Chapter 13 reviews Staël’s contributions to her second husband John Rocca’s memoirs of the Peninsular War. When we consider the new Europe of nations that Staël bequeaths us, Romantic Spain seems striking in its absence. Her article “Camoëns” of winter 1811 has more on exiled genius than on Iberia; in Delphine, 1802, Léonce and the family of his Spanish mother are proud and devout to excess; and finally, the description in De la littérature (1800) of Spain’s inability, in contrast to Italy, to fuse the Arab South and the Christian North – a sterility born of priests and despotism – is fundamental for the 1813 debates of Staël, Schlegel, and Sismondi (DL 164–166). But here stands proof that she revised the war memoirs of her husband Rocca to show a popular struggle that checkmated Napoleon’s troops.

During the 1960s, Cuba attempted to provide leadership to the Latin American Left, and to the region’s numerous Cuban-inspired guerrilla movements in particular. In the process, Cuban leaders departed from Marxist–Leninist orthodoxy, garnering harsh criticism from their Soviet and Chinese allies. Yet Cuba found a steadfast supporter of its controversial positions in North Korea. This support can in large part be explained by the parallels between Cuban and North Korean ideas about revolution in the Third World. Most significantly, both parties embraced a radical reconceptualization of the role of the Marxist–Leninist vanguard party. This new doctrine appealed primarily to younger Latin American militants frustrated with the old communist and social–democratic organizations. It was appealing because it captured the sense of urgency created by the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and provided a path of immediate revolutionary action. The impact of the Cuban/North Korean concept of the party went beyond polemics and theoretical debates. It had a tangible influence on strategies and tactics employed by revolutionary movements in Colombia, Peru, Brazil, Puerto Rico, El Salvador, Mexico, and Bolivia, as they took up arms in the 1960s and 1970s.

Between 1808 and 1814 Spain and Portugal were devastated by the single most destructive episode of the Napoleonic Wars, namely the so-called Peninsular War. Originating in a foolhardy attempt on the part of Napoleon to render the former country a more reliable ally in the wake of his bloodless occupation of the latter in October 1807, this soon turned sour. French armies sustained one embarrassing reverse after another; assailed by multiple problems, the puppet regime of Joseph Bonaparte was unable to impose its authority; the Spanish armies proved easy to beat but hard to eliminate; the British ejected the French from Portugal and turned her into an unassailable stronghold; the French suffered heavy casualties; and political revolution in Spain made it very hard to claim the ideological high ground. Had Napoleon been willing to concentrate all his efforts on the struggle, he might yet have prevailed, but his decision to attack Russia badly destabilised the position of his armies, the result being that within two years the whole of the Peninsula had been liberated. All this makes for a dramatic story, but in practice the impact of the Peninsular War on the fate of Napoleon was very limited, its real importance lying rather in its influence on the history of Spain and Portugal.

As the Iraqi Kurds and Southern Sudanese became disillusioned with their prospects of integrating into the postcolonial states on an equal basis, they began to challenge their governments and seek new solutions, ranging from federalism to secession. This chapter details how these movements developed this anti-colonial identity, and how they used the very ideas, strategies and methods employed by the first-generation liberation movements against them.

Chapter 9, “Home Army on the Offensive: Violence in 1943-1944,” dissects mature intelligentsia military resistance. As the tide of war turned and the Germans endured their first battlefield defeats against the Soviet Union, the consolidated Home Army grew aggressive. Its most effective move was a 1943 assassination campaign targeting Wehrmacht officers, Nazi police, and German administration personnel called Operation Heads. Heads intimidated the Germans and shifted occupation policy. The Home Army’s perceived success and the advance of the Eastern Front toward Warsaw in 1944 convinced underground military leaders that they were facing their last opportunity to launch a city-wide insurrection. Their rebellion, now known as the Warsaw Uprising, failed. Remaining German personnel in the city were reinforced and crushed the insurrection, slaughtered civilians, and destroyed the city. This chapter argues that military conspiracy, like Catholic resistance, had its successes but was ultimately dependent on the international situation and could not secure the practical support of the Grand Alliance in the face of both German and Soviet opposition.

The 1960s and 1970s are often remembered as the age of the Third World guerrilla. But by the mid-1970s, the seemingly unstoppable force of secular Third World liberation, embodied by the Tricontinental Conference, had lost momentum. A new generation of liberation fighters mobilizing sectarian and ethnic identities in local struggles gradually overtook secular left-wing revolutionaries.

Nowhere were these changes more pronounced than the Middle East. During the heyday of the Third World guerrilla, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) captured attention by casting itself as an Arab Viet Cong. Despite spectacular operations against Israel and its Western supporters, the PLO could not achieve lasting gains. By the mid-1970s, Palestinian fighters were pulled into the bloody Lebanese Civil War, which devolved into a conflict between rival sectarian groups. Soon after, the 1979 Revolution in Iran demonstrated that theocratic radicalism had become a significant player on the world stage. By the late 1980s, secular liberation fighters such as the PLO were replaced by the likes of Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Mujahideen as the vanguard of revolutionary forces in the Middle East.

If the intricacies of global supply chains form one crucial aspect of roadblock politics, we also need to investigate another aspect of logistics in order to unpack Congo’s roadblock proliferation. Focusing on Central African hinterlands where roads are a fading memory, Chapter 8 asks how contemporary rebel groups adapt to a terrain that is inimical to military logistics as usual. Rebels themselves have best theorized what military logistics might look like in the debris of infrastructural empire. By providing a glimpse of the inner workings of a few of Central Africa’s many rebel groups, this chapter explores what one armed group itself dubbed ‘non-conventional logistics’. From the perspective of conventional, centralized states, this form of organization is suboptimal, but it is perfectly geared to withdrawal from and rebuttal of the reach of outside powers. Yet the purchase of this approach extends beyond rebels: given the overbearing logistical and geographical constraints, state agents by necessity also practise versions of guerilla foraging, blurring the lines between enemies. Taken together, the examples provided in this chapter prompt one to consider political control not as a fixed property of mutually exclusive territorial configurations, but rather as a mobile and temporary achievement in the political economy of circulation.

Cuba is well-known for its mix of radical positions and skills at brokering agreements. Cuban internationalism began as a way to build alliances to counterbalance its geopolitical asymmetry with the United States and gain allies to ensure its survival. These skills are exemplified in the Tricontinental Conference. This investigation sketches the central role that Havana played in the development and hosting of the conference, then focuses on the negotiations undertaken by Cubans to keep the talks going in a thorny political climate in which many political positions were represented. More specifically, we focus on the role of Cuba before and after the Tricontinental in negotiating the tensions and infighting between stakeholders from anti-colonial and socialist liberation movements and parties in the Third World, as well as the emerging rift between the Soviets and Chinese. Finally, honing in on the example of West Germany, we consider how Western leftist participants at the conference saw Cuba’s role in this multidimensional, avant-garde camp that included not only guerrilla movements, communist parties, and other radical organizations, but social democrats as well.

The chapter traces the development of Guevara’s revolutionary consciousness and the concurrent creation of a militant program of armed struggle on three continents (Asia, Africa, and Latin America). It places Guevara’s intellectual and revolutionary project in the context of the emerging and evolving alliance between the Cuban revolution and the Soviet Union, the simultaneous confrontation with the realities and legacies of US imperialism, and the quixotic quest for Third World solidarity. An exploration of Che’s beliefs, ideas, and actions relating to revolutionary warfare reveals a man ahead of his time. Guevara synthesized and built upon the foundation of guerrilla strategies and tactics promulgated most famously by Mao Zedong but also exhibited by Augusto Sandino, hero of the struggle to liberate Nicaragua from the US occupation. In doing so, he championed an agenda of political and militant solidarity that would continue to attract adherents long after his death at the hands of Bolivian security forces in 1967.

Chapter 3 expands the examination of war’s great theorists and theories to include “small war,” maritime, and airpower theorists like Callwell, Galula, Trinquier, Lawrence, Mahan, Corbett, Douhet, Mitchell, Trenchard, and Slessor. This chapter emphasizes the subordinate relationship between subtheories of war and general theory and asserts that in some cases subtheories are the result of inadequacies in general theory. The chapter examines the human, political, and combat aspects of small wars from both strong and weak perspectives. Additionally, the chapter evaluates maritime and airpower subtheories and defines three tasks for domain theorists: characterize the domain in abstract terms, explain how to control it, and then show how control advances the aims of war. Finally, it synthesizes material from Chapters 2 and 3 by evaluating each theorist for balance relative to war’s twenty dialectics.

This chapter historically contextualizes the Kurdish Women’s Freedom Movement and analyses the trajectory of its organizational structures from 1987 to the present. It traces how the women’s movement managed to establish its own army (1995) and party (1999) within the PKK, while also establishing the co-chair system and the women’s quota in the political sphere in the early 2000s. The chapter zooms into one crucial moment of contestation between the women and men of the movement: the formation of the Kurdistan Women’s Worker’s Party (Partiya Jinên Karkerên Kurdistanê, PJKK) in 1999. It asks to what extent this and similar internal struggles can help us to gain a more nuanced understand of how the women managed to carve out the spaces for autonomous organizing within the wider movement, how the liberation of women came to feature so prominently in the movement’s ideology and how this speaks to ongoing debates around nationalism and feminism. The chapter also highlights some of the tensions and contradictions that emerge between the claim to liberation and the clear framework around the ‘free woman’.

In 1971 the Pakistan armed forces began a genocidal attack on the population of East Pakistan, igniting the Bangladesh Liberation War. The main thread is the violent struggle between the armed forces and local guerrilla fighters. But interwoven with this chronicle of national liberation are many other themes: the victimisation of specific groups (women, Hindus, ethnic minorities); local vendettas and the settling of personal scores; tensions between nationalists of different hues; regional variation in violence and destruction as well as in population displacement; and thousands of stories of personal courage and sacrifice. Equally important is the fact that the war was part of two larger geopolitical games: the rivalry between India and Pakistan and the struggle between Cold War superpowers.