---
title: "Special Topics in Irregular Warfare: Understanding Resistance (ARIS)"
id: "9222"
type: "page"
slug: "aris-understanding-resistance"
published_at: "2026-08-03T21:55:30+00:00"
modified_at: "2026-08-03T21:55:30+00:00"
url: "https://theresistancehub.com/aris-understanding-resistance/"
markdown_url: "https://theresistancehub.com/aris-understanding-resistance.md"
excerpt: "Special Topics in Irregular Warfare: Understanding Resistance is the ARIS series’ introduction to itself. Ten short studies by fourteen contributors, each opening a subject the project judged important enough to name but not yet ready to treat at book length...."
---

# Special Topics in Irregular Warfare: Understanding Resistance (ARIS)

**Special Topics in Irregular Warfare: Understanding Resistance** is the ARIS series’ introduction to itself. Ten short studies by fourteen contributors, each opening a subject the project judged important enough to name but not yet ready to treat at book length. Several of them later became volumes in their own right. This page records what the document is, what it contains, where it came from, and links the full text hosted by The Resistance Hub.

// Document Record

| Full title | Special Topics in Irregular Warfare: Understanding Resistance |
| --- | --- |
| 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 | Not printed on the document |
| Date | Not printed on the document |
| Named staff | Erin N. Hahn, Editor. Contributing authors: Katharine Raley Burnett, David J. Danelo, Eric Dunford, James A. Gavrilis, Erin N. Hahn, Jameel Khan, Jesse Kirkpatrick, W. Sam Lauber, Margaret McWeeney, Summer Newton, Guillermo Pinczuk, Theodore Plettner, Joseph M. Tonon and Timothy Wittig. |
| ISBN | Not printed on the document |
| Pages | 270 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

The preface states the purpose plainly. Over the project’s first six years ARIS researchers had used the word resistance to cover a wide spectrum of actors who challenge existing social structures, and the term had started to carry more weight than it could bear. This volume covers the topics identified as important to understanding that spectrum, offers an introduction to each, and says openly that some of them will be studied in depth later. It calls itself a set of starting points.

That modesty is the volume’s strength. Because no chapter is defending a book-length thesis, each one states its problem, surveys what is known, marks the boundary where the evidence runs out, and stops. The result is the fastest way into the series for a reader who has not decided which question they care about, and a useful corrective for one who has, because several chapters explicitly contradict conventional wisdom.

The organising spine is developmental. The opening study by David J. Danelo works through the phases of contemporary resistance and proposes a construct for further research, a line of work that ARIS later took up and rebuilt in *Understanding States of Resistance*. From there the volume moves through the parts of a movement, then through the things a movement needs, then through what happens if it wins.

The strongest individual chapters are the ones about money and legitimacy. Threat finance is treated at length, on the argument that a spontaneous movement can emerge from a protest or a riot but sustaining and growing one requires time, patience and above all money, and that an adversary’s operational, strategic and financial dynamics are a single system. The companion study on the effect of external actor resources on the local economy is unusual in the resistance literature for taking seriously what large-scale outside spending does to the economy it lands in, using peacekeeping mission data from Kosovo, Burundi, Liberia and East Timor. The chapter on legitimacy sets out how a group earns or forfeits recognition, and the chapter on transition from resistance to governance notes how rarely a movement manages it, taking the American Revolution as the exception rather than the pattern.

Two chapters have since become subjects in their own right. Threshold of Violence became a standalone ARIS volume, and the chapter on information technology in insurgency prefigures the whole of *Resistance and the Cyber Domain*. Reading them here, in their compressed form, shows what the project thought the question was before it had the answer.

## Contents

A preface and ten studies, followed by a bibliography and an index. Titles below are the document’s own.

| Chapter | What it covers |
| --- | --- |
| Exploring the Phases of Contemporary Resistance | David J. Danelo. Why phasing matters to planners. Deconstruction of the existing literature and doctrine, including Mao’s three phases, and a proposed construct for further research. |
| The Public Component | The overt element of a movement, its relationship to negotiated settlement, and the finding that conflicts resolved by negotiation have historically been more likely to revert to violence than those resolved by military victory, set against the growth of negotiated settlement since 1990. |
| Interest, Identification, Indoctrination, and Mobilization: I3M | A model of insurgent participation developed by JHU/APL and USASOC researchers in 2013, distinguishing exogenous risk contributors such as poverty, inequality and political exclusion from the endogenous motivations that carry an individual into a movement. |
| Threshold of Violence | Why and when a movement crosses into violence, and why weak actors are pushed towards public displays of intent because they cannot make credible threats. Later expanded into a standalone ARIS volume. |
| Information Technology in Insurgency and Resistance Movements | How cheap, fast, long-distance communication changed recruitment, popular support, skills transfer and planning, and how opposing forces responded. |
| Threat Finance | How movements raise, move and spend money, and why financial dynamics cannot be separated from operational and strategic ones. Draws on the Taliban, al-Shabaab and drug-trafficking organisations in Mexico. |
| Effect of External Actor Resources on Local Economy | What large-scale external spending does to the economy receiving it, using fiscal multiplier estimates and UN mission data from Kosovo, Burundi, Liberia and East Timor. |
| How Resistance Groups Generate Legitimacy | Why legitimacy is contested for non-state actors in a way it is not for states, what standards the international community applies, and how indiscriminate violence forfeits recognition. |
| Transition from Resistance to Governance | Why successful transition to a governing authority is rare, what the scholarship fails to explain, and the American Revolution as the exceptional case. Includes the Taliban’s consolidation after 1989. |
| Internal Conflict and the Role of Outside Influence | How states use indigenous resistance movements to destabilise rivals, extend regional influence or force regime change, and why working through proxies became the preferred method after the Cold War. |

## Provenance and lineage

This is an original ARIS volume with no Special Operations Research Office predecessor, though the series page inside it records the SORO inheritance that shapes the catalogue around it. Its own lineage runs forward rather than back. Threshold of Violence, which appears here as a single study, later became a full ARIS volume. The phasing construct proposed in the opening study was reworked into [Understanding States of Resistance](/aris-understanding-states-of-resistance/)
. The information technology study grew into [Resistance and the Cyber Domain](/aris-resistance-and-the-cyber-domain/)
.

Erin N. Hahn is named as editor. Fourteen contributing authors are credited on the title page, several of whom carry the rest of the series: W. Sam Lauber went on to lead *Understanding States of Resistance*, Guillermo Pinczuk edited the Sri Lanka case study, Summer Newton worked on Colombia, and Jesse Kirkpatrick co-authored the I3M model that this volume introduces. The illustration credits record where individual figures were first published, including *Special Warfare Magazine* for the I3M figures and the Sri Lanka case study for the threshold of violence figures.

The research was carried out at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory by its National Security Analysis Department, described on the copyright page as a nongovernmental agency operating under the supervision of the USASOC Sensitive Activities Division. The standard series disclaimer applies. No edition statement and no date of publication are printed anywhere in the front matter. The volume’s own series page lists it under its full title, *Special Topics in Irregular Warfare: Understanding Resistance*, which is the form used throughout this page.

## How The Resistance Hub uses it

This is the volume we recommend to readers who want the shape of the field before committing to a single subject. Each study is short enough to read in a sitting and honest enough to say where the evidence stops. The threat finance and external resources chapters inform how we treat money in reporting, and the legitimacy chapter is the reference behind our coverage of how movements seek recognition. For the wider map, see [resistance core concepts](/resistance-core-concepts/)
.

Where a topic introduced here has since become a full study, we cite the later volume and use this one for context. That applies to [Threshold of Violence](/aris-threshold-of-violence/)
 and to [Understanding States of Resistance](/aris-understanding-states-of-resistance/)
. The chapter on outside influence sits behind much of our writing on [influence](/influence/)
 and state sponsorship. Definitions are recorded in the [irregular warfare and resistance glossary](/irregular-warfare-resistance-glossary/)
, and the rest of the series is indexed in the [ARIS archive](/assessing-revolutionary-and-insurgent-strategies-aris/)
.

## Download

[Download the PDF →](https://theresistancehub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/ARIS_UnderstandingResistance-1.pdf-1.pdf)
PDF · 2.5 MB · 270 pages · English

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](https://www.soc.mil/ARIS/ARIS.html)
 as the canonical source. The copy hosted here is a mirror provided for readers who need the text immediately.

// Editorial Standards

**Sources used on this page:** the hosted PDF itself, specifically its title page, copyright page, series page, preface, illustration credits 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 prints nothing, this page says so rather than inferring a value. **Updated: August 2026.**

Manage Consent

To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behavior or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.

Functional   Functional  Always active

The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.

Preferences  Preferences

The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.

Statistics  Statistics

The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.

Marketing  Marketing

The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.

- [Manage options](#)
- [Manage services](#)
- [Manage {vendor_count} vendors](#)
- [Read more about these purposes](https://cookiedatabase.org/tcf/purposes/)

AcceptDenyView preferencesSave preferences[View preferences](#)

- [{title}](#)
- [{title}](#)
- [{title}](#)

Manage consent