Martin Thomas

Gareth Curless

Insurgency-based irregular warfare typifies armed conflict in the post-Cold War age. For some years now, western and other governments have struggled to contend with ideologically driven guerrilla movements, religiously inspired militias, and systematic targeting of civilian populations. Numerous conflicts of this type are rooted in experiences of empire breakdown. Yet few multi-empire studies of decolonisation's violence exist. Decolonization and Conflict brings together expertise on a variety of different cases to offer new perspectives on the colonial conflicts that engulfed Europe's empires after 1945. The contributors analyse multiple forms of colonial counter-insurgency from the military engagement of anti-colonial movements to the forced removal of civilian populations and the application of new doctrines of psychological warfare. Contributors to the collection also show how insurgencies, their propaganda and methods of action were inherently transnational and inter-connected. The resulting study is a vital contribution to our understanding of contested decolonization. It emphasises the global connections at work and reveals the contemporary resonances of both anti-colonial insurgencies and the means devised to counter them. It is essential reading for students and scholars of empire, decolonization, and asymmetric warfare.

Colonial Comparisons and Legacies

Decolonization and Conflict

Introduction : decolonization, conflict, and counter-insurgency / Martin Thomas & Gareth Curless -- Seeing like a soldier : the Amritsar massacre and the politics of military history / Kim Wagner -- Confronting revolt in France's interwar empire : counter-insurgency in 1920s Morocco and Syria / Martin Thomas -- The plantation as counterinsurgency tool : Indonesia 1900-1950 / Roel Frakking -- The sten gun is mightier than the pen : the failure of colonial police reform after 1945 / Gareth Curless -- "A litigious island" : law, rights, and counterinsurgencyduring the Cyprus Emergency / Brian Drohan -- "A battle in the field of human relations" : the official minds of repressive development in Portuguese Angola / Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo -- Strategic villages : forced relocation, counterinsurgency and social engineering in Kenya and Algeria, 1952-1962 / Moritz Feichtinger -- Reconsidering women's roles in the Mau Mau Rebellion in Kenya, 1952-1960 / Katherine Bruce-Lockhart -- The art of counterinsurgency analysis : phases in the Malayan and Kenyan emergencies / Karl Hack -- Rebel sanctuaries and late colonial conflict : the case of West Germany during Algeria's War of Independence, 1954-1962 / Mathilde von Blow -- David Galula and Maurice Papon : a watershed in COIN strategy in de Gaulle's Paris / Emmanuel Blanchard and Neil MacMaster -- Escaping the empire's shadow : British military thinking about insurgency on the eve of the Northern Ireland Troubles / Huw Bennett -- Shadow warriors : the Phoenix Program and American clandestine policing in Vietnam / Jeremy Kuzmarov

Gareth Curless

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