Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Unconventional Warfare:
Guerrillas and Counter-Insurgency from
Iraq to Antiquity
Trinity College Dublin Centre for War Studies
The Printing House, Trinity College
6-7 March 2015
Programme
Friday, 6 March 2015
1.00-1.30
Registration, Tea/Coffee
1.30-1.45
1.45-3.15
th
th
Century.
Dublin)
Daniel Sutherland (University of Arkansas), American Civil War guerrillas
Guillemette Crouzet (Paris IV) Pirates, bandits and fanatics. Taxinomia and
violence as a tool of empire-building in the Persian Gulf (c. 1800- 1890)
5.00-5.30
5.30-7.00
Tea/Coffee
Keynote Address
7.30
Conference Dinner
Abstracts
Panel 1. Civilians, Insurgents and Counter-Insurgency in the 20 Century
th
were terrorised by a few men with guns and that most nationalists were
moderate, if easily frightened, and in favour of dominion home rule and peace.
This paper will question these competing narratives by exploring guerrilla
attempts to discourage, stifle, and punish dissent among the civilian population,
and the actions by which dissent was expressed or implied. An examination of
low-level, everyday (and mostly non-violent) acts of defiance and punishment
will show that civilian interaction with the IRA was far more fluid than is usually
allowed. While the everyday acts of resistance discussed here could be
inconsequential in isolation, their cumulative effect was important. To achieve
hegemony over local populations, guerrillas had to punish even small acts of
dissent and ensure that they were not repeated. It will be seen that the nature of
this punishment was dictated by the perceived seriousness of the offence and,
more importantly, by local conditions.
Rather than fitting in to one of two neat categories, civilians generally operated in
a substantial, often vague, middle ground. As will be argued here, it was not
necessarily loyalty and ideology that motivated the actions or inactions of most
civilians, but rather concerns about their personal and economic welfare.
While the assumption that the IRA relied on the support, either active or passive,
of the general population is to a large extent true, it oversimplifies or misses
many of the complexities inherent in the local relationships between civilians and
guerrillas complexities that are not unique to the Irish case.
although
rebel
guerrillas
easily
outnumbered
their
Unionist
counterparts in most places. People spoke not so much of preserving the Union
or winning Confederate independence as they did of home protection.
Of equal note, with most guerrillas acting on their own hook, acknowledging
no rules or regulations that might restrain them, they too often treated noncombatants with a ruthlessness and cruelty that made them more outlaw than
irregular soldier. Appalled by this brand of uncivilized warfare, the Union
army began to treat captured rebel guerrillas as marauders or brigands, an
action. However, that only added to a vicious cycle of retaliation and counterretaliation.
wage guerrilla warfare. This paper investigates who the freebooters were, it
describes their actions and their impact on life and the economy in the front
region, and it discusses the largely unsuccessful stratagems developed by
both the Spanish and the Dutch to control this very fluid aspect of early modern
warfare. It is shown how freebooters suddenly disappeared from the war scene
early in the 1590s to be replaced by a full-fledged contributions system run by
Dutch civil servants. This contributions system changed life and power relations
in the front region and beyond and altered the course of the conventional war
leading up to the battle of Nieuwpoort (1600) and the siege of Ostend (16011604).
Panel 4. Small Wars in Antiquity and the Medieval World
Alistair Macdonald, (Aberdeen), Good King Roberts Testament? Guerrilla War
in late medieval Scotland
There is a strong belief in both academic and popular historiography that
Scotland owed the preservation of its medieval independence to the adoption of
a military template stipulating what might be termed guerrilla warfare to
combat an enemy (the English) clearly more powerful in conventional terms. The
argument goes that the Scots embarked on a conventional military defence when
invaded by Edward I in 1296, but that after their rapid defeat and the conquest of
the kingdom they turned to other techniques, developed first by Sir William
Wallace and perfected thereafter by King Robert I the Bruce. A martial legacy
was passed on beyond this kings death and the military behaviour of the Scots
was strongly conditioned by his example throughout the later medieval period.
The present paper seeks to investigate this conception in more detail. Key aspects
of what are taken to be the Brucean mode of war will be examined. Avoidance of
battle and the related techniques of scorched earth and slighting of fortifications
on home soil to deny their use to the enemy will be considered. Attention will
also be paid to those combat techniques deployed by the Scots that might seem
analogous to guerrilla warfare: rapid marches, ambush, surprise and trickery.
The extent to which Scottish military forces can be seen as unconventional will
also be examined by looking at social class, training, equipment and reward
mechanisms. Finally, some consideration will be given to the ethics of war. Was
savagery and atrocity more practiced by the Scots than their foes, and can this be
related to a Scottish war effort that was irregular in nature? It will be argued
that for each of these categories the demarcations between conventional and
unconventional warfare are blurred. It will be suggested that in medieval
warfare generally clear, binary divisions between regular and irregular personnel
and activity are impossible to maintain. Nonetheless, it will be suggested that
nuanced and careful exploration does allow us to note particularities, based on
the specific circumstances facing them, in the Scots practice of war in the later
middle ages.
Brian McGing (TCD), Guerilla warfare and revolt in 2nd century BC Egypt
Ancient empires, whether Greek or Roman, have tended to receive a good press
from classical scholars (who mostly come from countries with an imperial past).
Any admiration we may have for the Ptolemaic regime in Egypt was clearly not
shared by many of the native inhabitants, who revolted regularly throughout
Ptolemaic history for a variety of disputed reasons. The best known of these
revolts, the Great Revolt of the Thebaid, lasted for some twenty years (207-186
BC). It is usually presented as a war, with rebel forces confronting government
forces, winning and losing territory. But in the first description of guerilla
warfare that we have from the ancient world, Polybius (14.12) points the way to a
different interpretation of what happened. The situation in Ireland from 19181922 also suggests different lines of investigation.
Jacques Callot, Les misres et les malheurs de la guerre (Paris, 1633) (courtesy of TCD Library)
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