Insurgents

Insurgency has occurred frequently since the inception of the international community. Civil strife raged in North America between 1774 and 1783: the fight between American settlers and the British colonial power (which today would be styled a ‘war of national liberation’, although the rebels were white, like the colonial power) lasted along time and wrought havoc; it ended with the victory of the rebels. Between 1810 and 1824 other rebellions broke out on the same continent, against Spanish and Portuguese rule in Latin America. Once again, the insurgents got the upper hand. In the nineteenth century a number of internal armed conflicts also erupted in Europe, yet the most important civil war of all took place in the USA between 1861 and 1865, and was attended by such appalling devastation and cruelty that the contestants regarded it as no different from a war proper, and consequently applied to it the bulk of the rules governing armed conflict between States. In the twentieth century internal conflicts were particularly serious, protracted, and destructive. The Spanish Civil War 1936-9 stands out for its magnitude and far-reaching repercussions. After the Second World War, conflicts broke out in some Western and socialist countries: in Greece (1946-9), in Hungary (1956), in Czechoslovakia (1968), in Turkey (1983 to the present), in the former Yugoslavia (1991-5 and 1998-9) and in Chechnya (1991-6 and 1999-2001). However, most major insurrections in modern times have tended to take place in developing countries.