTES

1. Richard H. Sanger, Insurgent Era: New Patterns of

Political, Economic, and Social Revolution, revised edition,

Washington: Potomac Books, 1970, pp. 2-4.

2. Bard E. O'Neill, Insurgency and Terrorism: Inside Modern

Revolutionary Warfare, Washington: Brassey's, 1990, p. 1.

3. Michael Radu, "Introduction," in The New Insurgencies:

Anticommunist Guerrillas in the Third World, ed. Michael Radu,

New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1990, p. 2.

4. For analysis of Soviet and, later, Russian retrenchment

in the Third World, see Melvin A. Goodman, ed., The End of

Superpower Conflict in the Third World, Boulder, CO: Westview,

1992.

5. José Gonzales, "Guerrillas and Coca in the Upper Huallaga

Valley," in The Shining Path of Peru, ed. David Scott Palmer, New

York: St. Martin's, 1992, pp. 105-125; Bill Keller, "After Big

Gains, Angolan Rebel Offensive Is Halted," The New York Times,

September 24, 1993, p. A3. It is true, however, that the purchase

of arms whether from legitimate arms dealers or the black market

is a very precarious source of supply for an insurgent movement

compared to state sponsorship. See Aaron Karp, "Arming Ethnic

Conflict," Arms Control Today, Vol. 23, No. 7, September 1993,

pp. 11-12.

6. Edward N. Luttwak, Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace, Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1987.

7. Mancur Olson, Jr., "Rapid Growth as a Destabilizing

Force," Journal of Economic History, Vol. 23, No. 4, December

1963, p. 531; Pitirim A. Sorokin, "Fluctuations of Internal

Disturbances," in Struggles in the State: Sources and Patterns of

World Revolution, ed. George A. Kelly and Clifford W. Brown, Jr.,

New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1970, p. 145.

8. Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing

Societies, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968, p. 32.

9. Ted Robert Gurr, Why Men Rebel, Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press, 1970.

10. Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning, New York:

Washington Square Press, 1984, p. 121.

11. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, New York:

Grove, 1963, p. 73.

12. Radu, "Introduction," p. 4.

13. Victor Perera, Unfinished Conquest: The Guatemalan
Tragedy, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993, p. 13.

14. Ibid., p. 22.

15. Jennifer Morrison Taw and Bruce Hoffman, The

Urbanization of Insurgency: The Potential Challenge to U.S. Army

Operations, RAND Research Report DRR-364-A, Santa Monica, CA:

RAND Corporation, July 1993, p. 4.

16. Augustus Richard Norton, "The Security Legacy of the

1980s in the Third World," in Third World Security in the

Post-Cold War Era, ed. Thomas G. Weiss and Meryl A. Kessler,

Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1991, p. 23.

17. For example, O'Neill, Insurgency and Terrorism.

18. Raj Desai and Harry Eckstein, "Insurgency: The

Transformation of Peasant Rebellion," World Politics, Vol. 42,

No. 4, July 1990, pp. 443-444.

19. Robert C. Tucker, Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961.

20. Mark A. Uhlig, "The Endless War" (op-ed), The New York

Times, October 27, 1993, p. A23.

21. John P. Hannah, "The (Russian) Empire Strikes Back"

(op-ed), The New York Times, October 27, 1993, p. A23.

22. Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1985, p. 7.

23. See Steven Metz, "The Ideology of Terrorist Foreign

Policies in Libya and South Africa," Conflict, Vol. 7, No. 4,

1987, pp. 379-402. Also Bruce Hoffman, `Holy Terror': The

Implications of Terrorism Motivated by a Religious Imperative, RAND Paper 7834, Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1993.

24. Quoted in Terror and Urban Guerrillas: A Study of

Tactics and Documents, ed. Jay Mallin, Coral Gables, FL:

University of Miami Press, 1971, p. 47.

25. Eric Hobsbawm, Bandits, n.p.: Delacorte, 1969, p. 21.

26. Desai and Eckstein, "Insurgency," p. 452.

27. Carlos Iván Degregori, "Return to the Past," in Shining

Path of Peru, ed. Palmer, p. 38.

28. Earl Conteh-Morgan, "Conflict and Militarization in

Africa: Past Trends and New Scenarios," Conflict Quarterly, Vol.

13, No. 1, Winter 1993, p. 33.

29. Henry Bienen, "Leaders, Violence, and the Absence of
Change in Africa," Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 108, No. 2,

Summer 1993, pp. 273-274.

30. Robert H. Jackson and Carl G. Rosberg, Personal Rule in

Black Africa: Prince, Autocrat, Prophet, Tyrant, Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1982.

31. Augustus Richard Norton, "The Future of Civil Society in

the Middle East," Middle East Journal, Vol. 47, No. 2, Spring

1993, p. 205.

32. John L. Esposito, The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality?

New York: Oxford University Press, 1992, p. 69.

33. Jacques Waardenburg, "Islam as a Vehicle of Protest," in

Islamic Dilemmas: Reformers, Nationalists, and Industrialization,

ed. Ernest Gellner, Amsterdam: Mouton, 1985, p. 22.

34. Henry Munson, Jr., Islam and Revolution in the Middle

East, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988, pp. 119-122.

35. Hasan al-Turabi, "The Islamic State," in Voices of

Resurgent Islam, ed. John L. Esposito, New York: Oxford

University Press, 1983, p. 241.

36. Quoted in Islam and Revolution: Writings and

Declarations of Imam Khomeini, translated and annotated by Hamid

Algar, Berkeley: Mizan, 1981, p. 48.

37. Quoted in Edward A. Gargan, "Where Arab Militants Train

and Wait," The New York Times, August 11, 1993, p. A8.

38. Taw and Hoffman, The Urbanization of Insurgency, p.15.

The authors of this study suggest that the past ineffectiveness

of urban insurgency may be changing.

39. Karp, "Arming Ethnic Conflict," pp. 9-10.

40. Chris Hedges, "Islamic Guerrillas Take to the Hills in

Egypt," The New York Times, August 12, 1993, p. A5.

41. Sumit Ganguly, "Ethno-religious Conflict in South Asia,"

Survival, Vol 35, No. 2, Summer 1993, p. 88.

42. Khushwant Singh, "India, the Hindu State" (op-ed), The

New York Times, August 3, 1993, p. A17.

43. Sanjoy Hazarika, "Afghans Joining Rebels in Kashmir,"

The New York Times, August 24, 1993, p. A5.

44. Because of their different physical effects, heroin and

cocaine are not interchangeable and tend to appeal to somewhat

different clienteles. The market for crack cocaine, however, is

similar to that of heroin. This means that among lower
socio-economic groups, heroin could serve as something of a

surrogate for crack if the sources of cocaine dried up.
U.S. ARMY WAR COLLEGE

Major General William A. Stofft

Commandant

*****

STRATEGIC STUDIES INSTITUTE

Director

Colonel John W. Mountcastle

Director of Research

Dr. Earl H. Tilford, Jr.

Author

Dr. Steven Metz

Director of Publications and Production

Ms. Marianne P. Cowling

Secretaries

Mrs. Shirley E. Martin

Ms. Rita A. Rummel

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Composition

Mr. Daniel B. Barnett