This Casebook was originally published by the US Army Special Operations Research Office in December 1962. As we developed the Assessing Resistance and Insurgent Strategies (ARIS) project and work began on the new Casebook, we determined that the studies within this volume are still important and relevant and thus this first volume should be republished. This volume covers roughly the first half of the nineteenth century through 1962.

In a 1965 letter to Newsweek, French writer and academic Bernard Fall (1926-67) staked a claim as the 'Number One Realist' on the Vietnam War. This is the first book to study the thought of this overlooked figure, one of the most important experts on counterinsurgency warfare in Indochina. Nathaniel L. Moir's intellectual history analyses Fall's formative experiences: his service in the French underground and army during the Second World War; his father's execution by the Germans and his mother's murder in Auschwitz; and his work as a research analyst at the Nuremberg Trials. Moir demonstrates how these critical events shaped Fall's trenchant analysis of Viet Minh-led revolutionary warfare during the French-Indochina War and the early Vietnam War. In the years before conventional American intervention in 1965, Fall argued that--far more than anything in the United States' military arsenal--resolving conflict in Vietnam would require political strength, willpower, integrity and skill. Number One Realist illuminates Fall's study of political reconciliation in Indochina, while showing how his profound, humanitarian critique of war continues to echo in the endless conflicts of the present. It will challenge and change the way we think about the Vietnam War.

Human rights offer a vision of international justice that today’s idealistic millions hold dear. Yet the very concept on which the movement is based became familiar only a few decades ago when it profoundly reshaped our hopes for an improved humanity. In this pioneering book, Samuel Moyn elevates that extraordinary transformation to center stage and asks what it reveals about the ideal’s troubled present and uncertain future. For some, human rights stretch back to the dawn of Western civilization, the age of the American and French Revolutions, or the post–World War II moment when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was framed. Revisiting these episodes in a dramatic tour of humanity’s moral history, The Last Utopia shows that it was in the decade after 1968 that human rights began to make sense to broad communities of people as the proper cause of justice. Across eastern and western Europe, as well as throughout the United States and Latin America, human rights crystallized in a few short years as social activism and political rhetoric moved it from the hallways of the United Nations to the global forefront. It was on the ruins of earlier political utopias, Moyn argues, that human rights achieved contemporary prominence. The morality of individual rights substituted for the soiled political dreams of revolutionary communism and nationalism as international law became an alternative to popular struggle and bloody violence. But as the ideal of human rights enters into rival political agendas, it requires more vigilance and scrutiny than when it became the watchword of our hopes.

Since the original publication of Undergrounds in Insurgent, Revolutionary, and Resistance Warfare in 1963, much has changed, but much remains relevant. The Internet, the globalization of media, the demise of Soviet Communism and the Cold War, and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism have all impacted the nature and functionality of undergrounds. The original study's observation, however, that for every guerilla fighter, there are from two to twenty-seven underground members is still true. Likewise, the report's main thesis--that the underground part of an insurgency is the sine qua non of all such movements--is demonstrably accurate today. This book examines the anatomy of undergrounds in various insurgencies of recent history. Our goal is to continue the groundbreaking work performed in the original study and update it with insights from the post-Cold War world. Primary source material for this book comes from the Tier I and Tier II Case Studies written as part of the Assessing Revolutionary and Insurgent Strategies project. Hence, these case studies should be used as companion documents for this study.