Several aspects of this definition are particularly important to note. First, insurgents engage in a range of activities, most notably guerrilla warfare, but also political mobilization and attendant efforts to attract support from abroad. Thus, measures of the effectiveness of outside support must look beyond the immediate physical impact on the battlefield and take into account the political as well as military dimensions of the insurgent's overall struggle. Second, terrorism in this context is a specific tactic that insurgents use as part of a broader strategy to control a particular geographic area. That is, terrorism is an auxiliary mode of violence rather than an exclusive one. While both the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a group fighting in Sri Lanka, and Lebanon's Hezbollah may be among the world's bloodiest practitioners of terrorism, they are also considered insurgent movements for the purposes of this report because they use a range of other tactics in their effort to control territory. Size is also a useful distinguishing characteristic: Terrorist groups often consist of a small number of individuals, sometimes no more than a handful. Insurgent organizations like Hezbollah or the LTTE, in contrast, number in the thousands.

The definition does, however, exclude several types of groups that share many characteristics of insurgent movements. For example, internal paramilitary forces, such as the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC) active in Colombia, do not share the above fundamental insurgent characteristics and therefore are not included in our analysis. These internal forces have a territorial focus but are vigilante in nature and neither part of, nor involved in, underground political organizations. In many cases, their violence is simply backed by the state or its armed forces, either explicitly or implicitly. In addition, purely criminal groups, including large ones that regularly use violence, are excluded.

Their goals are not tied to territorial control or even specifically to politics, except when needed to promote criminal activities. Insurgent groups may traffic narcotics or other illicit enterprises, but these do not serve as rationales or goals for the organization. Rather, crime is a means to an end for insurgents (e.g., the generation of money to sustain operations), while for purely criminal groups such activities are ends in themselves. Furthermore, criminal groups usually do not seek to exert direct political control over a territory or populace as insurgents do. Some movements may begin as insurgencies and, over time, become criminal organizations as their political goals fade. Similarly, because insurgencies are ineluctably territorial-driven organizations, utopian movements and mystical cults such as the Aum Shinrikyo, whose objectives and self-identity transcend the bounds of territory, fall outside this definition. Finally, as alluded to above, movements that rely almost entirely on terrorism, such as the Basque separatist group ETA (Euskadi ta Askatasuna) and the November 17 group in Greece, are excluded.

This seminar is part of a series that combines a broad survey of all major insurgencies active since 1991 (though many began years or even decades previously) with a more detailed, qualitative examination of several of the most important insurgent movements active in the last decade to assess and analyze the phenomenon of post-Cold War external support for insurgencies. This combination of analytic methods has yielded a number of interesting findings. While the survey provided insight into the broad frequency of various phenomena, the case study approach proved particularly useful for making qualitative judgments about the impact of various types of support. The approaches together illustrate major trends in insurgency emerging from the last decade.

All the groups included in our review have inflicted in excess of 1,000 deaths per conflict. In addition, we examined certain insurgencies, such as the Slovene secession from the former Yugoslavia, that had a lower death toll but nonetheless "succeeded" because the movement in question took control of the government or gained a substantial degree of autonomy.

Although the above criteria appear clear, in practice they often required specific judgment calls with which other analysts might disagree. Among the ambiguities involving our selection and ordering of data were the following:

• Some insurgencies changed theirnames and, at times, their orientations, over the course of their struggle.Similarly, many insurgent movements split into rival factions at variouspoints in their history. It would be possible to categorize them eitheras separate movements or as a single insurgency with different offshootsor phases. Our preference was to categorize these multiple organizationsand names as a single insurgency to avoid giving the impression thatmany distinct insurgent groups existed when, in fact, only one was active.
• Some countries confronted severalsmall insurgent groups that, together, had an impact disproportionateto their individual size and influence. Nonetheless, because these groupswere demonstrably separate and independent entities and therefore, bythemselves, were largely inconsequential, they did not meet the strictcriteria given above. In the early 1990s, Afghanistan and Somalia, forexample, had myriad small groups that fought quite fiercely, althoughthe groups do not qualify for inclusion as an insurgency given thesecriteria. In such cases, we often amalgamated disparate organizationsunder one heading, even though these groups may even have fought withone another or otherwise did not consist of a single movement.
• The degree of territorial controlof certain groups was often limited at best. The Provisional Irish RepublicanArmy (PIRA) as well as the Iraqi-backed Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) bothhad territorial aspirations (and thus met the criteria in the definition),but their actual control was limited in duration and practice.
• At times, information on insurgentgroups was severely limited. This was especially true for movementsin Africa. Accordingly, several movements or manifestations of externalsupport may require further elaboration as more information becomesavailable.