The Science of Resistance (ARIS, First Edition, 2019)

The Science of Resistance is the ARIS attempt to say what four decades of academic social science actually establishes about resistance, and to put it in front of practitioners who will never read the underlying journals. It is organised around five questions rather than five topics. This page records what the document is, what it contains, where it came from, and links the full text hosted by The Resistance Hub.

What this document is

Most ARIS volumes describe how resistance works. This one asks what the research literature can actually support, and it is candid that the answer is often less than a practitioner would like. Each chapter is headed by a question that has generated decades of political science and sociology, and the stated aim is an intermediate introduction to the major findings and competing theories, written to explain rather than to distil best practice. Where there is no consensus in the field, the volume says so.

Chapter 1 does the definitional work, and it is the most consequential part of the book. It traces how the American military understanding of resistance began with the wartime European movements against Axis occupation, hardened into a definition that assumed a foreign occupier and armed action, and then broadened in two directions. The ARIS team’s own working definition, taken from the 2016 Conceptual Typology of Resistance, is that resistance is a form of contention or asymmetric conflict involving participants’ limited or collective mobilisation of subversive or disruptive efforts against an authority or structure. Three things follow from it: resistance is asymmetric, it requires mobilisation of more than one person, and it must be at minimum subversive and usually disruptive.

The reason for widening the definition is operational, not academic. The chapter argues that if Special Forces attend only to armed and violent variants, they become vulnerable to strategic surprise when a movement previously dismissed as nonviolent begins using force. The counterweight is that the definition must stay narrow enough to exclude groups of no strategic consequence. The chapter also records that when the ARIS team compiled the second volume of the SORO Casebook in 2012 they deliberately broke the original selection rule, which had required the use or threat of force, in order to admit revolutions achieved by predominantly nonviolent means.

The middle chapters take the questions in order. Why does resistance occur in some places and not others, answered through socioeconomic and ethnic grievance, demographics, regime type and governance, geography including conflict traps and mountainous peripheries, political opportunity, and international dimensions. Why do particular people mobilise, answered through the collective action problem, selective incentives, social networks, emotion and in-process incentives, humiliation, psychological risk factors, ideology, and micromobilisation. Why are some strategies chosen over others, which includes the transition from nonviolence to violence, protest cycles, repertoires of contention, and the effect of organisational structure, framing, territorial control and resourcing.

The last substantive chapter is the one most often skipped and most worth reading: why conflicts end. It separates civil war termination into rebel victory, government victory and negotiated settlement, treats recidivism as its own problem, and then breaks movement outcomes into eight distinct end states, of which only some are defeat. Facilitation, institutionalisation, establishment with the mainstream, co-optation, abeyance, radicalisation, exhaustion and repression are each defined and distinguished. A long appendix indexes roughly forty named theories used across the book, from abeyance and bad neighbourhoods to the loss of strength gradient and the political process model, so the volume doubles as a reference dictionary of the field.

Contents

Six chapters, an appendix of theories, a bibliography, an acronym list and author biographies. Chapter descriptions follow the subsection headings printed in the document’s own table of contents.

Provenance and lineage

This is original ARIS work rather than a revision of a Special Operations Research Office study, although its opening chapter is largely an account of how the SORO definitions were built and then outgrown. Its immediate predecessor inside the series is the 2016 Conceptual Typology of Resistance, whose definition it adopts. The PDF metadata still carries that earlier title in its document properties, which is a useful indication of how the file was produced.

The hosted file is not a finished production copy. The copyright page contains unresolved editorial queries and placeholders left in the text: a query reading “copyright notice for government work?”, ISBN fields printed as “####”, a query reading “doi/CIP data?”, and a citation template beginning “Cite me as” with the edition number and year unfilled. The ARIS series catalogue printed a few pages later still lists Science of Resistance as forthcoming. This is stated here because it affects how the document should be cited, not as a criticism of it: the text itself is complete and internally consistent, but the front matter was never finalised.

The rights position is unusual for the series and deserves care. Almost every ARIS volume prints only the Title 17 statement. This one prints the Title 17 statement and then adds, on the same page, “Copyright © 2019 by the United States Army Special Operations Command.” Both are reproduced verbatim in the document record above. Readers reusing the text should note the second line rather than assume the first stands alone.

Named staff: Summer D. Agan is lead author, with Jonathon Cosgrove, Robert Leonhard and Guillermo Pinczuk of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and Idean Salehyan of the University of North Texas as contributing authors. The acknowledgments record that Salehyan reviewed the draft and then wrote the International Dimensions section of Chapter 2 to close a gap he had identified, which is an unusually transparent note for a document of this kind. Paul J. Tompkins Jr. is the USASOC project lead across the series. The copyright page carries the standard ARIS disclaimer that the analysis and opinions are solely those of the authors.

How The Resistance Hub uses it

This is the volume we lean on when a piece needs to establish why a movement exists at all rather than how it operates. Chapter 2 supplies the structural conditions we look for in contingency assessments such as our analysis of resistance potential in Venezuela, and Chapter 5 is why our coverage treats a movement that has been co-opted or institutionalised as a distinct outcome from one that has been defeated.

Chapter 3 on mobilisation underpins our writing on civil resistance and on non-violent resistance, and its treatment of ideology and framing runs alongside our coverage of the influence domain. For definitions see the irregular warfare and resistance glossary, for the doctrinal counterpart see the Resistance Operating Concept, and for the rest of the series see 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.

Print edition