Inside Insurgency: Violence, Civilians, and Revolutionary Group Behavior [Hardcover]

Once considered nationalists, many insurgent groups are now labeled as terrorists and thought to endanger not just their own people, but the world. As the unprecedented trends in political violence among insurgents have taken shape, and as hundreds of thousands of civilians continue to be displaced, brutalized, and killed,Inside Insurgencyprovides startling insights that help to explain the nature of insurgent behavior.
Claire Metelits draws from over 100 interviews with insurgent soldiers, commanders, government officials, scholars, and civilians in Sudan, Kenya, Colombia, Turkey, and Iraq, offering a new understanding of insurgent group behavior and providing compelling and intimate portraits of the SPLA, FARC, and PKK. The engaging narratives that emerge from her on-the-ground fieldwork provide incredibly valuable and accurate first-hand documentation of the tactics of some of the world’s most notorious insurgent groups.Inside Insurgencyoffers the reader a timely and intimate understanding of these movements, and explains the changing behavior of insurgent groups toward the civilians they claim to represent.

Inside Insurgencyaddresses a question important to both academics and policymakers: How does one explain the variation in the types and level of victimization of civilian populations by insurgent groups. Metelit's book is a great contribution. It offers a relevant, parsimonious and testable theory, while at the same time providing a good springboard into three cases where there is still a lot to be understood. Metelits's book is a very useful contribution to undertanding why insurgent groups act as they do. Her first-hand research also will provide grist for futher efforts to explain the strategies and tactics of insurgencies. Metelits has written an engaging study that contributes a wealth of original data on three insurgencies as well as an innovative argument for why they behave differently toward civilian populations. A l³0