Bernard Fall and Vietnamese Revolutionary Warfare in Indochina

This article assesses Bernard Fall’s concept of Vietnamese Revolutionary Warfare in Indochina between 1953 and 1958. It also investigates differences in the conceptualization of Revolutionary Warfare between Fall and proponents of French military doctrine known as la guerre révolutionnaire. The last component of the article considers limits of Fall’s influence on counterinsurgency doctrine.     

The long and winding road … to success? Unit peace operation effectiveness and its effect on mission success

Why does peacekeeping sometimes fail? How can effective peacekeepers increase the likelihood of success of a mission? The two main flaws in the current evaluations of peace operations are that they mainly rely on already concluded missions and that they make use of indicators that do not reveal micro-level dynamics. This article introduces an analytical framework relating the effectiveness of soldiers to their actual impact in their area of operation in a peace operation. The framework is called “unit peace operation effectiveness” (UPOE). Focusing on soldiers in peace operations, this article shows that: different units behave differently; emphasize different aspects of the mandate; and are effective in different ways. Ultimately, this has an actual impact on the end-state of the mission. It relies on and adapts classic security studies works to theoretically enrich the peacekeeping literature. The model is tested in an illustrative case study based on ethnographic work on French and Italian units in Afghanistan between 2008 and 2010.     

Unrestricted warfare: Review essay I

During the Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970), France chose to support Biafra, but only on a limited scale, providing mercenaries and obsolete weaponry to Ojukwu's regime. General Charles de Gaulle's assistance to Ojukwu was conditioned by the French military drawdown after 1961, the increased power of French secret services on the continent, and the interventions in Katanga (1960–1963), Gabon (1964) and Chad (1968–1972). France supported Biafra primarily to protect its former colonies from Nigeria, stop Soviet subversion and acquire an economic foothold in the oil-rich Niger Delta. De Gaulle chose a limited strategy for two reasons. If Biafra won the war, France would be Biafra's greatest ally. If Nigeria won the war, France could extricate itself from the situation relatively easily and re-establish relations with the Nigerian government, which is what ultimately occurred.     

The insurgency of the Vendée

The insurrection in the Vendée combined open warfare with the methods of petite guerre, ambushing French republican soldiers and cutting their supply lines to Paris. These tactics, when combined with the hatreds generated by a civil war, go far to explain to the cruelty of the conflict in the west and the depth of the hatreds it engendered. In republican eyes the use of guerrilla tactics was unjust and illegitimate, and they denounced their adversaries as common criminals and brigands, portraying them as backward, superstitious, even as subhuman, and in the process justified the savage repression they unleashed against them.     

Initiating insurgencies abroad: French plans to ‘chouannise’ Britain and Ireland, 1793–1798

Secret French plans to launch guerrilla-style raids on the British Isles devised in the spring of 1796 were referred to as ‘chouanneries’. The name and concept behind these small-war operations were modelled on the irregular tactics used by the Chouan rebels in the Vendée, which the French state army had brutally quashed, but some wished to transfer into their institutional practice. Part of France's ongoing military strategy in the war against Britain, which included fomenting insurrection in Ireland, these irregular operations were to be manned partially by pardoned deserters and released convicts and prisoners of war. Of these, only Tate's brief invasion of Wales in 1797 was realised, but the surviving plans provide insightful historical lessons into an Anglophobic mindset shared by a small network of practitioners and policy deciders on the effectiveness of such shock and awe tactics. Largely motivated by the desire to take revenge for Britain's support of counter-revolutionaries in the Vendée, these plans could more aptly be referred to as counter-‘chouanneries’.     

The Nineteenth Century Origins of Counterinsurgency Doctrine

Abstract

In counterinsurgency, the population is the center of gravity. This insight has become a key doctrinal tenet of modern armed conflict. But where does it come from? The razzia, a tactic introduced by the French in North Africa around 1840, first thrust tribal populations into the focus of modern operational thinking. Soon the pioneering bureaux arabes added an administrative, civil, and political element. Eventually, in the 1890s, French operations in Madagascar gave rise to a mature counterinsurgency doctrine. David Galula, a French writer who heavily influenced the American Counterinsurgency manual, is merely the joint that connects the nineteenth century to the twenty-first.     

French intervention in Mali: strategic alliances,long-term regional presence?

The March 2012 coup in Mali opened the door to expanded territorial occupation in northern Mali by Tuareg separatists and subsequently armed Islamist extremists. French forces intervened at the behest of the interim government in Mali. This article examines how various actors frame the conflict to their advantage. While the Malian government and France are allies, the position of various Tuareg actors shift over time as they strategize and weigh the value of allegiance with the French. Local extremist organizations are labeled as terrorists and are targeted as enemies. This article argues that the conflict has been decontextualized and framed within the ‘war on terror’. France’s decision to intervene and to expand their regional military presence, rather than exit, is legitimized by the framing of their intervention as integral to counterterrorism efforts.     

Memory,magic and militias: Cora Indian participation in Mexico’s wars,from the reforma to the revolution (1854-1920)

ABSTRACT

Mexico’s Cora Indians have played an outsized role in national history, thanks to their skilful use of guerrilla tactics and success in forging strategic alliances with outside forces in defence of their cultural, territorial and political autonomy. Cora participation in elite struggles between Liberals and Conservatives (1850–73), and subsequently in the Mexican Revolution (1910–20), helped to shape the way that both conflicts played out in Western Mexico. Such participation also allowed Cora communities to keep hold of traditional landholdings in the face of political and economic reform, while sowing the seeds for the foundation of the Mexican state of Nayarit.