Analytical Studies & Frameworks
9 PublicationsUndergrounds in Insurgent, Revolutionary, and Resistance Warfare (2nd Ed.)
Analyzes the organization, security, and operations of underground movements, offering insights into how clandestine networks sustain resistance over time. The 2nd edition draws on modern case material and incorporates significant revisions to the original 1963 SORO study. Demonstrates that the underground is the structural element allowing a resistance movement to survive penetration, regenerate after losses, and sustain itself across decades, making clandestine network design the single highest-leverage variable in long-duration irregular warfare.
Human Factors Considerations of Undergrounds in Insurgencies (2nd Ed.)
Explores the psychology, recruitment, and group dynamics that drive individuals to join and remain active in underground movements. The 2nd edition draws on psychology, political science, economics, sociology, and organizational studies to update the original 1966 SORO publication. Establishes that recruitment, retention, and operational discipline in underground movements are governed primarily by interpersonal trust, perceived legitimacy, and the social cost of defection. Counterinsurgency strategies that ignore group psychology will misread both the movement and the population around it.
Legal Implications of the Status of Persons in Resistance
Examines how insurgents, partisans, and civilians are classified under international and domestic law, clarifying their rights, risks, and obligations. An essential reference for understanding the legal framework governing irregular warfare participants. Demonstrates that the legal classification of resistance fighters is shaped by the conduct of the movement itself, the policies of the occupying power, and the postwar political settlement. Legal status functions as an operational variable throughout the life of an insurgency.
Threshold of Violence
Examines how and why resistance movements transition from nonviolent protest to armed struggle, analyzing the factors that influence the decision to resort to violence. Provides a framework for identifying escalation indicators and understanding the tipping points of insurgency. Shows that the shift from nonviolent to armed resistance is most often a cascade triggered by state repression, internal factional pressure, and the closing of legitimate political channels. The regime’s own response is the most reliable predictor of when a movement crosses the threshold.
The Science of Resistance
Explores why resistance movements emerge, how they organize, and what factors shape their strategies and outcomes. Provides a framework for understanding resistance across a spectrum from nonviolent action to armed struggle, drawing on political science and organizational theory. Establishes that resistance is best understood as a continuum across nonviolent civic action, armed insurgency, and state-backed unconventional warfare. These modes share underlying dynamics of mobilization, organization, and legitimacy, and movements routinely move between them as conditions change.
Resistance and the Cyber Domain
Examines how resistance movements use cyberspace for communication, organization, and influence while also facing new vulnerabilities. Offers insights into narratives, operational security, and the evolving role of cyber operations in irregular warfare. Demonstrates that cyberspace is now an operational domain for resistance on equal footing with the physical and human domains. It provides reach, anonymity, and rapid mobilization while creating the most exploitable surface for state surveillance, disruption, and counter-narrative operations.
Understanding States of Resistance
Develops a phasing framework to explain how resistance movements emerge, grow, and decline. Integrates insights from law, economics, and political science to analyze their progression and outcomes across historical and contemporary cases.
Understanding Resistance
Introduces key concepts for analyzing contemporary resistance, from phases of mobilization to legitimacy, external influence, and the transition from movements to governance. Provides Special Operations Forces with conceptual tools for assessment in the field.
The Day After Overthrow: How the Behavior of the State and the Resistance Shapes Post-Overthrow Outcomes
Examines 69 cases of state overthrow since World War II, analyzing how the behavior of both governments and resistance movements shapes post-transition outcomes — from recurring civil war to stable governance. A data-driven framework for predicting post-conflict trajectories.
Resistance Manual & Pocket Guide
2 PublicationsResistance Manual
Provides a comprehensive guide to resistance theory, organization, and dynamics, integrating insights from political science and history to explain how movements form, sustain themselves, and adapt under pressure. Functions as the doctrinal synthesis of the entire ARIS program, distilling decades of case-study evidence into a single framework. The framework explains why resistance movements share the same underlying organizational, legitimacy, and operational logics across vastly different historical contexts.
Resistance Pocket Guide
Distills key concepts of resistance, insurgency, and unconventional warfare into a compact reference for military leaders and planners, emphasizing doctrine, phases of resistance, and critical factors for success. Designed for field use and rapid orientation.
Case Studies in Insurgent, Revolutionary & Resistance Warfare
12 PublicationsCasebook on Insurgency and Revolutionary Warfare — Vol. I (1933–1962) Revised Ed.
A survey of insurgent and revolutionary campaigns from 1933 to 1962, capturing early organizational patterns, strategies, and the influence of external actors. Originally produced by SORO in 1962 and updated under ARIS. Covers 23 insurgencies from the first half of the twentieth century. Establishes the comparative baseline for resistance scholarship by demonstrating that organizational form, external sponsorship, and population mobilization patterns are more predictive of insurgent outcomes than ideology, terrain, or technology.
Casebook on Insurgency and Revolutionary Warfare — Vol. II (1962–2009)
An examination of insurgencies from 1962 to 2009 across multiple regions, analyzing Cold War and post–Cold War dynamics in shaping movements and outcomes. Covers 23 insurgencies from the latter half of the twentieth century through the early twenty-first. Demonstrates that the shift from bipolar superpower competition to fragmented regional sponsorship transformed insurgent strategy, financing, and lifespan, and that movements which adapted to multipolar patronage outlasted those tied to single state sponsors.
Case Studies: Fostering Effective Counter Unconventional Warfare / Occupation
A study of resistance against Soviet and Russian aggression, distilled into lessons for designing counter–unconventional warfare strategies and national resilience. Examines how states and populations organize and sustain resistance against occupying powers. Shows that effective counter-UW depends less on military response and more on pre-crisis civil resilience, distributed leadership, and institutional preparation undertaken before occupation begins.
The Rhodesian Insurgency and the Role of External Support (1961–1979)
A case study of the nationalist insurgency against white minority rule, focusing on ZANU and ZAPU and the influence of competing Soviet and Chinese external support. Examines sanctuary, material aid, and diplomatic cover alongside Rhodesian Security Forces cross-border responses. Demonstrates that competing external sponsors can fragment a nationalist movement into rival factions, and that sanctuary states impose strategic constraints on insurgents that often outlast the war itself.
Colombia (1964–2009)
A case study of Colombia’s long insurgencies, examining the origins, structures, and strategies of groups such as FARC, ELN, M-19, and AUC, alongside government countermeasures and lessons for future conflict. One of the most complex protracted insurgency environments of the modern era. Shows how insurgent organizations evolve into hybrid criminal-political enterprises when they capture illicit economies, and how this transformation reshapes both their objectives and the counterinsurgency response required to defeat them.
Guatemala (1944–1954)
A study analyzing Guatemala’s revolutionary period, detailing the political, social, and military factors that contributed to instability and regime change. Documents the mechanics of the CIA-backed counterrevolution and how external intervention shapes insurgent outcomes. Demonstrates that small-scale external intervention can succeed against a weakly consolidated regime when it combines covert action with information operations, exile mobilization, and the manufactured appearance of internal collapse.
Sri Lanka (1976–2009)
A study of the protracted conflict between the Sri Lankan state and the LTTE, analyzing insurgent strategy, government responses, and the factors leading to the war’s conclusion. Covers both the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) and the JVP insurgencies in depth. Shows that an insurgency capable of fielding conventional forces, naval and air components, and proto-state governance is ultimately defeated not by counterinsurgency tactics but by a state willing to accept the political and humanitarian costs of total military victory.
Algeria (1954–1962) — Revised Edition
A case study of the Algerian War of Independence, highlighting FLN insurgent methods, French counterinsurgency measures, and the role of population mobilization. Examines the strategic cost of tactical victory and the political dimensions of decolonization warfare. Demonstrates that counterinsurgency tactics can succeed militarily while failing politically, and that the legitimacy of methods used against a population determines the strategic outcome more than their operational effectiveness.
Greece During World War II
An examination of the Greek resistance to Axis occupation, focusing on guerrilla operations, competing factions (EAM, ELAS, EDES), and the impact on liberation and postwar politics. Originally published by SORO in 1961 and updated under ARIS. Demonstrates how external sponsorship competition fragments resistance movements along ideological lines, and how the organizational structures built during occupation become the political fault lines of the postwar order.
Cuba (1953–1959)
A case study of the Cuban Revolution, tracing the rise of Castro’s insurgency against Batista and the strategies that enabled its victory — from the Sierra Maestra guerrilla campaign to urban underground operations and the political collapse of the regime. Shows that a small rural guerrilla force can topple a numerically superior regime when the incumbent loses elite cohesion, urban underground networks shift the population’s loyalty, and the security forces conclude the regime is no longer worth defending.
The Patriot Insurgency (1763–1789)
An analysis of the American Revolution as an insurgency, highlighting organization, foreign support, and the transformation of colonial resistance into independence. Examines how a colonial irregular force defeated a conventional military power through sustained asymmetric warfare. Demonstrates that an insurgency built on parallel governance, foreign alliance, and the strategic exhaustion of the occupying power can defeat a conventional military without ever defeating it on the battlefield.
The Relationship Between Iran and Lebanese Hizbollah
A study of the strategic, financial, and operational ties linking Iran with Hizbollah, underscoring the network’s role in regional unconventional warfare. Examines state-sponsored proxy relationships as a model for external support structures in irregular conflict. Demonstrates that a sustained state-proxy relationship built on ideological alignment, deep financial integration, and shared operational infrastructure produces a non-state actor with the strategic reach of a state and the political deniability of an insurgent.
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