Understanding States of Resistance (ARIS)

Understanding States of Resistance is the ARIS volume that tries to fix the phasing problem. Every doctrine and every school of resistance studies has its own model of how a movement develops, most of them built from armed insurgency and most of them assuming the stages run in order. This study reads the phasing literature across law, economics, political science and social movement theory, proposes a five-state construct that works for violent and nonviolent movements alike, and then codes forty-six ARIS case studies against it to see whether it holds. 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

The study begins with a complaint. Practitioners need to know where a movement is in its development, because support to a movement in its incipient state looks nothing like support to one in open confrontation with the state. The models available to them do not travel well. Mao’s three phases, and the Army doctrine descended from them, describe an armed movement building towards a war of movement. That is one path among many, and a construct built from it cannot describe a movement that never arms, or one that stalls, or one that wins in a fortnight.

So the authors go outside the military literature. The review takes in legal scholarship on the continuum from lawful protest through insurgency to belligerency, economic work on the incentives to rebel, and political science and social movement theory on mobilisation, abeyance and co-optation. Early twentieth-century historians of revolution are given significant weight, on the grounds that their models were built before the Cold War narrowed the question to communist insurgency.

What comes out is a construct of five states rather than phases: preliminary, incipient, crisis, institutional and resolution. The choice of word matters. The first four are consecutive but a movement can revert to an earlier one, and a movement can enter resolution from any of the other four. The preliminary state is defined by unrest that is neither organised nor attributed, meaning the actors are unconnected and there is no shared story about who is to blame. The incipient state, alternatively called coalescence, is defined by the arrival of deliberate organisation and a common narrative. The crisis state is the escalated confrontation in which a movement proves itself a real threat that its opponent must answer. The institutional state is what follows survival of that confrontation, when the movement has a role in society.

The resolution state is the most useful part of the model, because it refuses to treat outcomes as a binary. Eleven resolutions are set out: decline, radicalisation, institutionalisation, repression, facilitation, success, failure, co-optation, establishment with the mainstream, exhaustion and a return to dormancy. Different resolutions attach to different preceding states, which is a testable claim rather than a taxonomy for its own sake.

Appendix A is the proof of concept and it takes up half the document. All forty-six case studies in both volumes of the ARIS Casebook on Insurgency and Revolutionary Warfare are coded according to their path through the construct, then grouped: intraelite conspiracies that resolve without a crisis, coups and popular revolutions with short crises and decisive resolutions, movements that pass through institutionalisation, organisations destroyed without being defeated outright, and failed crises followed by repeat attempts. The last group produces the study’s most quotable finding, that movements which survived a first failed crisis often succeeded in a second because the first had taught them how, so that what reads as failure at the time can be the thing that makes a movement work.

Contents

A single continuous argument rather than chapters, followed by the coded case studies. Section titles below are the document’s own.

Provenance and lineage

This is a first study rather than a revision, and it has no Special Operations Research Office predecessor. Its lineage is internal to ARIS: it is explicitly the successor to an earlier ARIS treatment of phasing, which it criticises for being limited to armed, violent, military-based movements, and it is designed to work alongside the ARIS conceptual typology rather than to replace it. The construct it proposes was subsequently taken up inside the series, most visibly in the ARIS Resistance Manual, which teaches the five states to the ARSOF soldier as the first step in assessing a movement.

The document names its own staff. Paul J. Tompkins Jr. is the USASOC project lead, as he is across the case-study set. W. Sam Lauber is the lead author, with Steven Babin, Katharine Burnett, Jonathon Cosgrove, Catherine Kane and Theodore Plettner contributing. Figure 1, the continuum from legal protest to insurgency and belligerency, is credited to Erin N. Hahn and W. Sam Lauber’s earlier ARIS volume on the legal status of persons in resistance, which is the clearest sign of where the legal half of the argument comes from.

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: the analysis and the opinions are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the positions of the US Army or the Applied Physics Laboratory. No edition statement and no date of publication are printed anywhere in the front matter.

How The Resistance Hub uses it

This is the volume we reach for when the question is timing rather than structure. When we describe a movement as incipient, or note that a crackdown pushed it into abeyance rather than ending it, the vocabulary comes from here. It pairs with The Science of Resistance, which explains why movements start, and with Threshold of Violence, which explains the decision that usually marks the crisis state. Where the structure of a movement is the subject rather than its stage, the reference is Undergrounds in Insurgent, Revolutionary, and Resistance Warfare.

The eleven resolution states are the part we use most in reporting, because they make it possible to say something precise about how a movement ended without forcing it into victory or defeat. Our survey of resistance movements uses that framing throughout, definitions are recorded in the irregular warfare and resistance glossary, and the wider field is indexed in resistance core concepts and 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.