Decolonization and Conflict: Colonial Comparisons and Legacies

Martin Thomas · Gareth Curless

2017년 6월 · Bloomsbury Publishing

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Insurgency-based irregular warfare typifies armed conflict in the post-Cold War age. For some years now, western and other governments have struggled to contend with ideologically driven guerrilla movements, religiously inspired militias, and systematic targeting of civilian populations. Numerous conflicts of this type are rooted in experiences of empire breakdown. Yet few multi-empire studies of decolonisation's violence exist. Decolonization and Conflict brings together expertise on a variety of different cases to offer new perspectives on the colonial conflicts that engulfed Europe's empires after 1945.

The contributors analyse multiple forms of colonial counter-insurgency from the military engagement of anti-colonial movements to the forced removal of civilian populations and the application of new doctrines of psychological warfare. Contributors to the collection also show how insurgencies, their propaganda and methods of action were inherently transnational and inter-connected. The resulting study is a vital contribution to our understanding of contested decolonization. It emphasises the global connections at work and reveals the contemporary resonances of both anti-colonial insurgencies and the means devised to counter them. It is essential reading for students and scholars of empire, decolonization, and asymmetric warfare.

저자 정보

Martin Thomas is Professor of Imperial History at the University of Exeter, UK, where he is Director of the Centre for the Study of War, State and Society. His recent publications include Violence and Colonial Order (2012), Fight or Flight: Britain, France, and their Roads from Empire (2014) and he is co-author of Crises of Empire: Decolonization and Europe's Imperial States, 1918-1975 (2015).

Gareth Curless is an ESRC Future Research Leader (2013-16) and a Lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Exeter, UK. He is currently working on a monograph that investigates the relationship between labour unrest and decolonization in the British Empire.