ABSTRACT
Insurgency has existed as long as people have used violence to resist states and empires but its strategic significance has ebbed and flowed throughout history, increasing when conventional war between great powers was unlikely and states were ineffective at defeating it. During the Cold War, nuclear weapons diminished the probability of direct warfare between the superpowers, leading them towards proxy conflict. Combined with the crumbling of European colonial empires and the political mobilization of the peasantry in many parts of the world, this increased the strategic significance of insurgency. The refinement of insurgent methods by the Chinese, Vietnamese, Algerians and others led to its ‘golden age’. A type of conflict that previously festered at the periphery of global statecraft then moved to the fore.
