1st Edition

Revolutionary Guerrilla Warfare Theories, Doctrines, and Contexts

By Sam C. Sarkesian Copyright 1975
    650 Pages
    by Routledge

    623 Pages
    by Routledge

    ""Revolution"" is a word that causes fear in some, exhilaration in others, and confusion in most. Originally used to describe a restoration, it eventually came to mean a sweeping, sudden attack on an existing order. Human history has borne witness to a variety of national and social revolutions population revolution, revolution of ideas, technological revolution, and revolution in education. Simultaneously, there has been a proliferation of literature on revolution, armed struggle, and violence aimed at unseating policies and leadership of governments and societies.

    Revolutionary struggles are more than simply armed internal conflict; they involve the essence of the political system. The desire to make such phenomena understandable often leads to oversimplification. Attempts to encompass their multi-dimensional nature, on the other hand, can become immersed in complexities, ambiguities, and misinterpretations. The perspective of this classic volume, available in paperback for the first time, is that revolution is here to stay. Guerrilla warfare, according to Sarkesian, is a particularly useful strategy for the weak, the frustrated, the alienated, and seekers of power against existing regimes. The collected works in this volume examine thei?1/2social roots of revolution, development of strategy and tactics, practice in city and countryside, dilemmas of attackers and defenders. The actors and thinkers collected and analyzed here range from leading political analysts, anthropologists, sociologists, historians, and officials as well as practitioners of guerrilla warfare. This core text with primary sources in the area of war, revolution, and insurgence develops an understanding of revolution, traces the growth of guerilla doctrine, and studies the specifics of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary guerilla warfare.

    Revolutionary Guerrilla Warfare: An introduction; II: Revolution; Theories of Revolution; A Theory of Revolution; Psychological Factors in Civil Violence; The J-Curve of Rising and Declining Satisfactions as a Cause of Some Great Revolutions and a Contained Rebellion; Social Revolution as Seen by Bourgeois Ideologists; III: Revolutionary Guerrilla Warfare: The Development of Doctrine; Selections from Sun Tzu, The Art of War; Clausewitz on Limited War; Partisan Warfare; Selections from Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung; IV: Modern Revolutionary Guerrilla Warfare in Macro-View: Causes and Contexts; Guerrilla Warfare: Predisposing and Precipitating Factors; Insurgency in the Countryside Of Underdeveloped Countries; The Peasantry as a Political Factor; On Peasant Rebellion; Patron-Client Politics and Change in Southeast Asia; V: Modern Revolutionary Guerrilla Warfare: Some Micro-Views; The Third Generation of Guerrilla Warfare; The Malayan Emergency—The Roots of Insurgency; Che Guevara on Guerrilla Warfare: Doctrine, Practice, and Evaluation; Neither Mao, Nor Che: The Practical Evolution of Revolutionary Theory; Political Mobilisation in Guinea-Bissau; Selections from The Struggle for Mozambique; VI: Urban Guerrilla Warfare; Urban Guerrilla Warfare; Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla; VII: The Problems of the Defenders; Selections from Rebellion and Authority: An Analytic Essay on Insurgent Conflicts *; Some Dilemmas of Counterinsurgency; Batista and Betancourt: Alternative Responses to Violence; An Approach to Future Wars of National Liberation; Morality and National Liberation Wars; VIII: Sources for the Study of Revolutionary Guerrilla Warfare

    Biography

    Sam C. Sarkesian