markfiend wrote:Quiff Boy wrote:"pompous and impenetrable"
tbh most academic texts are written that way. it's infuriating, exclusive and perpetuates the detached, navel-gazing, ivory-tower elitist reputation of academia.
Indeed. As far as I can tell it's a bunch of academic jargon with semantic content approaching zero.
Yep, all of that. However, there appeared to be some specific references in there, and a search turned up the following. I'll include the link at the bottom so your heads can hurt even more.
The strategic interaction thesis: "According to this thesis, the interaction of the strategies actors use during a conflict predicts the outcome of that conflict better than competing explanations. If … when actors employ similar strategic approaches … relative power explains the outcome … when actors employ opposite strategic approaches … weak actors are much more likely to win…."
Just as pompously written, but the short version is, when groups in violent conflict use the same strategies as each other, the more powerful group will usually win, but when they use opposite strategies to each other, the weaker group will usually win. Don't ask me to back that up, I'm just the messenger. However, it gives the example of Russian military force failing to quell Afghan guerrillas. When you look at it like that, it starts to make some sense.
Here's the link I took that quote from
http://www.socialaffairsunit.org.uk/blo ... 001074.php
In this context, asymmetrical contests = conflicts where one group is more powerful than the other.
A structural perspective is one that sees a system in terms of the sum and interaction of its parts rather than each part individually eg an arm doesn't work independently of a body - you have to see the body as a whole system and understand how all its parts interact.
http://www.hemantjha.in/content/3/struc ... ition.html
I
think the passage you originally quoted is saying that applying the same argument to a case where the state comes into conflict with an unarmed population, it might seem to follow that the unarmed population could win; but you have to look at the situation as a whole and realise that, for instance, if the state has guns and the unarmed population is, well, unarmed, there might just be an advantage there that makes any amount of "opposite strategy" a bit redundant.
Hopefully that helps. (And hopefully I've got it right!)
Any more of that and we'll be round your front door with the quick-setting whitewash and the shaved monkey.
... I'm currently training my English for the next interpreter's job at a conference reading through stuff written by the lecturers ... 
... so far so fine, but this sentence goes way beyond my understanding ... I don't 
... still for me, it's an interesting read ... mostly.
)
you might be right.
...