Quotes About Insurgencies

Internet companies created the social-media tools that fueled the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street insurgencies, and that have helped political candidates rally grass-roots support.

Insurgencies are easy to make and hard to stop. Only a few ingredients need to combine to create an insurgency; like oxygen and fire, they're very common and mix all too often. The recipe is, simply, a legitimate grievance against a state, a state that refuses to compromise, a quorum of angry people, and access to weapons.

You can't talk about defeating insurgencies in the same way that you can with a conventional army.

Militant political religion as the only alternative to corruption. That was just the nexus I had seen in the Taliban's appeal in Afghanistan, and in the frequent presence of extremist insurgencies in other acutely corrupt countries. Public integrity, the proposition seemed to be, could only emerge through the rigid purity of religious practice—imposed by law if need be, or savage violence.

Also, as Nils Petter Gleditsch and Halvard Buhaug have pointed out, even though an increasing proportion of the world's armed conflicts have involved Islamic countries and insurgencies over the past two decades (from 20 to 38 percent), it's not because those conflicts have increased in number.

The non-state organizations that wage it rely largely on terrorism, guerrilla tactics, and popular insurgencies. However, they also engage in small-scale conventional warfare. The perfect examples are Hezbollah in 2006 and Daesh (ISIS) in 2014–2015. Neither organization is a state. Neither maintains the usual distinctions between government, armed forces, and people. However, both have enough money, troops, and conventional weapons to do more than wage terrorism and guerrilla alone.