Since Operation 1027, Myanmar's civil war has continued despite significant resistance gains. China-brokered ceasefires under the Haigeng Agreement process collapse repeatedly, no party achieves decisive advantage, and fighting persists at a bounded level of intensity. This article offers one way to read that pattern: managed stalemate, a civil war configuration in which a regional power's interventions - originating in the prevention of potential regime collapse - reproduce bounded conflict rather than facilitating settlement. Drawing on IISS conflict mapping and ACLED data, it specifies three structural conditions for managed stalemate's emergence and distinguishes the concept from proxy war, frozen conflict, and failed mediation.
British small wars before the twentieth century were generally understood as purely military conflicts involving military tactics against the indigenous. In India's Northeast frontier, during the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century, the British launched small wars, a combination of military and non-military measures, which included money allowances and gift exchanges. This paper probes both the military and non-military aspects of these, especially the latter, which scholarship on small wars has tended to disregard.
My main thesis in this paper is that history, geography, culture and political cleavages played a vital role in the 'Greek entanglement' of the 1940s and in the insurgencies of the period. Greek 'Andartiko', ie the guerrilla movement against the Axis forces (1941-44), was based in a long established tradition of violence, in local and family ties and in certain networks of power (found mostly in the mountainous regions of the country). From this point of view counter-insurgency policies adopted by the Germans, as well as those later in the Civil War of 1946-49 by government forces, were based on the assumption that the social base of the insurgents was the typical mountain community (chorio). It was not an easy task fighting Andartes (Greek resistance fighters) under these conditions. The condition of war lasted almost an entire decade and the experience of Andartiko transformed ultimately Greek society in an unprecedented way.
As comparative analyses of irregular warfare have shown, two of the principal means of deciphering forms of degenerated, irregular warfare are the participation of women and the persecution of unarmed civilians. To unravel the nature of irregular warfare in post-civil war Spain, the present paper will combine these emphases, focusing upon the changing roles of women who found themselves in the middle of the theatre of operations between 1939 and 1952, in the war between the Spanish Francoist state and the guerrillas. This 'little' war generated praxis, in which some women decided to become involved, or into which they were dragged, more specifically praxis of control, violence, adaptation or resistance. Lacking clear rules, irregular warfare imposes itself as a space of constant and daily management of legal, political and personal securities and insecurities, thus blurring the boundary between the public and the private. By addressing some individual cases - which range from active resistance, attempts by state forces to enforce reproductive control, effective or forced collaboration, renunciation of the guerrillas, torture and death - this paper will analyse, through the centrality of guerrilla and counter-guerrilla praxis linked to women's agencies, the dimensions and scales of irregular warfare in Spain.
Materially superior states often achieve battlefield dominance without securing favorable political outcomes. Prevailing coercion theory assumes that sustained force compresses adversary options toward political decision. This article argues that coercion depends on the structure through which it propagates. In multiplex systems characterized by overlapping and partially autonomous political, societal, and external networks, escalation generates relational movement rather than compression. Large-scale mechanical escalation tends to activate and synchronize these dimensions, hardening coalitions and sustaining resistance despite material losses. Irregular approaches to conflict can be understood as attempts to control this movement. Rather than seeking decisive compression through scale, calibrated and limited-footprint strategies aim to disrupt adversary capacity while minimizing synchronized activation across elite, societal, and external domains. Through structured comparison of Vietnam and the Malayan Emergency, the article demonstrates that battlefield superiority can coexist with political stalemate when escalation amplifies relational movement, and that strategic effectiveness depends on managing this movement rather than maximizing material destruction.
