1. Basque Separatist Group E.T.A.:
More crucial than its theoretical debates, however, was its commitment to a particular model of armed action, which remains dominant today. This is the “spiral of action-repression-action,” which operates along the following lines: 1) ETA carries out a provocative violent action against the political system; 2) the system responds with repression against “the masses”; 3) the masses respond with a mixture of panic and rebellion, Paddy Woodsworth, World Policy Journal.
2. Brazilian Terrorist Group, ALN:
The rebellion of the urban guerrilla and his persistance in intervening in political questions is the best way of insuring popular support for the cause which we defend. We repeat and insist on repeating–it is the way of insuring popular support. As soon as a reasonable portion of the population begins to take seriously the actions of the urban guerrilla, his success is guaranteed.
The government has no alternative except to intensify its repression. The police networks, house searches, the arrest of suspects and innocent persons, and the closing off of streets
make life in the city unbearable. The military dictatorship embarks on massive political persecution. Political assassinations and police terror become routine.In spite of all this, the police systematically fail. The armed forces, the navy and the air force are mobilized to undertake routine police functions, but even so they can find no way
to halt guerrilla operations or to wipe out the revolutionary organization, with its fragmented groups that move around and operate throughout the country. The people refuse to collaborate with the government, and the general sentiment is that this government is unjust, incapable of solving problems, and that it resorts simply to the physical liquidation of its opponents. The political situation in the country is transformed
into a military situation in which the “gorillas” appear more and more to be the ones responsible for violence, while the lives of the people grow worse, Carlos Marighella, MiniManual of the Urban Guerrilla.
3. Al Qaeda strategy:
Force America to abandon its war against Islam by proxy and force it to attack directly so that the noble ones among the masses….will see that their fear of deposing the regimes because America is their protector is misplaced and that when they depose the regimes, they are capable of opposing America if it interferes. Abu Bakr Naji, The Management of Savagery ( p. 24)
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July 30, 2009 at 11:56 am
allan
This basic model is evident in the film Battle of Algiers. Salman Rushdie does a wonderful job of portraying its heartbreaking inevitability in Shalimar the Clown.
August 6, 2009 at 10:21 pm
sandeep
Thanks. Will check those out.
August 1, 2009 at 11:24 am
Javaad Ali
Lets take the “action-repression-action” story as the general case. The idea seems to be that the political upstart provokes repressive action by the government, that the government then chooses to repress, and that the general public then chooses to support the political upstart. (The story depicts, accurately in my opinion, Srebrenicia, Kosovo, Darfur, and possibly Lebanon in 2006.)
I think one insight that comes out of the story is that the initial provocation is more or less unobserved by the general public, but that the repression and subsequent action are both common knowledge to all players. If so, then it may follow that the general public, taken as a single player, is not monitoring the upstart prior to the provation. If so, then it will be the case that the expected utility monitoring the upstart is such that the general public prefers not to monitor. For that to be true, it should be true that the general public is sufficiently insulated from the actions of political upstarts.
The question then reduces to one of figuring out the source of the posited insularity. By insularity, I only mean to refer to a sort of social network structure in which players are not directly linked to all other players, but are instead linked through some intermediary called a “star.” If the star is the government, and if the political upstart would like to form links with the general public, then the shortest path in the network may run through the government.
My guess is that government’s ascend to centrality in social networks through various sorts of welfare projects. Welfare systems provide exactly the kind of insularity that the general public needs to prefer not to monitor political upstarts. As an example, every out-of-work carpet-bagger is either on his way, or dreams of being on his way, to Washington DC to get a slice of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. If so, then one implication may be that dismantling welfare states may actually reduce the incidence of terrorism.
I realize there are a lot of assumptions and theoretical luxuries taken above, but that’s how the story works in my head. Thoughts?
May 14, 2015 at 3:53 am
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