Insurgency

How did the party of Lincoln become the party of Trump? From an acclaimed political reporter for The New York Times comes the definitive story of the mutiny that shattered American politics. “A bracing account of how the party of Lincoln and Reagan was hijacked by gadflies and grifters who reshaped their movement into becoming an anti-democratic cancer that attacked the U.S. Capitol.”—Joe Scarborough Jeremy W. Peters’s epic narrative chronicles the fracturing of the Republican Party. Insurgency is a fantasia-like story of a party establishment that believed it could control the dark energy it helped foment—right up until it suddenly couldn’t. How, Peters asks, did conservative values that Republicans claimed to cherish, like small government, fiscal responsibility, and morality in public service, get completely eroded as an unshakable faith in Donald Trump grew to define the party? The answer is a tale traced across three decades—with new reporting and firsthand accounts from the people who were there—of populist uprisings that destabilized the party. The signs of conflict were plainly evident for anyone who cared to look. After Barack Obama’s election convinced many Republicans that they faced an existential demographics crossroads, many believed the only way to save the party was to create a more inclusive and diverse coalition. But party leaders underestimated the energy and popular appeal of those who would pull the party in the opposite direction. They failed to see how the right-wing media they hailed as truth-telling was warping the reality in which their voters lived. And they did not understand the complicated moral framework by which many conservatives would view Trump, leading evangelicals and one-issue voters to shed Republican orthodoxy if it delivered a Supreme Court that would undo Roe v. Wade. In this sweeping history, Peters details key junctures and episodes to unfurl the story of a revolution from within. Its architects had little interest in the America of the new century but a deep understanding of the iron will of a shrinking minority. With Trump as their polestar, their gamble paid greater dividends than they’d ever imagined, extending the life of far-right conservatism in United States domestic policy into the next half century.

Boko Haram is the major threat to the Nigerian state, and has emerged as a destabilizing factor across sub-Saharan Africa. This is now a major focus of global policy-making, as between 2013 and 2014 insurgency-related deaths in Nigeria exceeded those in Iraq and Afghanistan. This book is the first to focus on the military nature of Boko Haram, the reasons for its success in those specific regions of the Chad basin it operates in and a detailed history of the Nigerian army's counter-insurgency – with whom, uniquely, the author has spent research time. The book identifies and analyses the battles and skirmishes on the front line, as well as unearthing a wider explanation for Boko Haram's military success and the causes of the instability in the region.

Based on previously classified materials, this study traces the political policies and operational practices that enabled the British to defeat the communist insurgency in Malaya between 1948 and 1960. The author points to the key roles played by the Briggs Plan and General Sir Gerald Templer.

Explores current debates around religious extremism as a means to understand and re-think the connections between terrorism, insurgency and state failure. Using case studies of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq, she develops a better understanding of the underlying causes and conditions necessary for terrorism and insurgency to occur.

This edited collection examines the British ‘way’ in counter-insurgency. It brings together and consolidates new scholarship on the counter-insurgency associated with the end of empire, foregrounding a dark and violent history of British imperial rule, one that stretched back to the nineteenth century and continued until the final collapse of the British Empire in the 1960s. The essays gathered in the collection cover the period from the late nineteenth century to the 1960s; they are both empirical and conceptual in tone. This edited collection pivots on the theme of the nature of the force used by Britain against colonial insurgents. It argues that the violence employed by British security forces in counter-insurgency to maintain imperial rule is best seen from a maximal perspective, contra traditional arguments that the British used minimum force to defeat colonial rebellions. Case studies are drawn from across the British Empire, covering a period of some hundred years, but they concentrate on the savage wars of decolonisation after 1945. The collection includes a historiographical essay and one on the ‘lost’ Hanslope archive by the scholar chosen by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to manage the release of the papers held. This book was published as a special issue of Small Wars and Insurgencies.

First Published in 2009. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.