Winning Hearts and Minds in Civil Wars: Governance and Support for Violence in Iraq

Author(s):  
Christoph Mikulaschek ◽  
Saurabh Pant ◽  
Beza Tesfaye
Keyword(s):  
1977 ◽  
Vol 72 ◽  
pp. 766-785 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chalmers Johnson

It is now 15 years since Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power was first published and became known as a controversial book. However, when in the autumn of 1960 I began writing my doctoral dissertation in political science at Berkeley, it never once crossed my mind that I was writing something controversial or even publishable. For the previous two years I had been reading Japanese Government archives concerned with the Japanese war in China, 1937–45, archives that had been obtained for the Berkeley libraries by Professor Robert Scalapino from Hatano Ken'ichi, one of Japan's leading specialists on China and a Japanese governmental adviser during the so-called “China Incident.” These archives impressed me with a point that I thought was already widely accepted among scholars interested in the Chinese Revolution – namely, that the Japanese army had created conditions of such savagery in the Chinese countryside that the peasantry in overwhelming numbers had given their allegiance to the Chinese Communist Party as the only true leader of anti-Japanese guerrilla resistance. Because the Communist Party had openly championed resistance to Japan, it had won the “hearts and minds” of a significant proportion of the rural population, an achievement that guaranteed that in the postwar world it could no longer be regarded by the Kuomintang (KMT) as merely a “rebel faction”. When the Nationalists precipitated a civil war with the Communists after Japan's defeat, it was only natural that the mass of the population in the formerly occupied areas supported the Communists, and it was this factor of popular support, as in most other civil wars, that contributed most to the communist victory of 1949.


2017 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Krcmaric

Why do some civil wars feature the mass killing of civilians while others do not? Recent research answers this question by adopting a ‘varieties of civil war’ approach that distinguishes between guerrilla and conventional civil wars. One particularly influential claim is that guerrilla wars feature more civilian victimization because mass killing is an attractive strategy for states attempting to eliminate the civilian support base of an insurgency. In this article, I suggest that there are two reasons to question this ‘draining the sea’ argument. First, the logic of ‘hearts and minds’ during guerrilla wars implies that protecting civilians – not killing them – is the key to success during counterinsurgency. Second, unpacking the nature of fighting in conventional wars gives compelling reasons to think that they could be particularly deadly for civilians caught in the war’s path. After deriving competing predictions on the relationship between civil war type and mass killing, I offer an empirical test by pairing a recently released dataset on the ‘technology of rebellion’ featured in civil wars with a more nuanced dataset of mass killing than those used in several previous studies. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, I find that mass killing onset is more likely to occur during conventional wars than during guerrilla wars.


2020 ◽  
pp. 363-410
Author(s):  
R. Alan Covey

Complementing the military and political narrative already presented, this chapter discusses the lack of progress made toward the Christian conversion of native Andeans by the mid-1500s. The first Spaniards in Peru not only failed to promote their missionary project, but proved to be bad Christians themselves. Andean lords, including many Inca women and men, embraced Christianity as a way to protect their noble status, but rural populations remained largely ignorant of Catholic doctrine, living on a landscape that friars and priests saw under demonic control. Rural conversion gradually proceeded after Spanish civil wars died down, and those missionary efforts reflected the changing Catholic orthodoxy being defined by the Council of Trent. Many of the priests fighting Andean idolatry blamed the independent Incas living in Vilcabamba, despite the growing diplomatic contacts that were defusing the threat that the Vilcabamba Incas posed to Spanish Peru. Rather than the Incas, it was young Spaniards and men of mixed heritage whose plots against royal officials threatened royal rule during the 1560s.


Author(s):  
Joseph Arthur Mann

Printed Musical Propaganda in Early Modern England exposes a relationship between music and propaganda that crossed generations and genres, revealing how consistently music, in theory and practice, was used as propaganda in a variety of printed genres that included or discussed music from the English Civil Wars through the reign of William and Mary. These bawdy broadside ballads, pamphlets paid for by Parliament, sermons advertising the Church of England’s love of music, catch-all music collections, music treatises addressed to monarchs, and masque and opera texts, when connected in a contextual mosaic, reveal a new picture of not just individual propaganda pieces, but multi-work propaganda campaigns with contributions that cross social boundaries. Musicians, Royalists, Parliamentarians, government officials, propagandists, clergymen, academics, and music printers worked together setting musical traps to catch the hearts and minds of their audiences and readers. Printed Musical Propaganda proves that the influential power of music was not merely an academic matter for the early modern English, but rather a practical benefit that many sought to exploit for their own gain.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard J. Blakemore ◽  
Elaine Murphy
Keyword(s):  

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