Insurgencies Archive

Fierce urban fighting alongside Machiavellian political maneuvering is nothing new to the Syrian conflict. But the past few days have brought a new twist in the upheaval with lasting, if opaque, repercussions for Syria’s civil war and the many actors involved in it directly or by proxy. The key center of the new convoluted and deadly developments is Aleppo, Syria’s prewar commercial capital, now a rubble-strewn ruin at the heart of the five-year-old conflict. After several days of intensified battles and curious political moves, a new crop of winners and losers is emerging. But identifying who they are, or who […]

Throughout the month of July, a series of violent clashes in Kashmir between protesters and Indian security forces left more than 50 Kashmiris dead and more than 5,000 injured. In an email interview, Anit Mukherjee, an assistant professor in the South Asia Programme at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), NTU, Singapore, discusses the Indian military’s domestic security role and civil-military relations. WPR: What role does the Indian military play in domestic security, including the Kashmir conflict and the Naxalite insurgency? Anit Mukherjee: The Indian military has historically played an important role in countering domestic insurgencies and separatist […]

Last week, the United States significantly expanded airstrikes in Libya against the self-proclaimed Islamic State, upping its military involvement in a country mired in civil war since a NATO-led intervention helped topple dictator Moammar Gadhafi in 2011. Libya’s United Nations-backed government in Tripoli, known as the Government of National Accord, or GNA, requested the airstrikes. They have centered on the coastal city of Sirte, where Libyan forces aligned with the unity government have been engaged in fierce street battles with the Islamic State. The strikes have reportedly come from jets launched from a U.S. amphibious assault ship in the Mediterranean […]

Last month, as an attempted military putsch was put down in Turkey, posters lining streets across Pakistan beckoned the country’s popular army chief, Gen. Raheel Sharif, to take over in a coup. The posters have since been taken down, and the man responsible for them arrested. But the question still remains: Is the Pakistani military poised to take over? The last time Pakistan experienced a coup, in October 1999, the context was markedly different from today. At the time, Pakistan was reeling economically, in part due to U.S. sanctions over the country’s May 1998 nuclear tests. Civil-military relations had gone […]

Editor’s note: This article is part of an ongoing WPR series on the status of women’s rights and gender equality in various countries around the globe. The Colombian government and rebels from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) agreed during peace negotiations last month to promote women’s access to property and to deny amnesty to perpetrators of sexual violence. In an email interview, Felipe Jaramillo Ruiz, a founding member of Colombian Network of International Relations and doctoral student at the Graduate Institute of Geneva, discusses women’s rights in Colombia. WPR: What is the current status of women’s rights and […]