Insurgency Warfare

This timely book offers a world history of insurgencies and of counterinsurgency warfare. Working beyond traditional Western-centric narrative, arguing that it is crucial to ground experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq in a global framework. Unlike other studies that begin with the American and French revolutions, this book reaches back to antiquity to trace the pre-modern origins of war. Interweaving thematic and chronological narratives, Black probes the enduring linkages between beliefs, events, and people on the one hand and changes over time on the other hand. He shows the extent to which politics, technologies, and ideologies have evolved, creating new parameters and paradigms that have framed both governmental and public views. Tracing insurgencies ranging from China to Africa to Latin America, Black highlights the widely differing military and political dimensions of each conflict. He weighs how, and why, lessons were "learned" or, rather, asserted, in both insurgency and counterinsurgency warfare. At every stage, he considers lessons learned by contemporaries, the ways in which norms developed within militaries and societies, and their impact on doctrine and policy. His sweeping study of insurrectionary warfare and its counterinsurgency counterpart will be essential reading for all students of military history.

Jeremy Black

Preface Abbreviations 1 Introduction 2 Insurgency to 1500 3 Contesting Religion and Power, 1500-1700 4 Entering the Modern? The Eighteenth Century 5 Insurgencies in an Age of Imperialism: The Nineteenth Century 6 The Ideology of People's War Refracted, 1900-1940 7 Insurrections at a Height, 1940-60 8 The Fall of Empires, 1960-80 9 The Variety of Goals and Means, 1980s 10 After the Cold War, 1990s 11 Interventionism and Its Failings, 2000s 12 A World without Shape? The Situation since 2010 13 Speculations about the Future 14 Conclusions Notes Selected Further Reading Index About the Author