Focusing on armed groups as fundamental political units, this Brief challenges traditional categorizations that separate insurgents, militias, and governmental forces. It proposes a unitary political theory that emphasizes the significance of these groups in international politics, advocating for their analysis beyond conventional frameworks of class, gender, and state influence. This perspective aims to reshape the understanding of armed groups and their roles in contemporary political dynamics.
This book analyses the nationalist rebellion which emerged in Romania following the Second World War. The first two decades after the end of the war were times of rebellion in imperial peripheries. Armed movements, sometimes communist but nearly always nationalist in orientation, rose in opposition to retreating or advancing imperial powers. One such armed revolt took place in Romania, pitting nationalist partisans against a communist government. This book is an analysis of how the authorities crushed this rebellion, set in the context of parallel campaigns fought in Europe and the Third World. It focuses on population control through censorship, propaganda and deportations. It analyses military operations, particularly patrols, checkpoints, ambushes and informed strikes. Intelligence operations are also discussed, with an emphasis on recruiting informants, on interrogation, torture and infiltration. Bullets, brains and barbwire, not “hearts and minds” approaches, crushed internal rebels in post-1945 campaigns.
