The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (115 page)

Armed struggles waged by irregular units, usually in the countryside and enjoying popular support, which demand socio-political transformation and challenge the power of the state. This century the strategy has been identified with Third World revolutions, particularly the Chinese, Vietnamese, and Cuban.
GS 

 
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(1929–67)
Argentine Marxist and revolutionary. Having participated in the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and served as a government minister, he left Cuba in 1965 in order to support other Third World revolutions. He launched an abortive insurrection in Bolivia in 1967 but was caught and executed.
His
Guerrilla Warfare
(1960) was a practical guide. It proposed four theses:
(1) Popular forces could win a war against a regular army providing the people realized that legal processes were no longer viable. (2) It was not necessary to wait for all objective conditions to exist before launching the guerrilla war; the revolutionary
foco
(Spanish for point of activity) could create them. The
foco
theory was misinterpreted by Regis Debray in
Revolution in the Revolution?
(1967) which stressed the military to the neglect of the political. Debray's misinterpretation had disastrous results in a number of countries (for example, Peru in 1965). (3) The countryside would be the place for armed struggle, the city for clandestine activity. (4) The revolution must be international. His last message from Bolivia called for the creation of ‘2, 3 … many Vietnams’.
Guevara criticized orthodox communist policy in Latin America and argued against any slavish copying of the Soviet model. Revolutionary theory must be based upon practical experience of struggle in each country. Guevara advocated the development of a socialist political culture based upon moral rather than material incentives, and resulting in the creation of a ‘New Man’.
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A short-lived but influential British socialist movement which flourished in the first quarter of the twentieth century, and which achieved its fullest exposition in the writings of G. D. H.
Cole
. Inspired by the model of the medieval guilds, it offered a vision of decentralized socialism rooted in structures of workers' control and
industrial democracy
.
KT 

 
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Term adopted in the United Kingdom and the United States in the late nineteenth century to describe the enforced closure of parliamentary debate, by analogy with the revolutionary guillotine of France. Formally an ‘allocation of time motion’ in the United Kingdom, a guillotine regulates the amount of time the House of Commons devotes to debate on a particular bill, either on the floor of the house or in committee. A guillotine was first used to manage debates in the House of Commons in 1881, when Irish MPs tried to filibuster the Coercion Bill.

 
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Russian acronym for ‘Chief Administration of Corrective Labour Camps’. The ostensible purpose of these camps, dispersed throughout the less inhabited areas of the Soviet Union, was to imprison and reform citizens guilty of various ‘crimes against the people’. Inmates were used as forced labour in the drive for rapid industrialization and infrastructural development. The atrocious conditions of the camps were publicized by the first-hand accounts of Solzhenitsyn, and it is estimated that the Gulags accounted for between 9.5 and 15 million deaths.
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Gulf Co-operation Council
(GCC)

A body formed in 1981 by six countries on the western side of the Persian Gulf (the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar, and Kuwait) for their collective security after the overthrow of the Shah of Iran followed by the emergence of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the launching of the Iraq-Iran War. The vulnerability of the oil facilities of the Gulf states to air and sea attack was exposed by the war. In the face of these external threats, co-operation was forged amongst the six for purposes of co-ordinating defence through regional collective security.
The main goals of the GCC are: economic integration together with co-ordinated planning; a cohesive foreign policy towards the non-Arab world, and a framework for the discussion of Arab affairs; co-ordination of regional collective security; and educational co-operation and sociocultural understanding among member states. There has been success on each of these four fronts but the most successful area has been in the field of economic co-operation.
A Gulf Rapid Deployment Force with units from each member state, was set up in 1984. But with the Iraq invasion of Kuwait in 1990, it was clear that this Rapid Deployment Force could not delay any large-scale assault until help could be organized for an effective defence.
BAR