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Street Gangs: the New Urban Insurgency
As input to the question of whether the violence in France, Denmark etc. is due to social failures or Islamacist aspirations, I highly recommend the Army War College article linked here.
The author is:
the General Douglas MacArthur Chair and Professor of Military Strategy at the U.S. Army War College. He is a retired U.S. Army colonel and an Adjunct Professor of International Politics at Dickinson College. He has served in various civilian and military positions, including the U.S. Army War College, the U.S. Southern Command, and the Defense Intelligence Agency. Dr. Manwaring is the author and co-author of several articles, chapters, and reports dealing with political-military affairs, democratization and global ungovernability, and Latin American security affairs.
Manwaring's analysis is dense but worth the read. This sort of insurgency isn't limited to Muslim ghettos in Europe - the MS-13 gang has targetted US police for assasination, for instance, and a number of Mexican cities are no longer effectively under police control. We'll be seeing more of this sort of thing in the near and mid-future, I fear.
Brief excerpt from the intro: |
Although differences between gangs and insurgents regarding motives and modes of operations exist ... gang phenomena are mutated forms of urban insurgency. In these terms, these ânewâ nonstate actors must eventually seize political power to guarantee the freedom of action and the commercial environment they want. The common denominator that can link the gang phenomenon to insurgency is that some third generation gangsâ and insurgentsâ ultimate objective is to depose or control the governments of targeted countries...
This is a ... problem that must be understood on three distinct levels of analysis:
first, the gangs phenomena are generating serious domestic and regional instability and insecurity that ranges from personal violence to insurgent to state failure:
second, because of their criminal activities and security challenges, the gangs phenomena are exacerbating civil-military and police-military relations problems and reducing effective and civil-military ability to control the national territory;
and, third, gangs are helping transitional criminal organizations, insurgents, warlords, and drug barons erode the legitimacy and effective sovereignty of nation-states .
Posted by: lotp 2005-11-06 |
