The Counter-Insurgent State: Guerrilla Warfare and State Building in the Twentieth Century

1998 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 208
Author(s):  
William Reno ◽  
Paul Rich ◽  
Richard Stubbs
2012 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 71-85
Author(s):  
Nicolas Delalande

This article highlights the recent historiographical revisions that have led historians on both sides of the Atlantic to develop innovative and refreshing views on state-building and state-society relationships through a comparative study of tax reform in France and the United States at the turn of the twentieth century*. Taxation offers a good case study because it deals with the power of the state, its capacity to act upon and shape society, and provides information about the way it is perceived by citizens, as Joseph Schumpeter summed up in his famous statement (1918).


Author(s):  
Laura Robson

This chapter introduces the main question of the book: how did mass violence come to be a primary—perhaps the primary—mode of making political claims in the twentieth and twenty-first century Middle East? It asks when mass violence became a constitutive aspect of the political landscape of the region, why it took precedence over other strategies of state building and establishing political authority, and how governments, armies, and civilians alike came to think of mass violence as a viable and legitimate mode of claiming political space and national rights. Drawing on several different and largely separate historiographies, this introduction argues, makes it possible to produce a synthetic account of violence in the twentieth century Eastern Mediterranean that takes account of regional developments as much as individual national histories.


2018 ◽  
pp. 115-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fanar Haddad

Both Shia-centric state building and Sunni rejection of the post-2003 order are the result of cumulative processes that have unfolded over the course of the twentieth century. These developments ranged from the homogenizing nation building propagated by successive Iraqi regimes to the rise of a sect-centric Shia opposition in exile. The sectarianization of Iraq was not inevitable, but regime change in 2003 accelerated the empowerment of new and preexisting sect-centric actors. The necessary will, vision, and political skill to avert the sectarianization of Iraq were absent among Iraqi and U.S. decisionmakers at the time. The failure of the occupation forces and the new political classes to construct a functioning state that could deliver basic services exacerbated the problem. Sunni opponents of the post-2003 order became as sect-centric as the system they once derided for its Shia-centricity. Sectarianization will continue to define Iraqi politics. The spread of the self-proclaimed Islamic State across much of Iraq in 2014 represents the most extreme form of Sunni rejection,while the state-sanctioned Hashd al-Shaabi, the term given to the mass mobilization of volunteers to repel the Islamic State, embodies the most serious defense of Shia-centric state building as of late 2015.


Author(s):  
Nader Sohrabi

The history of both modern Turkey and modern Iran have often been told through their founding figures, Atatürk and Reza Shah, whose state-building projects are often assumed to have been similar. This chapter compares the Young Turk Revolution in the Ottoman Empire of 1908 with the Constitutional Revolution in Iran in 1906 to point to both similarities and differences in the trajectories of these two countries in the early twentieth century. Both revolutions, it is argued, were foundational moments for the political development and processes of each country and are key to understanding the context in which Atatürk and Reza Shah emerged.


Author(s):  
Marilyn Lake

This chapter explores the transnational formation of the gendered and racialized figure of the “white man” in the constitutive relations of colonial conquest and imperial rule across the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. The self-styled bearer of a “civilizing mission” to indigenous peoples, the white man became a perpetrator of violence and atrocity as imperial rule and colonial settlement encountered continuing resistance and guerrilla warfare. In the process, the older ideal of moral manliness gave way to a more modern conception of masculinity characterized by toughness, aggression, and a capacity to use firearms to “pacify the natives.” Defined by power, even as he was haunted by his vulnerability, the white man engaged in systematic denial and disavowal, evasion, and euphemism and narratives of nation-building that justified his right to rule.


Author(s):  
Meghan Healy-Clancy

This chapter examines the history and historiography of women’s engagement in popular politics in twentieth-century South Africa. Over the first half of the century, women’s combination of marginality from male-dominated politics and centrality to social life made them critical to a range of grassroots movements. Feminist scholars have demonstrated how contending visions of nationalism aimed at transforming the state not only through moments of protest, but also by everyday transformations of social institutions. Women became central to both apartheid state-building and antiapartheid politics, often by organizing in ways that shared much with older forms of organization: most strikingly, they continued to mobilize as mothers. While women’s grassroots activism enabled the survival of the antiapartheid movement, an entrenched history of male leadership worked to women’s disadvantage in the democratic transition.


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