This book brings together several scholars to examine the relationship between guerrilla insurgencies and state building. In essays covering such societies as Mozambique, Algeria, Peru, Malaysia and Sri Lanka the authors show that the rise of guerrilla insurgency can lead states to develop far-reaching programmes of social and economic modernisation or else in some cases to disintegrate from within if the challenge of modernisation proves to be beyond their capacities. The book argues that as the last phase of colonial modernisation of developing states has finished insurgencies increasingly threaten the cohesion of less developed states in a global order in which superpower patronage has largely ended.