The Dynamics of the Armed Struggle

The Dynamics of the Armed Struggle is an authoritative and provocative analysis of the nature of one of the time's most prevalent forms of political violence. The classic examples are known to: the IRA, the Euroterrorists, the pilgrims of the Holy Jihad and the Algerian fundamentalists, the Palestinian fedayeen, and all those, including Mao and Che, Begin, Kenyatta, and Giap, who have made history by recourse to the power of the gun. Dr Bowyer Bell has attended wars, not seminars, in pursuit of data, insight and explanation, and has been shot at, kidnapped, expelled and questioned from Central America to Northern Ireland: a scholar amid terror. The text arises from his access to the underground, from time spent in the revolutionary ecosystem and among those who kill to make a dream real. The result is a unique analysis that transcends traditional studies of insurgency or terrorism, depicting a strange world where the will is trusted, not tangible assets, where a galaxy of the faithful seeks to alterhistory. Sometimes the will prevails over the assets of the state: the weak win because their will endures until the centre fails. The structure that the faithful create, everywhere different yet everywhere the same, has not been examined before from the inside out. The Dynamics of the Armed Struggle is both a special and a general study of the hidden world of the gunman-not as a mirror image of everyday reality amenable to academic tools, but as perceived by a scholar with a visa into violence. The reader will no longer find the armed struggles of our time inexplicable, merely horrible, yet emerging as cohesive means to act on events. This book offers a compelling insight into an elusive phenomenon, a process that at times allows the few to change the course of history. Dr J Bowyer Bell is President of the International Analysis Center, New York, a consulting firm on problems of international security, and teaches low-intensity conflict and terrorism at Columbia University.