Your comment made me do a very long sigh, but fine, I'll engage.

This is on me for going into an Internet debate on a topic on which I have scholarly expertise.

All insurgencies start as civilian uprisings - with or without guns.

Rojava had long pre-existing structures, they're not a random uprising that armed itself. It's a political party (PYD) and its professional militia (YPG) with command structure, logistics, training, external Kurdish support, not civilians grabbing weapons for a spontaneous revolt. It's a disciplined paramilitary organization seizing territory when the Syrian regime pulled back, with US support.

This also applies to Talibans, FARC, ETA, LTTE, Hamas, etc. There are literally no examples of successful modern insurgencies *starting* as civilian uprisings. This is factually untrue. You are wrong.

they took advantage of Syrian state power fragmenting to launch their insurgency

This did not happen.

The PYD/YPG walked into a power vacuum and set up local governance. They did not wage an armed campaign against the Syrian state. They actually maintained a non-aggression pact with Assad for years. You cannot launch an insurgency against a state you're not fighting.

The Syrian state did not lose Rojava because civilians had guns. It lost Rojava because Assad abandoned it. If he wanted that area, YPG rifles would not have stopped the Syrian air force, artillery, missiles, armor. We know this because when Assad did want territory, he flattened entire districts full of people with weapons who couldn't do shit about it.

zapatista / vietminh / mao comparion

Youtube clip of the "bruh sound effect #2"

This is an unserious comparison.

Mao and the Viet Minh had millions of military grade fighters, supplies, training, heavy weapons, regime collapses that opened power vacuums, massive foreign backing, whereas the Zapatistas have rifles in some isolated rural communities and a few thousand non-military fighters.

This is merely the historical pattern almost all insurgencies must pass through.

Most insurgencies don't start as peasant uprisings that get crushed and then re-emerge lmao

Talibans emerged from Mujahideen networks with Pakistani support, Hezoballah began with heavy iranian backing, LTTE instantly had external funding and territorial control, FARC never had a spectacular early defeat, ISIS captured Mosul in days… you're just using some romantic examples from a handful of cold war cases and thinking they're a general principle. They're not.

If PR was the only thing standing between the Mexican state and crushing militant autonomy within it’s own borders, it would have happily already done so already.

The timing of the insurgency was not random.

The PRI's legitimacy was fragile at the time. NAFTA had just launched, massacring indigenous rebels would have jeopardized it. The Catholic Church (very very important for PR in mexico) was asking to mediate a ceasefire. It's political optics that constrained the state.

Besides, Mexico did crush them militarily. It took 12 days.

Modern states can annihilate insurgents when they stop caring about optics. see: Russia/Chechnya, Syria/Hama, Sri Lanka/LTTE, China/Xinjiang, Turkey/PKK, Ethiopia/Tigray, Myanmar/Rohingya, etc…

Mexico chose to not join this club. States restrain themselves for political reasons, not for fear of insurgents.

If you are going to take armchair revolutionaries to task for simplifying and essentialising the nature of insurgency (justified as it may be), you should be careful not to do the same yourself.

Pointing out the political context of the EZLN isn't simplifying insurgency, it's knowing the history.

I'm not making a theory, I'm explaining a case.

You're the one stretching an outlier into a rule.