Nightmarch
Nightmarch

Author: Alpa Shah

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2019-04-23

Total Pages: 357

ISBN-13: 022659033X

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Winner of the 2020 Association for Political and Legal Anthropology Book Prize Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize Shortlisted for the New India Foundation Book Prize Anthropologist Alpa Shah found herself in an active platoon of Naxalites—one of the longest-running guerrilla insurgencies in the world. The only woman, and the only person without a weapon, she walked alongside the militants for seven nights across 150 miles of dense, hilly forests in eastern India. Nightmarch is the riveting story of Shah's journey, grounded in her years of living with India’s tribal people, an eye-opening exploration of the movement’s history and future and a powerful contemplation of how disadvantaged people fight back against unjust systems in today’s world. The Naxalites have fought for a communist society for the past fifty years, caught in a conflict that has so far claimed at least forty thousand lives. Yet surprisingly little is known about these fighters in the West. Framed by the Indian state as a deadly terrorist group, the movement is actually made up of Marxist ideologues and lower-caste and tribal combatants, all of whom seek to overthrow a system that has abused them for decades. In Nightmarch, Shah shares some of their gritty untold stories: here we meet a high-caste leader who spent almost thirty years underground, a young Adivasi foot soldier, and an Adivasi youth who defected. Speaking with them and living for years with villagers in guerrilla strongholds, Shah has sought to understand why some of India’s poor have shunned the world’s largest democracy and taken up arms to fight for a fairer society—and asks whether they might be undermining their own aims. By shining a light on this largely ignored corner of the world, Shah raises important questions about the uncaring advance of capitalism and offers a compelling reflection on dispossession and conflict at the heart of contemporary India.

Tribal Guerrillas
Tribal Guerrillas

Author: Edward Duyker

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1987

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13:

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Using valuable field data, Duyker examines the historical roots of the Santal participation in the Naxalite movement, and the roles of traditional weapons, oral tradition, and clan and kinship in their participation.

Guerrilla Strategies
Guerrilla Strategies

Author: Gérard Chaliand

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1982-09-15

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 9780520044432

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This unique anthology of writings on revolutionary warfare and counterinsurgency covers almost all the major struggles of the modern world. Chaliand, who has had firsthand experience with guerrilla movements in Afghanistan, Africa, and Latin America, provides a concise yet panoramic overview of political and military strategies in revolutionary warfare, noting their strengths, limitations, and pathologies.

Nonstate Warfare
Nonstate Warfare

Author: Stephen Biddle

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2021-04-06

Total Pages: 464

ISBN-13: 0691216657

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How nonstate military strategies overturn traditional perspectives on warfare Since September 11th, 2001, armed nonstate actors have received increased attention and discussion from scholars, policymakers, and the military. Underlying debates about nonstate warfare and how it should be countered is one crucial assumption: that state and nonstate actors fight very differently. In Nonstate Warfare, Stephen Biddle upturns this distinction, arguing that there is actually nothing intrinsic separating state or nonstate military behavior. Through an in-depth look at nonstate military conduct, Biddle shows that many nonstate armies now fight more "conventionally" than many state armies, and that the internal politics of nonstate actors—their institutional maturity and wartime stakes rather than their material weapons or equipment—determines tactics and strategies. Biddle frames nonstate and state methods along a continuum, spanning Fabian-style irregular warfare to Napoleonic-style warfare involving massed armies, and he presents a systematic theory to explain any given nonstate actor’s position on this spectrum. Showing that most warfare for at least a century has kept to the blended middle of the spectrum, Biddle argues that material and tribal culture explanations for nonstate warfare methods do not adequately explain observed patterns of warmaking. Investigating a range of historical examples from Lebanon and Iraq to Somalia, Croatia, and the Vietcong, Biddle demonstrates that viewing state and nonstate warfighting as mutually exclusive can lead to errors in policy and scholarship. A comprehensive account of combat methods and military rationale, Nonstate Warfare offers a new understanding for wartime military behavior.

African Guerrillas
African Guerrillas

Author: Christopher S. Clapham

Publisher: James Currey Publishers

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 2

ISBN-13: 0852558155

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Analyses African insurgencies and their relationship to the societies in which they are set and to the outside world.

Guerrilla Warfare
Guerrilla Warfare

Author: Peter Polack

Publisher: Casemate Publishers

Published: 2018-12-19

Total Pages: 165

ISBN-13: 1612006760

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This concise history of guerilla warfare presents profiles in combat courage from George Washington to Simón Bolívar, Mao Zedong, and beyond. The concept of guerrilla warfare is centuries old, with Sun Tzu’s writing on the subject dating back to the sixth century BC. One of the earliest recorded examples of guerrilla tactics deployed by a military leader was the campaign of Roman general Fabius Maximus, who took a course of evasion and harassment against Hannibal’s columns. Guerilla Warfare is a compendium of prominent guerrilla leaders across the globe, from thirteenth-century Scotland’s William Wallace to modern-day Sri Lanka’s Velupillai Prabhakaran. It profiles each leader to analyze their personal history, military tactics, and political strategy. All are home-grown leaders of extended guerrilla campaigns. Many became the first leaders of their liberated countries. Both victories and defeats are included here in an analysis of effective guerrilla tactics as well as counterinsurgency strategies. Today, the labels of insurgent, freedom fighter, and jihadi are fast replacing guerrilla. The old notion of the guerrilla, associated with fights for independence and the end of colonialization, has dimmed with modern and far-reaching religious insurgencies taking their place. This concise history gives a fascinating overview of a once history-altering form of warfare.

Nagaland The Night of the Guerrillas
Nagaland The Night of the Guerrillas

Author: Nirmal Nibedon

Publisher: Lancer Publishers LLC

Published: 2013-10-19

Total Pages: 471

ISBN-13: 1935501836

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This is the explosive story of the underground movement in Nagaland never written before. It is an investigative report of the secret trails where the dew never dries, a trail which ended far beyond the Indian borders, snaking into the monsoon-soaked jungles of Kachin, where men like Zewtu fought and died unsung. These were the forests of no return where men like Kaito, Zhukiye. Mowu, Zuheto and Thinoselie embraced death often and survived. You are about to enter ‘terra incognita’ on the fog-bound heights of the Arakans where many a platoon commander fell, their mission reports unwritten. It is the only book to offer interpretations on: Meikhel: Three of the hallowed stones, of which two fell, according to a Naga prophecy. Oking: Top-secret mobile Headquarters of the Guerrillas. Ahza: A decree which emanated from Oking and could bring death of traitors. Peking: The Chinese connection which made an effort to convert Nagaland into a mini-Vietnam. Kuknalim: “Long live the land” was how the Guerrillas greeted each other, while they talked with bullets. Tatar Hoho: The underground Parliament where democracy prevailed. Alee Command: The Foreign Legion - will it strike again? Kachin: Where the south-east Asian guerrilla movements converge to co-ordinte. In The Night of the Guerrillas, there are no villains - the contending sides were caught between the indomitable and the inevitable. The destiny of the Nagas must have always lain with India while the luckless revolutionaries were searching it elsewhere.

Insurgent Crossfire
Insurgent Crossfire

Author: Subir Bhaumik

Publisher: Lancer Publishers

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13: 9781897829127

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Since the British withdrew from the subcontinent, nations in the region have been at war with each other. But instead of fighting long-drawnout wars like that between Iran and Iraq, nations of South Asia have sponsored guerrilla armies and armed, trained and equipped them to harass, bleed or embarrass their rivals. The four wars in the region’s post-colonial era were also born out of sponsored guerrilla wars. In 1948 and 1965, Pakistan first tried to have its way in Kashmir by sponsoring irregulars on a large scale and then followed it up with unsuccessful military campaigns aimed at ensuring the state’s secession from India. In 1962, China attacked India not so much over a disputed border or India’s much publicized Forward Policy but essentially in response to what it felt was a joint Indo-US covert effort in Tibet. In 1971 India rounded off its successful sponsorship of the Bengali guerrilla struggle in erstwhile East Pakistan by a speedy military campaign that resulted in the break up of Pakistan. Insurgent Crossfire examines the origins of sponsored insurgencies and how they have shaped South Asia’s tense diplomatic environment. Having done that, it studies the major sponsored guerrilla campaigns in South Asia and then seeks a detailed case study of the phenomenon by focusing on the far eastern slice of the subcontinent. The author argues that this region, with its multitude of tribes and battling ethnicities, has been the most durable theatre of insurgent crossfire – in which nations like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and China (a major actor in South Asian politics) have backed insurgencies against each other.