Human Factors Considerations of Undergrounds in Insurgencies is the companion volume to Undergrounds in Insurgent, Revolutionary, and Resistance Warfare, and the ARIS series answer to a different question. Where the companion asks how a clandestine organisation is built, this book asks why individual people join one, stay in it, radicalise inside it, and eventually leave. This page records what the document is, what it contains, where it came from, and links the full text hosted by The Resistance Hub.
| Full title | Human Factors Considerations of Undergrounds in Insurgencies |
| Series | Assessing Revolutionary and Insurgent Strategies (ARIS) |
| Publishing body | The United States Army Special Operations Command, Fort Bragg, North Carolina, with the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, National Security Analysis Department |
| Edition | Second Edition |
| Date | 25 January 2013 |
| First edition | Special Operations Research Office, American University, December 1965, as printed on the copyright page. The preface to this edition repeatedly calls the original the 1966 edition, so the document is inconsistent with itself on this point and both dates are recorded here. |
| Named staff | Paul J. Tompkins Jr., USASOC Project Lead. Nathan Bos, Editor. Preface to the second edition signed by Nathan Bos, Ph.D., and Jason Spitaletta, Laurel, Maryland, March 2012. First edition preface signed by Andrew Molnar. |
| ISBN | Not printed on the document |
| Pages | 398 pages in the hosted PDF |
| Language | English |
| Rights | Printed on the copyright page, verbatim: “This publication is a work of the United States Government in accordance with Title 17, United States Code, sections 101 and 105. Reproduction in whole or in part is permitted for any purpose of the United States government.” |
What this document is
This is the ARIS series treatment of the human domain. Its subject is not the underground as a structure but the people inside it: what conditions produce them, what makes an ordinary law-abiding citizen accept the risk of clandestine life, what holds a cell together once formed, and what eventually breaks it. The preface to the first edition, quoted in this one, states the problem plainly: in the desire to understand the broad characteristics of revolutionary movements, the study of the human element is often neglected.
The book is organised into an opening pair of chapters and then three parts. Chapter 2 sets out the conditions under which political violence becomes likely, working through economic deprivation, poor governance, absence of government legitimacy, marginalisation of identity groups, a country history of conflict, demographic youth bulge, exploitable primary commodity resources, and terrain. Part I then covers undergrounds as organisations, Part II covers motivation, and Part III covers underground psychological operations.
Three sustained case treatments carry the organisational chapters. The Provisional Irish Republican Army is used as the model of a regional insurgency, examined through its growth, command and control, its links between clandestine and open structures, and its criminal connections. Communist insurgencies are examined as an organisational type, including the chain of command between committee levels, the role of self-criticism sessions, parallel structures, and the infiltration and control of mass and front organisations. Al Qaeda is examined as a decentralised network. The leadership chapter runs a psychological profile of Ayman al-Zawahiri as a worked example of the profiling methods it describes.
The motivation chapters are the most distinctive part of the book, and the least well covered elsewhere. Chapter 5 separates reasons for joining, reasons for staying, and reasons for leaving, and treats leaving as four separate phenomena: defection, disengagement, deradicalisation and reintegration. Chapter 6 sets out mechanisms of group radicalisation, including radicalisation through isolation, under threat, through condensation or splitting, through competition for the same base of support, and through hate. Chapter 7 asks whether a disease model of psychopathology applies to insurgents at all, and largely concludes that it does not, while identifying emotional vulnerability, youth, personal or vicarious connection to a grievance, and humiliation as real risk factors.
Part III is the influence half. Chapter 8 covers insurgent use of traditional, broadcast and internet media, including insurgent-owned broadcasters and the specific uses of the internet for publicity, targeting, recruitment, training, fundraising and command and control. Chapter 9 is a full treatment of the psychology of influence, covering interpersonal influence, social identity, diffusion of innovation, rumour, message repetition and inoculation, cognitive dissonance, armed propaganda, reciprocity, and the role of narrative in justifying a movement. Chapters 10 and 11 handle nonviolent resistance and terrorism as the two ends of the tactical range available to the same organisation.
Human Factors of Undergrounds in Insurgencies: Abridged Edition
The ARIS study of how undergrounds actually function under pressure, abridged for practical use — retaining the analytical substance while removing the length that keeps most practitioners from reading it.
Contents
Eleven chapters in three parts, plus a glossary. Chapter descriptions follow the subsection headings printed in the document’s own table of contents. The book also repeats a table of contents at the head of every chapter, a deliberate choice to make it usable as a reference rather than a straight read.
| Chapter | What it covers |
|---|---|
| 1. Introduction | Underlying causes, and a road map to the three parts. |
| 2. Underlying Causes of Violence | Economic deprivation, poor governance, lack of government legitimacy, marginalisation or persecution of identity groups, a country history of conflict, demographic youth bulge, exploitable primary commodity resources and type of terrain. |
| Part I | Undergrounds as organisations. |
| 3. Organizational Structure and Function | Components of an insurgency, command and control, aligning structure with strategy, secrecy and compartmentalisation, organisational growth, underground and aboveground connections, criminal connections. Extended treatments of the PIRA as a regional insurgency, Communist insurgencies as an organisational type, and Al Qaeda as a decentralised network. |
| 4. Leadership | Transactional and transformational leadership, charismatic leadership in undergrounds, and four approaches to profiling leaders: trait and motivational, cognitive, psychodynamic and personological. Case study of Ayman al-Zawahiri. Targeting leaders. |
| Part II | Motivation. |
| 5. Joining, Staying in, and Leaving the Underground | Recruitment in rural insurgencies, PIRA recruitment of Republican sympathisers, campus recruitment, ideology including Qutbism, and affiliative factors. Reasons for staying. Reasons for leaving, split into defection, disengagement, deradicalisation and reintegration. Insurgent transitions. |
| 6. Group Dynamics and Radicalization | Social psychology of group conflict, social identity categorisation and salience, in-group formation, and the mechanisms of group radicalisation: escalation of in-group and out-group conflict, isolation, threat, condensation or splitting, competition for the same base of support, and hate. |
| 7. Psychological Risk Factors | Whether the disease model applies at all. Axis I disorders and lone-wolf attackers, Axis II developmental and personality disorders, suicidality and suicide bombers, emotional vulnerability, youth, personal and vicarious grievance, and humiliation. |
| Part III | Underground psychological operations. |
| 8. Insurgent Use of Media: Traditional, Broadcast, and Internet | Importance of media to insurgencies, traditional media, global broadcast media and the dilemmas it creates, insurgent-owned broadcasters, and the properties and uses of the internet for publicity, targeting, recruitment and radicalisation, training, fundraising and command and control. |
| 9. Psychology of Influence | Psychological operations, influence as a social process, interpersonal influence, social pressure and networks, social identity, diffusion of innovation, rumour, message relevance, repetition and inoculation, cognitive dissonance, persuasion techniques, armed propaganda, reciprocity and obligation, coercion against private belief, and narrative. |
| 10. Nonviolent Resistance | Objectives, techniques including attention-getting devices, noncooperation and civil disobedience, organisation, legitimacy through normative, mystical and consensual factors, communication and propaganda, training, riots and demonstrations with Colombia 1948 and Seattle 1999 as cases, and shadow government structure. |
| 11. Terrorism | Objectives of terrorism: disruption of the status quo, demonstration of strength, punishment and retaliation, maintenance of security through oaths and enforcing squads, and provocation. Considerations including unity of effort, franchising, suicide terrorism, target selection, surveillance and reconnaissance, rehearsal, execution, escape and evasion, and rationalisation. |
| Glossary | Defined terms used across the ARIS series. |
Provenance and lineage
The first edition was produced by the Special Operations Research Office at American University in Washington, DC. The copyright page of this edition dates that first edition to December 1965. The preface to the second edition instead describes the original as the 1966 book of the same name and refers to it throughout as the 1966 edition. The document does not reconcile the two, so this page states both rather than choosing one.
The preface gives an unusually clear account of the institutional line. SORO was established by the US Army in 1956. Through the 1950s and mid-1960s its social scientists and military staff researched political, cultural, social and behavioural questions in emerging nations across Asia, Africa and Latin America, including the first serious analyses of propaganda effects and the role of the military in developing countries. SORO published the Casebook on Insurgency and Revolutionary Warfare in 1962, Undergrounds in Insurgent, Revolutionary, and Resistance Warfare in 1963, and Human Factors in 1966. Its successor was the Center for Research in Social Systems. In 2009 the USASOC G-3X set out to recreate part of that lost capability and turned to the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, which is how ARIS began.
The second edition is candid about how much of the original it retains. Most of the text is new. Large sections of the first edition survive verbatim, mostly in the Chapter 3 study of Communist organisations and in parts of Chapter 5 on recruitment and retention, with smaller retained passages elsewhere. First-edition material is used without citation, while other SORO studies are cited normally. Chapters that reuse significant original material list SORO authors in the byline. Before work started, the second-edition co-authors and project lead Chuck Crossett met Andrew Molnar, first author of the original study, who agreed to his work being updated.
Named staff on this edition: Paul J. Tompkins Jr. as USASOC project lead, Nathan Bos as editor, with the preface signed by Bos and Jason Spitaletta at Laurel, Maryland in March 2012. John Shissler served as quality reviewer. Jerome Conley, Angela Hughes, Robert Leonhard, Kelly Livieratos and Summer Newton are credited as contributing colleagues. The volume opens with letters of introduction from LTG Charles T. Cleveland, then Commanding General of USASOC, and from Tompkins. The 1965 acknowledgments preserved in the front matter name the original outside reviewers, among them Jan Karski, the Polish underground courier who later taught government at Georgetown.
The copyright page carries the standard ARIS disclaimer: “The analysis and the opinions expressed within this document are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the positions of the U.S. Army or The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.” Corrections are invited by post to USASOC G-3X, Special Programs Division, 2929 Desert Storm Drive, Fort Bragg, NC 28310.
How The Resistance Hub uses it
This is the volume behind most of our writing on why people mobilise and what holds a movement together once the initial grievance fades. Chapter 10 is the doctrinal reference for our explainer on what non-violent resistance is, and its treatment of legitimacy and symbolism sits underneath our piece on why iconography matters in resistance movements. Chapters 8 and 9 on media and influence inform our coverage of the influence domain and of contested information space.
Read it against its companion, Undergrounds in Insurgent, Revolutionary, and Resistance Warfare, which covers the same subject as a structural problem rather than a human one. Terms used across both are defined in our irregular warfare and resistance glossary, and the full series sits in the ARIS archive.
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The document states that all ARIS products are available from USASOC at soc.mil under the ARIS link. For scholarly citation, prefer the official USASOC ARIS index as the canonical source. The copy hosted here is a mirror provided for readers who need the text immediately.
Sources used on this page: the hosted PDF itself, specifically its title page, copyright page, letters of introduction, preface to the first edition, preface to the second edition, acknowledgments and table of contents, read directly on 3 August 2026; and the USASOC ARIS publication index at soc.mil.
Every bibliographic field above is transcribed from the document’s own front matter. Where the document contradicts itself, as it does on the date of the first edition, both readings are recorded. Updated: August 2026.