ABSTRACT
This chapter examines predisposing factors of revolutionary guerrilla warfare, which create a revolutionary environment, and their relationship to precipitating factors, which act as a catalyst. Revolutionary war is mass based, class conscious, makes use of organized violence, and assumes the political system and its leaders to be illegitimate. The factors that create the revolutionary conditions span the range of the political, social, economic, and psychological. Land reform is often part of the program of revolutionaries, especially in countries where there is a “dispossessed” group of peasants who are “alienated from the fruits of their labor.” The distribution of wealth in general, as well as of land in particular, may entail comparable revolutionary possibilities. Predisposing conditions are necessary but not sufficient for revolution. This is similar to the distinction that Stanley Lieberson and R. Silverman Arnold make between the precipitating and underlying conditions of race riots.
