The second decade of the twenty-first century saw emergent social movements challenge the authority of the Islamic Republic. The pattern prompted competing notions of revolution in public debates about Iranian politics. This introductory chapter posits questions regarding the subject of revolution in the debates. It identifies a shared rhetorical pattern between competing parties, who, despite their differences, construe revolutionaries as partisans. The chapter proposes an inquiry into the 1979 revolution, recovering an unexamined archetype of collective action to reframe polemics. The archetype of an insurgent witness describes the millions of people who joined mass demonstrations from December 1978 until the fall of the Pahlavi state on February 11, 1979, as both partisans and spectators. The idea departs from prevalent templates in social science studies of revolution, political theories of agency in revolutionary contexts, and extant studies of modern Iran. To see it more clearly, we may consider a perspectival comparison with Taziyeh mourning processions, in conversation with Ali Shariati’s insurrectionary speeches about the Karbala paradigm.

This chapter concludes the book by revisiting its key findings and by reflecting on their meaning from a broader perspective. The first half of the chapter consists of a summary of the rise and fall of the classical doctrine of civil war as explained in the preceding chapters. The second half assesses the overall legacy of the classical doctrine in the light of modern legal theory, and observes how the classical law was hardly better able to overcome the problems of indeterminacy and recognition than current principles are. Yet this does not mean that the classical doctrine would have been meaningless, as its practical utility may have been based precisely on its limited effectiveness and inevitable ambiguity.

For the first time in its modern history, the post-2003 state faced a severe legitimation crisis, which was compounded by its inability to establish the authority to dominate. Chapter 4 argues that the fragmentation of the state’s authority resulted from the undoing of its domination capacity by the US-led invasion during the first three months of the occupation. The extent of the fragmentation was plain to see in 2003 when militia-backed political groups moved into the space where the state used to be – by the end of the 2006 civil war, those groups had firmly consolidated their demarcated domains of authority over Iraq’s economy and politics. The chapter investigates the Coalition Provisional Authority’s biggest civil project: repairing the national electrical grid. Technical and material elements of that project became sites of physical and political contestation over the state’s consolidation at a moment when its domination had disappeared. The chapter also traces the trajectory of “state-building” as an influential and ultimately dangerous framework, from its roots in 1980s US academia and 1990s UN peace-keeping practices to its arrival in Iraq with the US-led invasion.

This chapter helps readers make sense of the array of activities that can be considered as irregular warfare. As an umbrella term for a particular form of warfare, its methods consist of terrorism, insurgency, revolution, coup d’état and civil war. The chapter compares and contrasts these methods according to the level of resources they employ, their respective centres of gravity, strategic and tactical orientations, mechanism for success and duration. It provides a useful taxonomy for students seeking to better comprehend irregular warfare but narrows down subsequent study to its two most prevalent methods: terrorism and insurgency.

This chapter provides a critical analysis of the material scope of NIAC and is divided into seven sections. The first explores the material concepts of NIAC pursuant to both CA3 and APII,  and explores how the drafters understood these  concept and how it has been interpreted in practice. Second, it examines the concept of NIAC contained in Additional Protocol II of 1977, looking at how its distinct identity emerged, as well as its specific material elements. The second section explores some of the legal and operational challenges that arise from the existence of two categories of NIAC, and in particular how the activation of APII can fragment the applicable legal regime, resulting in fluctuating levels of protection during NIAC. The fourth section undertakes a comparative analysis of the material scope and associated threshold of NIAC pursuant to the Tadić definition of NIAC (CA3) and that contained in APII, in order to identify areas of convergence and divergence. The fifth section explores how developments in both customary and conventional IHL applicable during NIAC have influenced its material scope and, in particular, the level of organization armed groups require in order to qualify as a Party to a NIAC. Following from the conclusions of sections four and five, the sixth section assesses the continued relevance of the distinction between CA3 and APII NIACs in practice.

Irregular war, like war, remains an enduring feature of security studies both as they relate to internal state security and sovereignty as well as to international relations. Irregular war may not always appear to hold political purposes; many today seem driven by religious ideology, but the institution of theocratic governance has a politics of its own. Thus, like regular war, irregular war is subordinate to a political purpose. Whether they occur on the periphery of regular wars or perform roles to keep state competition from escalating into conflict, irregular wars are often intricately tied to their regular counterparts. While two broad theories of counterinsurgency both claim to have prescriptions for winning an irregular fight, one – the good governance approach – is plagued by problems of implementation at the governmental level, and the other – coercion – entails unreasonable brutality against both insurgent and population, often unbefitting a liberal counterinsurgent force.

Why did the British war effort in the South fail so badly, and therefore lead to the British loss of the American mainland colonies? The British tried to solve the political problem of reunification through military means, which was always a poor fit. Further, the British continuously underrated their allies and did not use them effectively. These mistakes doomed the British war effort in the South. The region dissolved into a brutal civil war fought through guerrilla means. Neither side could win complete victory. Mistakes compounded, making British victory impossible.

The Taliban insurgency happened because they enjoyed a permissive environment: safe haven in Pakistan, state failure in Afghanistan, and an America increasingly focused on Iraq. In turn, most of those had common roots in the Bush administration’s decisions in 2001: to define the conflict as a “War on Terror” best waged with a light footprint and to conflate the Taliban and al-Qaida. Some of those decisions made sense in 2001, but none of them bore scrutiny as the situation in Afghanistan changed, and the Bush administration failed to adapt quickly enough.

The September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States further propelled the global focus on terrorism. Despite international efforts, the threat of terrorism remains throughout the world. In this chapter, the challenges in defining and analyzing terrorism are established by articulating the characteristics, structures, and motivations of groups that terrorize others. These definitions of terrorism, and the features of relevant groups, are then placed within the wider context of intrastate conflict. Key questions addressed include: Why does terrorism more frequently occur in war-torn countries? And how does its occurrence lower prospects for sustainable peace? This analysis is then used to inform modern counterterrorism methods, and how their evolution is critical for future international and national security along with peace mediation studies.

In this chapter we locate the question of ‘radical pedagogy’ in the current moment: a time in which insurgent social movements (such as #rhodesmustfall, #metoo, and #blacklivesmatter) are raising pertinent questions of representation, accountability and justice in society as well as at universities. We reflect on our own pedagogical-scholarly practice, and ask whether it is possible to separate language activism from other kinds of social-justice/decolonial/anti-colonial activism. In answering this question we draw on the Black racial tradition(s), and we emphasize the importance of being attuned to one’s local context. In our case this means the settler-colonial realities of post-apartheid South Africa, and the Imperial university. Being an activist-scholar means that one has to be prepared to engage in ‘difficult conversations’, with other scholars, but also with students and the wider community. These are conversations that are grounded in a willingness to ‘unlearn’ and to engage in ‘dialogics’ (Paolo Freire, 1968). One area where these ‘difficult conversations’ have gained traction is around questions of citation and curriculum: How can we teach and use citation practices that are ethically responsible? Can we develop an ethics of citation, and create a curriculum that is ethically sound?

This chapter opens with a literary history of armed conflicts in the Global South, and the violent suppression of these conflicts in the name of national security in India, Nigeria, Burma and the Middle East. Situated between the world literature debate and the vernacular turn within Anglophone literary criticism, the chapter develops disruptive (ir)realism as an analytical frame, one that accounts for the multiple modalities of violence in literary texts from the Global South. The chapter traces these modalities to the violent trajectories of insurgent lifeworlds through disruptive plots, mobile narrators, botched syntax, and alternating and collapsing timelines. Such tropes of disruption, the chapter reveals, are inflected in both the aesthetic configuration of insurgent figures who lack a guiding narrative anchor, and the uneven distribution of violence among fictional communities that results in further sociopolitical cleavages. The implied move toward post-terrorism in this chapter gestures toward the social (re)distribution of violence through myriad figures: rogues, rebels, guerillas, bandits, revolutionaries, and, most importantly, insurgents.