ABSTRACT
The great upsurge of guerrilla warfare in the 1950s and 1960s was reflected in the hundreds of books and thousands of articles devoted to the strategy and tactics of wars of national liberation, foci, revolutionary warfare, the advantages of the rural over the urban guerrilla, and vice versa. Most of this new body of doctrine emanated from Latin America and was left wing in inspiration. There were heated polemics about the "correct approach," about "subjective" and "objective" conditions, about the place of the vanguard, and the role of the masses in the struggle. But the number and even the quality of books produced was not necessarily an indicator to the efficacy of the movements sponsoring them. Some of the most protracted and bloody guerrilla wars such as those in Algeria, the Middle East or Ulster, produced few theoretical reflections on the subject. The Kurds fought for twenty years and knew all there was to know about guerrilla warfare even though they probably never read a book on the subject. If they were defeated in the end, it was not because of any doctrinal shortcomings. Conversely some guerrilla movements, which barely functioned, were very strong on doctrine. Broadly speaking the more remote the Marxist-Leninist inspiration, the more limited was the interest in ideological disputations. This is not to say that all the theoretical writings were innovative: most of the literature presented variations on the same theme.
