The Resistance Hub Podcast

Case Study: Revolutionary Warfare in Columbia

Four armed groups. Five decades. Hundreds of thousands dead. The Colombian conflict is the longest-running insurgency in the Western Hemisphere, and the ARIS case study on it is one of the most useful documents in irregular warfare literature precisely because Colombia doesn't fit a clean narrative. The leftist guerrillas didn't win. The state didn't decisively defeat them. Right-wing paramilitaries operated in collusion with the security forces. Drug money rewired the original ideological objectives of nearly every armed actor. And one group — M-19 — laid down arms and ended up writing the country's constitution. In this episode we walk through the USASOC ARIS Colombia case study and pull out what irregular warfare practitioners need: the political and historical conditions that made the conflict possible (La Violencia, the National Front, rural disenfranchisement), the comparative anatomy of the FARC, ELN, M-19, and AUC, the role of narco-finance in extending the conflict, and the Colombian government's long arc of countermeasures — including Plan Colombia and the paramilitary demobilization. Pairs naturally with our Cuba 1953–1959 episode for anyone tracking how the same analytic framework produces very different conclusions in different contexts. Source material: USASOC ARIS, Case Studies in Insurgency and Revolutionary Warfare: Colombia 1964–2009.

Case Study: Cuba

Batista's regime had a 30,000-man army, U.S. backing, and a relatively prosperous economy. Castro's 26th of July Movement started with a failed barracks attack, returned from Mexican exile with about 80 men, and never won a decisive military engagement. So how did this end with Batista on a plane out of Havana? In this episode we walk through USASOC's ARIS case study on the Cuban Revolution and pull out the parts irregular warfare practitioners actually need: the structural weaknesses that made Cuba combustible despite its prosperity, the division of labor between the Sierra Maestra guerrillas and the urban underground, and the deliberate strategy of provoking the regime into counterterror that gutted its own legitimacy. We also look at what came after — how a movement that recruited on a platform of constitutional restoration consolidated into a one-party Marxist-Leninist state within two years, and what that says about the gap between a revolution's stated program and its operational logic. Source material: USASOC ARIS, Case Studies in Insurgency and Revolutionary Warfare: Cuba 1953–1959 (revised edition).

State-Insurgent Strategic Competition

What if the most important battlefield in insurgency isn't a battlefield at all? What if it's a marketplace — one where states and armed challengers compete not over territory, but over who gets to govern? In this episode, we walk through The War Marketplace Framework: Insurgency as Competitive Governance, a contributing article by Moe Gyo that originally appeared on The Resistance Hub as a three-part series. The framework reframes insurgency as competitive governance provision under conditions of institutional failure, arguing that armed groups endure not because they fight well, but because they outcompete the state in delivering security, justice, public goods, and legitimacy to populations operating under coercion and uncertainty. Part One establishes the core model. Civilians are not spectators — they are constrained consumers allocating compliance based on which provider governs more credibly. Insurgents operate less like rebels and more like disruptive startups entering a stagnant monopoly, bundling violence within a broader governance offering. Part Two applies Porter's Five Forces to the war marketplace, examining how entry barriers, civilian bargaining power, supplier networks, substitute governance providers, and rivalry among armed actors create structural conditions that explain why some insurgencies regenerate endlessly, why others fragment into warlordism, and why certain conflicts resist decisive resolution regardless of military effort. Part Three gets into strategy — how states and insurgents manipulate the same five forces from opposite positions, why fragmentation prevents defeat but rarely produces victory, and why the most durable insurgent groups often face a brutal internal choice between governing well and surviving long. Whether you work in defense, security, conflict analysis, or policy, this episode challenges conventional thinking about why counterinsurgency campaigns fail and what it actually takes to collapse a rival governance market.

Case Study: The Rhodesian Insurgency

Two insurgent groups. Two competing Cold War sponsors. One battlespace. The Rhodesian Bush War offers something rare in the study of irregular warfare — a natural experiment comparing two fundamentally different approaches to unconventional warfare, playing out simultaneously inside the same conflict. In this episode, we walk through the United States Army Special Operations Command case study on the Rhodesian insurgency and the role of external support from 1961 to 1979, produced in partnership with the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory as part of the Assessing Revolutionary and Insurgent Strategies series. The study examines how the Soviet Union backed the Zimbabwe African People's Union while China backed the Zimbabwe African National Union, each exporting a distinct model of guerrilla warfare to their respective clients. We cover the full arc: the colonial roots and road to rebellion, Ian Smith's Unilateral Declaration of Independence and the international sanctions that followed, the organizational structures and strategies of both insurgent movements, and the external support networks that sustained them. At the heart of the analysis is a critical divergence — how the Chinese emphasis on politicizing and mobilizing the rural population through a Maoist people's war strategy ultimately proved decisive, while the Soviet model's military-first approach left its client organizationally weak when it mattered most at the ballot box. We also examine the Rhodesian Security Forces' counterinsurgency campaign, the role of neighboring states as sanctuaries and sponsors, and the pressures that finally brought all parties to Lancaster House in 1979. Key takeaways include the importance of tailoring external support to the local environment, the criticality of linking military strategy to political objectives, the role of structural conditions in shaping insurgent outcomes, and the cost of failing to achieve unity of effort among resistance movements. Essential listening for anyone studying unconventional warfare, foreign internal defense, or the mechanics of Cold War proxy conflicts in Africa.

The Power of Symbols: Why Iconography Matters in Resistance Movements

Some moments in an uprising transcend words — a raised fist on an Olympic podium, a sea of Guy Fawkes masks in a city square, a canopy of umbrellas pushing back tear gas. These aren't decoration. They're doctrine. In this episode, we break down three of the most powerful symbols in modern resistance and why they work, drawing on Gene Sharp's framework from 198 Methods of Nonviolent Action. We trace the raised fist from 1930s anti-fascist Spain and the 1968 Mexico City Olympics to Otpor's strategic branding in Serbia, Belarus 2020, and Iran's Woman, Life, Freedom movement. We examine the Guy Fawkes mask as the digital-age balaclava, anonymity as weapon, from Anonymous and Occupy Wall Street to Hong Kong's anti-mask law defiance and Nigeria's #EndSARS. And we look at the umbrella, perhaps the most poetic of all: an ordinary civilian object turned into shield, banner, and non-escalatory assertion of public space from Hong Kong to Myanmar. Along the way, we ask the harder questions: What happens when a resistance symbol is owned by a media conglomerate? How do movements defend their iconography from corporate appropriation and regime counter-messaging? And why, in asymmetric struggles where movements lose the battle of resources, can they still win the battle of meaning? Symbols are low-cost, high-impact, and they outlive the leaders who raise them. For anyone studying irregular warfare, influence operations, or the psychological terrain of modern conflict, this one's essential listening.