Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rdxmf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-28T00:24:54.496Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Insurgency: The Transformation of Peasant Rebellion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Raj Desai  and
Harry Eckstein
Raj Desai
Affiliation:
Harvard University
Harry Eckstein
Affiliation:
University of California, Irvine
Get access

Abstract

The nature of insurgencies is an ambiguous concept. As a step toward theory about it and prudent action in regard to it, the authors argue that insurgency should be regarded as a syncretic phenomenon—a highly potent compound that combines the “spirit” of archaic peasant rebellions (their apocalyptic, millenarian passions) with modern revolutionary ideologies and organization, and the practice of guerrilla warfare. Insurgency thus supplies both the “steam” and the “piston box” that Trotsky considered an irresistible revolutionary combination. The syncretic mix of disparate elements in insurgency has stood in the way of proper conceptualization of the phenomenon, and of good theory and practice regarding it. The authors further maintain that insurgency is generally confused with the Latin American foco as well as with urban terrorism and guerrilla wars of all kinds; in fact thefoco may well foreshadow the end of insurgencies as a special type of collective political violence.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 42 , Issue 4 , July 1990 , pp. 441 - 465
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1990

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Böll, Heinrich, Fürsorgliche Belagerung (Cologne: Kiepenhauer & Witsch, 1979)Google Scholar.

2 See, for example, Osanka, Franklin Mark, ed., Modern Guerrilla Warfare (New York: Free Press, 1962)CrossRefGoogle Scholar: Paret, Peter and Shy, John W., Guerrillas in the 1960's (New York: Praeger, 1962)Google Scholar; Eckstein, Harry, ed., Internal War: Problem and Approaches (New York: Free Press, 1964)Google Scholar; and Bienen, Henry, Violence and Social Change (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1968)Google Scholar.

3 Examples are Blaufarb, Douglas, The Counter-Insurgency Era: U.S. Doctrine and Performance (New York: Free Press, 1977)Google Scholar, and Shafer, D. Michael, Deadly Paradigms: The Failure of U.S. Counterinsurgency Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988)Google Scholar.

4 Pye, in Eckstein (fn. 2), 162.

5 Arendt, Hannah, On Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1963)Google Scholar.

6 Bonnet, Gabriel, Les guerres insurrectionelles et révolutionnaires [Insurgent and revolutionary wars] (Paris: Payot, 1958)Google Scholar, and “The French Army and la Guerre Révolutionnaire,” Journal of the Royal United Service Institutions, vol. 104 (1959)Google Scholar.

7 Ibid.

8 Wolf, Eric, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper & Row, 1966)Google Scholar; Paige, Jeffrey M., Agrarian Revolution (New York: Free Press, 1975)Google Scholar; Scott, James C., “Hegemony and the Peasantry,” Politics and Society 7, no. 3 (1977), 267–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Migdal, Joel S., Peasants, Politics, and Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974)Google Scholar, chap. 10.

10 Popkin, Samuel L., The Rational Peasant (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979)Google Scholar, esp. 17–18 and 28–31.

11 Skocpol, Theda, States and Social Revolutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 54–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 67–68, 82–83.

12 Scott, James C., “Patron-Client Politics and Political Change in Southeast Asia,” in Schmitt, Steffen W. et al. , eds., Friends, Followers, and Factions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977)Google Scholar.

13 AlRoy, Gil Carl, The Involvement of Peasants in Internal Wars, Research Monograph 24, (Princeton: Center of International Studies, Princeton University, 1966)Google Scholar.

14 Dobson, R. B., ‘The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 (London: Macmillan, 1970), 76–78Google Scholar.

15 Borton, Hugh, Peasant Uprisings in Japan of the Tokugawa Period (Tokyo, 1938)Google Scholar.

16 Landsberger, Henry A., Rural Protest (London: Macmillan, 1974), 76Google Scholar.

17 Engels, Friedrich, The Peasant War in Germany (New York: International Publishers, 1926)Google Scholar.

18 Oman, Sir Charles, The Great Revolt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906), 155Google Scholar.

19 Zimmerman, Wilhelm, Allgemeine Geschichte des Grossen Bauemkrieges [General History of the Great Peasant War] (Stuttgart, 1981)Google Scholar; Bax, Ernest Belford, The Peasants' War in Germany, 1525–1526 (New York: Macmillan, 1899)Google Scholar; Friedrich Engels (fn. 17).

20 Banfield, Edward C., The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1958), 83Google Scholar.

21 Cohn, Norman, The Pursuit of the Millennium (Fairlawn, NJ: Essential Books, 1957), 24Google Scholar.

22 Owst, G. R., Literature and the Pulpit in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933), 287Google Scholar.

23 Engels (fn. 17), 54.

24 Cohn (fn. 21), 214–15.

25 Froissart, Sir John, Chronicles (New York: Colonial Press, 1901), 212–13Google Scholar.

26 Bax (fn. 19), 240–41.

27 Cohn (fn. 21), 260.

28 Lanternari, Vittorio, Religions of the Oppressed (New York: Knopf, 1963), 244–45Google Scholar.

29 Osanka (fn. 2), 293–97.

30 Hobsbawm, Eric, Bandits (New York: Dell, 1969)Google Scholar.

31 Cited in Lewis, John W., Peasant Rebellion and Communist Revolution in Asia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1974), 48Google Scholar, 293.

32 Hobsbawm (fn. 30), 136 (italics added); 14.

33 Hobsbawm, Eric, Primitive Rebels (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1959)Google Scholar.

34 Arendt (fn. 5), 42, 43–44.

35 Brinton, Crane, A Decade of Revolution: 1789–1799 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1934), 150–51Google Scholar.

36 Arendt (fn. 5), 259.

37 DeNardo, James, Power in Numbers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 11Google Scholar.

38 Arendt (fn. 5), 221.

39 DeNardo (fn. 37), 181–82, 24–25.

40 Arendt (fn. 5), 256.

41 Berman, , Revolutionary Organization (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1974), 76–77Google Scholar.

42 Lenin, V. I., What Is to Be Done? (New York: International Publishers, 1929), 196Google Scholar, 197.

43 Lenin, V. I., One Step Forward, Two Steps Back (New York: International Publishers, 1967), 122Google Scholar.

44 Selznick, , The Organizational Weapon (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1960), 17–73Google Scholar.

45 Eckstein, Harry, “The Idea of Political Development: From Dignity to Efficiency,” World Politics 34 (July 1982), 451–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

46 Clausewitz, Carl von, On War, ed. and trans. Howard, Michael and Paret, Peter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 480–81Google Scholar.

47 Paret and Shy (fn. 2).

48 Paret, Peter, Internal War and Pacification: The Vendée 1789–1796, Research Monograph no. 12 (Princeton: Center of International Studies, Princeton University, 1961)Google Scholar.

49 Speier, Hans, Revolutionary War (Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation, P-3445, 1966)Google Scholar.

50 Lawrence, , “Evolution of a Revolt,” British Army Quarterly, vol. 41 (1920)Google Scholar.

51 Lawrence, T. E., Seven Pillars of Wisdom (New York: Doubleday, 1935), 135Google Scholar; italics added.

52 Tse-Tung, Mao, Mao on Guerilla Warfare (New York: Praeger, 1961)Google Scholar, and “Struggle in the Chingkang Mountains,” in Selected Military Writings (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1972)Google Scholar.

53 Hobsbawm (fn. 33) 105–7.

54 Trotsky, Leon, History of the Russian Revolution (London: Victor Gollancz, 1965)Google Scholar, vol. 1, p. xix.

55 See the compilation in Osanka (fn. 2) and the recent summations in Blaufarb (fn. 3) and Shafer (fn. 3).

56 Debray, , Revolution in Revolution? (New York: Grove Press, 1967)Google Scholar, and Strategy for Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970)Google Scholar.

57 Debray (fn. 56, 1967), 41.

58 Rubenstein, Richard E., Alchemists of Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1987), 215–17, 218Google Scholar.