PERSPECTIVE: Rural insurgencyIs the United States Heading for a Rural Insurgency?

The intrusions of white supremacist militias into cities to intimidate, and at times attack, protestors from the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement highlights the possibility of rural insurgency, Vasabjit Banerjee writes in Just Security. He notes that rural insurgencies range from week-long armed rebellions against local governments, law enforcement, and the wealthy to decades-long ones against subnational and national-level security forces, which seek to impose new revolutionary regimes. Many African, Asian, and Latin American countries have faced such insurgencies.

Banerjee writes:

In her book on white supremacist groups, Bring the War Home:The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America, Professor Kathleen Belew shows that the grievances of rural white militia groups center on threats to white racial supremacy that date back to the U.S. defeat in the Vietnam War. These have recently combined with fears of becoming a minority group due to changing demographics. The targets of such fears have shifted from primarily African Americans to include non-White immigrants. In conjunction with racial fears, other causes include anti-Semitism as well as perceived threats to Christianity from Muslims, who have replaced Catholics as antagonists. Some scholars have observed, however, that the militias do not constitute a cohesive movement, but have many groups with varied beliefs, broadly classifiable as anti-federal government control of lands, guns, speech, and other liberties.

Banerjee writes that although culture, economic or political grievances underlie such rebellions, a successful rebellion must overcome barriers such as availability of weapons, rebel organizations and leadership,  training, as well as funding from wealthy allies.

Banerjee notes that Mao Zedong allegedly remarked that rebels should inhabit their environment as fish in the sea, which was the case in mid-20th Century China with its rural hinterland where the vast majority of the population resided.

Twenty-first Century United States, however, has a mostly urban population. In a social media interaction with me, Professor Doug Thompson of the University of South Carolina mentioned that less than 2 percent of the American population lives in 100 percent rural countries, while most states have “roughly the same spatial distribution of partisanship,” which neither overlaps with traditional regions like the North, South, Midwest, etc. nor with urban/rural divides. Rather, what he terms the “new sectional conflict,” in a reference to antebellum regional divisions, could be centered in the exurban and suburban areas. In which case, the nearness to urban centers may mitigate conflict by facilitating pacification efforts, which may even deter insurgencies from breaking out, or worsen insurgencies because of the accessibility to high-value urban targets and populations.

Despite how the political geography of the United States ultimately shapes the nature of such insurgencies, however, the above-mentioned grievances, resources, and opportunities indicate that the preconditions for insurgencies are already present. Consequently, militia groups deserve more scrutiny from security forces and a unified political consensus to deter and suppress them in order to maintain peace and stability.