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Academic Insights for the Thinking World

  • Author: David Brenner

Revolutionary Music and the Social Fabric of Rebellion

Rebels are central actors in civil wars. However, their perspectives and lifeworlds remain little understood. In fact, many studies on civil war suffer from what Ranajit Guha criticised as the “prose of counterinsurgency”: scholars often infer the logic of rebellion from second-hand accounts, many of which are produced in the interest of state power. Insofar as scholarship has been interested in the rebel perspective, it mostly focuses on the strategic calculus of revolutionary elites.

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