Counterinsurgency in China and India: an Introduction

In Insurgency and Counterinsurgency: A Global History, Jeremy Black argued that insurgencies should be studied, ‘without political blinkers, national prejudices, or conceptual and historiographical confusion’. As a military historian, Professor Black emphasized that insurgency was neither a new phenomenon, nor one confined to the concerns of Western powers. He was, however, writing in response to the majority of current studies in the field that seldom concern themselves with either pre-19 century history or the non-West except from a Western perspective. Of course, military theorists have taken an ahistorical view of insurgencies from at least the 16 century, so the current state of the field has a long, and scarcely recognized, tradition. Black is also not the first scholar to lament the lack of cultural awareness in studies of insurgency and will not be the last. He, at least, has a long record of arguing for, and writing about, the rest of the world in his many military histories. Studies of insurgency in the West have naturally been connected to ‘pragmatic’ concerns of current events and tend toward 20 century studies and Western interests. An edited volume, by Beatrice Heuser and Eitan Shamir, Insurgencies and Counterinsurgencies: National Styles and Strategic Cultures, has one or two chapters that look further back in history, but it is mostly about the 20 and 21 centuries, and mostly Western-centric. The Middle East and Afghanistan are longstanding interests of Western powers, as is, at least theoretically, modern China. The successful Communist Chinese insurgency, and Mao Zedong’s influential theoretical writings about insurgency, established a place for modern China in the security studies and political science fields that developed in the Cold War. Yet Mao and China have been abstracted from historical context in order to accommodate them to theoretical models that do not allow for cultural or temporal variables.