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Modern genocides have been stopped in various ways. The Nazi Holocaust during World War II ended only in the face of a massive external military on­slaught mounted on two fronts, by both the Allies and the Soviet Union. Jewish and Soviet partisans, and resistance movements in Poland, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Norway, Italy, Greece, and France all inflicted significant casualties on Nazi forces, in some cases causing substantial losses, but such indigenous opposition played a secondary role in the defeat of the Hitler regime. This is not surprising, because genocidal regimes also tend to be aggressively expansionist, and frequently create international crises or provoke external cross-border retalia­tion.

Yet domestic opposition can also be important. In Bangladesh in 1971, local guerrilla forces resisted the Pakistani army’s genocidal repression until an invading Indian army ended it. In Rwanda in 1994, it was left to an externally-trained but indigenous, predominantly Tutsi insurgent army, the Rwandan Patriotic Front, to overthrow the Hutu Power regime and halt its genocide of Tutsis. ­

The Khmer Rouge regime led by Pol Pot collapsed only in the face of an international military intervention: a full-scale Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1979. The Indonesian occupation of East Timor, too, ended only under the substantial international pressure exerted by a United Nations peacekeeping force which arrived in East Timor in 1999. Yet both Cambodia and East Timor had also produced significant indigenous resistance movements, which challenged these genocidal regimes with military force that proved inferior though not ineffectual. Resistance forces were able to draw upon or muster important indigenous political support that contributed to the eventual defeat of the two perpetrator regimes. The factors that led them to take action merit study.

Although these two Southeast Asian genocidal dictatorships, respectively communist and militarist, came from opposite ends of the political spectrum, and the motives of the rebel lead­ers who confronted them varied, both of the resistance movements originated in radical leftist political parties. National independence was a major goal of the Fretilin guerrilla movement in East Timor, and Maoist ideology was an additional influence on some of its leaders. Along with indigenous racism, Maoism was also a major element of the ideology of Pol Pot’s Cambodian regime, but Mao’s thinking had initially also influenced the Khmer Rouge cadres who rebelled against that regime. In both Cambodia and East Timor, however, the leading resistance forces, though they began as radical organizations, also became more moderate over time in the face of genocide and extermination. Other resistance movements in various regions of the world have followed different trajectories.

Rebel movements that inflict casualties on perpetrator regimes are of course not the only forms of resistance worth studying. In various cases, organized non-violent or passive resistance has also obstructed mass repression and rescued targeted victims. At an individual level, more everyday forms of resistance have also enabled victims to sur­vive, including by enabling them to maintain their dignity and self-respect. These other kinds of resistance deserve equal attention.

For more on armed and unarmed resistance movements, see for instance:

Yitzhak Arad, “The Armed Jewish Resistance in Eastern Europe: Its Unique Conditions and its Relations with the Jewish Councils (Judenrate) in the Ghettoes,” in The Holocaust and History: The Known, the Unknown, the Disputed, and the Re-examined, ed. Michael Berenbaum and Abraham J. Peck, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998, 591-600.

Ben Kiernan, Genocide and Resistance in Southeast Asia: Documentation, Denial and Justice in Cambodia and East Timor, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 2008.

Jacques Semelin, Unarmed against Hitler: Civilian Resistance in Europe, 1939-1943, Westport, CT: Praeger, 1993.

James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985;

James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1990;

Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-1979, 2nd ed., New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002, 246-50.