In society, rebel groups are socially constructed as violent groups seeking political change in the government of a country. The motives for rebel groups are for social, religious and political inclusion of their ideas in the government. In the Western Hemisphere, developed nations are concerned about rebel groups in developing nations, especially located in the Middle East. Middle Eastern rebel groups, such as the Taliban and Al-Qaeda are notoriously known as Islamic extremists because of their radical beliefs against Western society. The constant threats of global terrorism by the rebel groups drives fear among the western world. Events that have affected Western societies by Islamic extremists are September 11th attacks and the Paris attacks. However, it is not only the Islamic extremists in the Middle East that are the most threatening to the world, but rebels groups in Africa cause several casualties …show more content…
It is important to care about Africa because it is the most forgotten continent by the Western world. Africa doesn’t have the same impact as the Middle East with western society’s dependence of natural resources, such as oil and minerals. It does not escape the issue that several African rebel groups severely abuse women and children, forcing them to become child soldiers and raped at young ages. Several of human right abuses caused by the rebel groups go unpunished. In order to gain attention by the government, the rebels control territories in resource-rich areas in return gain more power and rise to destabilize the order of the state.. Rebels have strategic goals in gaining attention by increasing their value in natural resources as rebels, to increase their influential value of capturing the state (Humphrey, 2005). The question that appeals to many researchers is how do rebel groups’ resources affect the government response to their
Rebel Without a Cause is an unconventional story with a conventional, classical approach to storytelling. The film follows the seven traits of Classical Hollywood Cinema and is adapted to the hybridization of film noir, which was primarily a style of B movies, and teen drama films, which was newly emerging in the 50s.
There was a war in Sierra Leone, Africa, from 1991 to 2002 where a rebel army stormed through African villages amputating and raping citizens left and right (“Sierra Leone Profile”). Adebunmi Savage, a former citizen of Sierra Leone, describes the reality of this civil war: In 1996 the war in Sierra Leone was becoming a horrific catastrophe. Children were recruited to be soldiers, families were murdered, death came easily, and staying alive was a privilege. Torture became the favorite pastime of the Revolutionary United Front rebel movement, which was against the citizens who supported Sierra Leone’s president, Ahmad Tejan Kabbah.
The consequences of Sierra Leone civil war are children like Ishmael and his friends “by pass villages by walking through the nearby bushes” (Beach 37). By hiding behind bushes and sneaking by villages that is how they “would be safe and avoid causing chaos” (Beah 37). This civil war consequences were having people not only to be living in fear but fear of being caught or be in a village that gets under attack. Another consequence was losing loved ones, friends, and neighbors. But the final consequence was turning children and teenagers into child soldiers. (word count
Organizing Insurgency by Paul Staniland, introduces the question, “Do resources like diamonds, drugs, and state sponsors turn insurgent groups into thuggish people or do they help build a more disciplined organization?” The reason this question is asked is because in some cases it suggests that “resource wealth encourages the degeneration of armed groups into greed and criminality” and other evidence shows that “external sponsorship and criminal activity can help leaders build organizations in the face of state repression” (p.142). This question is being presented because with different insurgent groups like the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) and the Hizbul Mujahidden, having very similar interactions with state sponsors, could have very different outcomes determining the fate of the insurgency. In looking at insurgent groups and how they operate, we are able to learn how some groups prosper while other groups fall apart.
The Red River Rebellion, lasting from 1869-1870, was a sequence of retaliations among the Metis and the Ontario settlers that led to the establishment of the provisional government by the Metis leader Louis Riel and his followers of the Red River Colony, in the modern day province of Manitoba. Many independent First Nations, Metis and Inuit peoples populated Rupert’s Land and the North-West Territory, but immediately impacted by the impending acquisition of Rupert’s Land was the settlement along the Red and Assiniboine Rivers. Pride and ignorance, the rebellion begins, mixed with physical and political battles with the goal of succession of the National Policy and the Metis long desired independent province.
After reading several documents written by Gardiner, Campbell, Sita Ram, Sayyid Khan, and Coohill, the main cause of the Sepoy Rebellion was that many Indians felt suspicious that the British were trying to undermine Indian traditions/society and replace it with their own.
For decades, Uganda’s economy has suffered through disappointing economic policies and instabilities. These setbacks have been put forth by a chronically unreliable government, leaving it as one of the world’s poorest countries. Uganda’s weak infrastructure and corrupt government are two of the primary constraints against a continuation of economic growth. Uganda has ongoing military involvement in the War on Congo, wrongly taking money from the already deprived country and into the war. Many villages in Uganda also have to waste their precious money and time in pursuit of hiding places. They are faced with a group known as, The Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). LRA is infamous for their twenty years of massacre and slaughter in Uganda, causing an estimated 1.5 million internally displayed persons. Several people are questioning why the LRA is still terrorizing the country and criticizing the government’s commitment to putting an end this horrific group. The Inspector General of Government (IGG) ...
Kurashigue argued that what contributed to the social and political factors that caused the 1967 Rebellion is the same factors that are being applied today. The policies and conditions that led to the 1967 Rebellion is very similar in what Black Detroiters are experiencing today through discrimination, urban renewal and police terror. Once you reflect on the events that led up to the Rebellion, there were two distinct perspectives from Whites and Blacks during this era. There was a conveying mix of sadness, tragedy, anger and regret that provide a deep sense of what White America felt it lost in the Detroit Rebellion of 1967. This deep sense of loss, in turn, informs what ex-Detroiters would like to bring back or take back. Today’s impulse
The acts of violence that were performed by rebels in Africa were horrific. Adults and children were murdered, mutilated, tortured, and raped. The Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in Sierra Leone performed despicable acts of cutting off a people's body parts with machetes to instill fear in the community. If you were working in the diamond mines and not performing up to the standards of the rebels you would lose a body part as punishment. Rebels would continue to do this from one village to another in order “to take control of the mines in the area” (Hoyt). It is estimated that in Sierra Leone that over 20,000 people suffered mutilation. The acts that the rebels performed to these innocent victims was clearly a violation to their human rights. The RUF collected 125 million a year to fund their war on the government and the people of Sierra Leone.
The Red Brigades were an Italian terrorist organization with a strong emphasis on Marxism. Founded in 1969 by radical left-leaning students Renato Curcio and his wife Mara Cagol, the Red Brigades’ objective was “to destabilize the country” and “to overthrow capitalism” with tactics that “included robberies, kidnappings, assassinations, and arson”. In order to fully assess the impact of the Red Brigades in Italy, it is necessary to answer the question: why were the Red Brigades so violent? The answer is not as black and white as solely a pure pursuit of communism – as the above source suggests – although that is undeniably a reason. Since the violence of the Red Brigades is closely linked to the history of Italy and the events leading up
In today’s world there are over a hundred rebel groups. Many of them are in foreign countries such as Afghanistan, Brazil, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Angola and Africa. Currently, there are approximately 300,000 child soldiers; roughly 40% are in Africa to sustain ongoing conflicts. Africa’s rebel groups are responsible for over 10,000 murders and for the abduction of more than 24,000 children in Uganda (Wessells, p. 363). One of the world’s most notorious rebel groups is armed with children and is run by a very dangerous man by the name of Joseph Kony in northern Uganda.
Mali is a landlocked country in North West Africa. It is bordered with Algeria to the South, Niger to the East, Burkina Faso and Cote d’Ivoire to the south and Senegal and Mauritania to the west. Modern day Mali is nowhere close to what it was at its peak in the 1300s. It was a flourishing empire, and one of the three empires that controlled trans-Saharan trade. It covered twice the size of modern day France, meaning around 1,500,000 kilometres square. However during the Scramble of Africa, France seized control of Mali making it a part of French Sudan. After the independence from the French, French Sudan became the Federation of Mali. However Senegal left, leaving Sudan occupying Mali. After a coup in 1991, Mali became an independent country. Now however, Mali is 1,240,000 Kilometres Square with a Gross Domestic Product of just 631 dollars per capita, compared to 43,185 dollars per capita in the United Arab Emirates. Mali has a population of around 14 million people. The southern part of Mali is more populated because it features the Niger and Senegal rivers. Mali’s prominent natural resource is gold. Actually it is the third largest producer of gold in all of Africa, but however the country is still poor. One of the arising problems in Mali, is humanitarian rights. The Tuareg rebellion, and a political upheaval generated by a March military coup led to a deterioration in respect to the human rights in Mali. After the occupation of the North, the respect to the human rights in Mali fell drastically forcing about 400,000 northern residents being displaced. Several armed groups, took control of territories in the North, and abused civilians. This abuse includes sexual abuse, looting and pillaging houses, and setting executions, rec...
In the book, Warlords: Strong-Arm Brokers in Weak States, the author, Kimberly Marten, analytically and theoretically examines past and present cases of warlords; looking at their rise to power, their effect on states, their relationship with internal and external state political leaders, and the common themes that stem from each case of warlordism. Throughout this book, Marten studies the impact of warlords through four different case studies, each pertaining to different time periods and regions: Pakistan’s Federally Administrated Tribal Areas (FATA), Georgia’s Upper Kodori and Ajara regions, Russia’s province of Chechnya, and the United States’ support of Sunni warlords in Iraq.
The presence and sheer abundance of valuable, easily extractable diamonds, that required neither vast financial investment nor excessively advanced mining techniques, provided an incentive for the control of diamond fields, leading to increased violence in the West African state of Sierra Leone. In 1991, ex-soldier and radicalist Foday Sankoh catalysed the rise of extremist violence by exploiting Sierra Leone’s amplitude of highly sought after diamonds, with their value one of the most significant on the market in the 1990’s . With the assistance of Charles Taylor, corrupt President of Liberia, the duo established a rebel army to overthrow Sierra Leone’s government – The Revolutionary United Front – but instead, capitalized on the ease of extraction of the greatly valuable resource. The release of RUF’s pamphlet “Footpaths to Democracy” revealed its initial goals to “no longer leave the destiny of [Sierra Leone] in the hands of a generation of crooked politicians and military adventurists.” However, the years following falsified majority of the promises of ‘democracy’ in Sierra Leone as RUF forces became ...
Nigeria, a country that exalts itself as the “Giant of Africa”, viewed by neighboring countries as “big in words, little in action,” has an opportunity to walk softly, but carry a big stick. Islamic terrorist group, Boko Haram, which operates in the northern states of Nigeria, has arguably gained control of the area and has incited fear in many of northern Nigeria’s citizens. Violence has spread like wildfire in parts of Nigeria, and people are asking, “is Nigeria capable of dealing with an insurgency of this level?”, and “If Nigeria is being significantly threatened by a group as loosely organized, but as deadly, as Boko Haram, what chance do we have to contain an insurgency?” Nigeria has the potential to be an economic powerhouse of Africa, which undoubtedly will influence other nations in the immediate area. This potential can be fully realized, and expanded upon, if Nigeria is able to deal with forces that aim to cripple it. This assessment will evaluate the internal threats that Nigeria faces, analyze the regional impact that Nigeria has on the continent of Africa, and demonstrate cause and effects.