The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the role that political ideologies plays in determining the target of insurgency movements. In order to understand how these groups operate, I use Janowitz's military establishment to apply it on the three main revolutionary ideologies of the 20th century, Khomeinism, Marxism/Leninism and Fanonian. Based on these analyses, I hypothesize the three main targets by ideology based on the clarity of the indoctrination and on the level of bureaucracy entailed in the revolutionary texts. I then proceed to compare these theories to three case studies, the Hezbollah, the FARC and finally the PKK. I try to offer an explanation on why religious insurgencies target most of their attacks towards rival factions or why nationalist left-wing groups are mostly focused on attacking security forces. I argue that a well-structured hierarchy, a reliance on the civil society and a clear definition of the political and military targets are quintessential to prevent civilian causalities. But contrarily to most papers on the topic, I find that a strict military discipline has the reversed result that expected. For instance, the FARC and the PKK have such a strict internal code of discipline that it led the members to desert the organizations by thousands and have civilians as...

Private military companies have rapidly filled in many operational force capacities that national militaries now longer have the capabilities to fill natively. As such, PMCs have expanded their rosters as well as their services provided to fill in many roles, and have carried out many such roles such as logistics management, personal and site security, and some inherently state functions such as training indigenous security forces and interrogation of prisoners. This rise has impacted national militaries in many facets of their operations and abstract professional bases. The ability of the PMC to carry out operations at the same standard as regular soldiers but with higher pay has impacted how the regular soldier views their own place in the professional national military, and creates problems for the establishment as a whole. This thesis will discuss the Iraq War as a case study and the impact of PMCs on the war, as well as introduce the Huntingtonian theories of soldier professionalism and corporateness, and will also employ a critical Marxist perspective to analyse the role and impact of PMCs in the modern military convention and in civil-military relations.