Sen Keating, The Men of the West (courtesy of TCD Library)

Unconventional Warfare:
Guerrillas and Counter-Insurgency from
Iraq to Antiquity
Trinity College Dublin Centre for War Studies
The Printing House, Trinity College
6-7 March 2015

Programme
Friday, 6 March 2015
1.00-1.30

Registration, Tea/Coffee

1.30-1.45

Opening Remarks (Fergus Robson and Brian Hughes, TCD)

1.45-3.15

Civilians, Insurgents and Counter-Insurgency in the 20

th

Century. Chair: Anne Dolan (TCD)

Matthew Hughes (Brunel University) Terror in Galilee: British-Jewish
collaboration and the Special Night Squads in Mandate Palestine
Brian Hughes (TCD) The entire population of this God-forsaken island is
terrorised by a small band of gun-men: guerrillas and civilians during the Irish
Revolution
3.30-5.00

Guerrillas in Colonial and post-Colonial Warfare in the 19

th

Century.

Chair: William Mulligan (University College

Dublin)
Daniel Sutherland (University of Arkansas), American Civil War guerrillas
Guillemette Crouzet (Paris IV) Pirates, bandits and fanatics. Taxinomia and
violence as a tool of empire-building in the Persian Gulf (c. 1800- 1890)
5.00-5.30
5.30-7.00

Tea/Coffee
Keynote Address

Michael Broers (University of Oxford), Napoleons Other War: A watershed?

Guerrilla warfare in the age of Revolution & Counter-Revolution, 1789-1815 and
beyond.
2

7.30

Conference Dinner

Saturday, 7 March 2015

9.30-11.00

Guerrillas, Bandits and Counter-Insurgency in Early

Modern Europe. Chair: Joseph Clarke (TCD)

Fergus Robson (TCD) Insurgent identities, destructive discourses and militarised

massacre: French armies on the warpath in the Vende, Italy and Egypt
Tim Piceu (Leuven) Unconventional warfare and the origins of the Dutch
contributions system during the Dutch Revolt (1584-1609)
11.00-11.30 Tea/Coffee
11.30-1.00

Small War in Antiquity and the Medieval World. Chair:

Terry Barry (TCD)

Alastair Macdonald (University of Aberdeen), Good King Roberts testament?

Guerrilla war in late medieval Scotland
Brian McGing (TCD), Guerrilla warfare and revolt in 2nd century BC Egypt
1.00-1.15

Closing Remarks John Horne, (TCD)

Abstracts
Panel 1. Civilians, Insurgents and Counter-Insurgency in the 20 Century
th

Matthew Hughes (Brunel University), Terror in Galilee: British-Jewish

Collaboration and the Special Night Squads in Mandate Palestine'
This paper is an empirical study of how the British and Jews in Palestine in the
late 1930s collaborated to defeat Arab rebels. It touches on joint intelligence
gathering operations between the British Army and Jewish agents but the focus is
on joint military operations in the field, notably the Special Night Squads that
operated in Galilee in 1938. The British led the Jewish-manned Special Night
Squads with small teams of officers and soldiers; the idea for the squads came
originally from the unorthodox British officer, Orde Wingate. Wingate and the
Special Night Squads are generally well covered in the literature. The originality
of this paper comes from its dissection of how the British brutalised Jewish
troops by training them in well-established British counter-insurgency methods
that targeted whole villages close to rebel attacks. Away from the control of the
usual British military chain-of-command, the Special Night Squads became
especially brutal in their dealings with Palestinians, an operational method
readily absorbed by the many Jewish soldiers who served in the unit under
British command. Through its examination of the Special Night Squads, this
paper opens up wider issues of how imperial powers collaborate with loyalist
colonial minorities, of how they use of irregular forces in pacification campaigns,
and how post-colonial regimes carried over methods of control from the imperial
era.
Brian Hughes (TCD), The entire population of this God-forsaken island is
terrorised by a small band of gun-men: guerrillas and civilians during the Irish
Revolution.
One of the cornerstones of the traditional nationalist narrative of the four
glorious years of the Irish Revolution (c. 1918-1922) is majority public support
for the Irish Republican Armys guerrilla campaign. It was accepted then, and
widely accepted since, that the success of their guerrilla war depended on the
support of the public, offered either actively or passively. Reports from
government and police officials, however, continually emphasised that the public

were terrorised by a few men with guns and that most nationalists were
moderate, if easily frightened, and in favour of dominion home rule and peace.
This paper will question these competing narratives by exploring guerrilla
attempts to discourage, stifle, and punish dissent among the civilian population,
and the actions by which dissent was expressed or implied. An examination of
low-level, everyday (and mostly non-violent) acts of defiance and punishment
will show that civilian interaction with the IRA was far more fluid than is usually
allowed. While the everyday acts of resistance discussed here could be
inconsequential in isolation, their cumulative effect was important. To achieve
hegemony over local populations, guerrillas had to punish even small acts of
dissent and ensure that they were not repeated. It will be seen that the nature of
this punishment was dictated by the perceived seriousness of the offence and,
more importantly, by local conditions.
Rather than fitting in to one of two neat categories, civilians generally operated in
a substantial, often vague, middle ground. As will be argued here, it was not
necessarily loyalty and ideology that motivated the actions or inactions of most
civilians, but rather concerns about their personal and economic welfare.
While the assumption that the IRA relied on the support, either active or passive,
of the general population is to a large extent true, it oversimplifies or misses
many of the complexities inherent in the local relationships between civilians and
guerrillas complexities that are not unique to the Irish case.

Panel 2. Guerrillas in Colonial and Post-Colonial warfare in the 19 Century

th

Daniel Sutherland, (University of Arkansas), American Civil War guerrillas

The guerrilla conflict spawned by the American Civil War is often misunderstood
as a purely military phenomenon. In point of fact, while Confederate guerrillas
could pose serious threats to Union communications, supply lines, and small
units of soldiers, their over-arching purpose was to defend the people and
property of their communities against invading armies and disagreeable
neighbours. Both sides organized irregular bands in the South for that very
purpose,

although

rebel

guerrillas

easily

outnumbered

their

Unionist

counterparts in most places. People spoke not so much of preserving the Union
or winning Confederate independence as they did of home protection.

Of equal note, with most guerrillas acting on their own hook, acknowledging
no rules or regulations that might restrain them, they too often treated noncombatants with a ruthlessness and cruelty that made them more outlaw than
irregular soldier. Appalled by this brand of uncivilized warfare, the Union
army began to treat captured rebel guerrillas as marauders or brigands, an
action. However, that only added to a vicious cycle of retaliation and counterretaliation.

As a consequence, the entire war became far more brutish than

anyone could have imagined at the onset of hostilities.

Guillemette Crouzet, (Paris IV) Pirates, Bandits and Fanatics: Taxinomia and
violence as a toll of empire-building in the Persian Gulf (c.1800-1890).
This paper seeks to explore an important episode of the Persian Gulf history,
related to the two first British interventions in this space in 1809 and 1819 against
what was called Gulf piracy or the Gulf pirates. It will describe how the
Bombay Presidency justified from British India the two violent expeditions
against Ras el Khymah and other port cities of the Persian and Arabian shores by
creating a rhetorical frame permeated with violence against the populations of
the Gulf. Called from the end of the 19th pirates or bandits, the Qawasimis and
other populations of the Gulf were accused of leading a violent warfare against
Anglo-Indian commercial and political interests in the Gulf and of being
enemies of all mankind by restricting the access to this main water highway.
This paper will describe the invention by the British of a Qawasimi violence
and piracy and of practises of warfare against British and Anglo-Indian ships. It
will highlight that this invention served as a justification and rested upon a deep
misunderstand of Gulf societies. Finally, this communication will highlight how
to an imaginary piratical warfare, the British answered by a two violent armed
interventions which led to the slow enforcement during the long 19th century of
Anglo-Indian rule in this space.
Keynote Address: Michael Broers (University of Oxford) Napoleons Other
War: A watershed? Guerrilla warfare in the age of Revolution & CounterRevolution, 1789-1815 and beyond.
The vast European conflagration sparked by the French Revolution of 1789 and
fanned by the Revolutionary-Napoleonic wars raged for over a generation, and
engulfed almost all of Europe and Latin America. In a plethora of contexts, and
for a multitude of complex, often highly localised reasons, the policies imposed

by the French revolutionaries and Napoleon, within France and beyond, as

French domination spread, produced popular, overtly counter-revolutionary
revolts and local risings of less markedly political character, but equally opposed
to many the reforms of the new regimes. As the wars intensified, and the new
phenomenon of mass conscription was imposed on bewildered communities,
open rebellion evolved into guerrilla warfare, which was itself often, but not
always, rooted in atavistic social and economic forms of banditry and smuggling.
This period, which saw the birth of mass mobilisation, of warfare waged on a
scale hitherto unheard of ( if hardly that of total war as it has become
fashionable to assert), ironically also saw the emergence of the guerrilla on an
equally unprecedented scale. Indeed, the nomenclature, itself, derives from the
Napoleonic invasion of Spain.
That the name now ubiquitously used to describe irregular warfare dates from
these wars is not without significance. Although the scale and, eventually, the
conduct of the French-Revolutionary wars was unprecedented, its mass armies
and holistic approach to the organisation of war efforts, were meant to be
deployed in support of conventional warfare; the political and military leaders of
the period envisaged warfare in eighteenth century terms, which, on a reading of
Clauswitz, had scant comprehension of the nature of the beast. Militarily, most
commanders were taken aback by its appearance, and disgusted by its
manifestations. Politically, the revolutionaries were baffled, infuriated and,
ultimately, driven to gross acts of atrocity, by the spectre of popular resistance
directed against their self declared armies of liberation. Guerrilla resistance was,
as a result, vilified as Manichean conspiracy or castigated as simple criminality.
The realities were, of course, more complex, but also, as often as not, a blend of
these extremes. Even the regimes allied against France often blanched at the
prospect of popular resistance of a lawless, uncontrollable character, however
loyal the protagonists claimed to be to the old order.
The Revolutionary-Napoleonic period represents a flowering of guerrilla
warfare, as the refinement of popular resistance to avowedly populist regimes,
across the western world. It had many roots, many diverse contexts, but almost
everywhere, the same target: the work of the French Revolution. Its prolonged
nature gave it remarkable shape and form in many places. It is this set of
contradictions, underlain by a remarkable uniformity, that this paper seeks to
explore.

Panel 3. Guerrillas, Bandits and Counter-Insurgency in Early Modern Europe.

Fergus Robson (TCD), Insurgent identities, destructive discourses and
militarised massacre: French armies on the warpath in the Vende, Italy and
Egypt
The paper will examine French discourses and practices around the repression of
insurrection in the Vende, Italy and Egypt between 1793 and 1801. What it
intends to demonstrate is that the tactics employed by the state and military,
differed very little despite the distance in place and period, not to mention the
insurgents identities or programmes. This is evidence that the over-riding
motivation was the re-establishment of order and that once civilian populations
had begun to resist the state, they were seen as having placed themselves outside
the norms of warfare. This negated their right to be treated as either noncombatants or regular combatants, placing them and their communities in a grey
area which allowed for atrocity and massacre in a manner that was
uncharacteristic of warfare at the time.
Evolving perspectives on combatant-status and atrocity will be analysed through
discourses among soldiers, commanders, politicians and the civilian and military
press. A qualitative analysis of military action will examine specific examples of
massacre and atrocity to gain a more fine-grained insight into the dynamics of
violence unleashed by guerrilla war and insurrection. Finally a relatively loose
quantitative approach will be used in an attempt to test the hypothesis that the
individual theatre of conflict mattered little. Whether within Revolutionary
France, in Christian Europe or in the Islamic Middle-East, the scale of massacre
and destruction wreaked by soldiers faced with unconventional war depended
more upon the scale of the conflict rather than any sense of culpability, duty to
humanity or identification with the insurgent forces and the population from
which they hailed.
Tim Piceu (Leuven), Unconventional warfare and the origins of the Dutch
contributions system during the Dutch Revolt (1584-1609)
The successful Spanish reconquista of the major rebellious cities in Flanders and
Brabant (1584-85) by Alexander Farnese did not bring peace to these provinces.
Based in frontier towns such as Ostend and Sluis, which were held by the Dutch,
the so-called vributers (freebooters) penetrated deep into Flanders and Brabant to

wage guerrilla warfare. This paper investigates who the freebooters were, it
describes their actions and their impact on life and the economy in the front
region, and it discusses the largely unsuccessful stratagems developed by
both the Spanish and the Dutch to control this very fluid aspect of early modern
warfare. It is shown how freebooters suddenly disappeared from the war scene
early in the 1590s to be replaced by a full-fledged contributions system run by
Dutch civil servants. This contributions system changed life and power relations
in the front region and beyond and altered the course of the conventional war
leading up to the battle of Nieuwpoort (1600) and the siege of Ostend (16011604).
Panel 4. Small Wars in Antiquity and the Medieval World
Alistair Macdonald, (Aberdeen), Good King Roberts Testament? Guerrilla War
in late medieval Scotland
There is a strong belief in both academic and popular historiography that
Scotland owed the preservation of its medieval independence to the adoption of
a military template stipulating what might be termed guerrilla warfare to
combat an enemy (the English) clearly more powerful in conventional terms. The
argument goes that the Scots embarked on a conventional military defence when
invaded by Edward I in 1296, but that after their rapid defeat and the conquest of
the kingdom they turned to other techniques, developed first by Sir William
Wallace and perfected thereafter by King Robert I the Bruce. A martial legacy
was passed on beyond this kings death and the military behaviour of the Scots
was strongly conditioned by his example throughout the later medieval period.
The present paper seeks to investigate this conception in more detail. Key aspects
of what are taken to be the Brucean mode of war will be examined. Avoidance of
battle and the related techniques of scorched earth and slighting of fortifications
on home soil to deny their use to the enemy will be considered. Attention will
also be paid to those combat techniques deployed by the Scots that might seem
analogous to guerrilla warfare: rapid marches, ambush, surprise and trickery.
The extent to which Scottish military forces can be seen as unconventional will
also be examined by looking at social class, training, equipment and reward
mechanisms. Finally, some consideration will be given to the ethics of war. Was
savagery and atrocity more practiced by the Scots than their foes, and can this be
related to a Scottish war effort that was irregular in nature? It will be argued

that for each of these categories the demarcations between conventional and
unconventional warfare are blurred. It will be suggested that in medieval
warfare generally clear, binary divisions between regular and irregular personnel
and activity are impossible to maintain. Nonetheless, it will be suggested that
nuanced and careful exploration does allow us to note particularities, based on
the specific circumstances facing them, in the Scots practice of war in the later
middle ages.
Brian McGing (TCD), Guerilla warfare and revolt in 2nd century BC Egypt
Ancient empires, whether Greek or Roman, have tended to receive a good press
from classical scholars (who mostly come from countries with an imperial past).
Any admiration we may have for the Ptolemaic regime in Egypt was clearly not
shared by many of the native inhabitants, who revolted regularly throughout
Ptolemaic history for a variety of disputed reasons. The best known of these
revolts, the Great Revolt of the Thebaid, lasted for some twenty years (207-186
BC). It is usually presented as a war, with rebel forces confronting government
forces, winning and losing territory. But in the first description of guerilla
warfare that we have from the ancient world, Polybius (14.12) points the way to a
different interpretation of what happened. The situation in Ireland from 19181922 also suggests different lines of investigation.

Jacques Callot, Les misres et les malheurs de la guerre (Paris, 1633) (courtesy of TCD Library)

10