Sartorial insurgencies: Rebel women, headwraps and the revolutionary Black Atlantic

Modeling Insurgencies and Counterinsurgencies

A system dynamics model of insurgencies is built using the US. Army and Marine Counterinsurgency Manual (FM 3-24) as a basis. It must, however, be supplemented by additional theory from outside sources to enable calibration to a historical data set. Parameter and policy analyses are conducted. These highlight the criticality of some features of insurgencies described by FM 3-24 such as the impo...

Joseph Knight : Scotland and the Black Atlantic

A quotation from Ben Okri’s Birds of Heaven – written in the context of a Nigeria wrestling with postcolonial nation building – opens James Robertson’s Joseph Knight.[1] This theme of a nation facing its own historical truths points to the drive of Robertson’s historical novel: to open up the established national narrative of Scotland to the black Atlantic issues of slavery, rebellion, race and...

Insurgencies in the Infosphere

Analytic Modeling of Insurgencies

Legacy force-on-force models are symmetrical; they reflect the fact that the dynamics of both sides in the conflict is governed by similar rules. These models have also traditionally focused on the physical aspects of armed conflicts – fire, attrition, detection, movement, logistics, etc. Insurgency models are different in two key aspects: (a) they are asymmetrical and (b) they contain, in addi...

Khadi – A Sartorial Call for Mobilization

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi had a knack for identifying the simplest of things which would have an impact on the masses. He knew that food and clothing mattered the most to the impoverished millions in India. The Dandi March was a clarion call to defy the salt laws. The Swadeshi enterprise with khadi as the dominant theme showed Gandhi's immense skill at effective mobilization. This paper would ...