Separatists, rebels, and other problems of word choice

It’s Spring Break, and I finally have time to catch up on answers to interesting language questions from the writing groups.

In one group, we were looking at a piece of writing about the political situation in Russia, and we discussed the differences between these words, which all refer to groups that use violence against a government: separatist, rebel, insurgent, militant. The Oxford Learner’s Thesaurus adds guerrilla (pronounced like gorilla), terrorist, revolutionary and some other, less common words.

All these words have slightly different connotations depending on the public’s perception of the group (the American army in the War of Independence might be seen as revolutionaries from a U.S. perspective but separatists in Britain!).

To decide between these words, in addition to checking a dictionary, you could use a corpus search. I’m going to give examples from the TIME Corpus by Mark Davies, which searches the text of Time magazine, a well-respected U.S. news magazine. My reason is that certain labels become attached to particular situations in the media, and these become the expected way to refer to them. Here’s what I found:

Separatist

The use of this word peaks in the 1970s to refer to Quebec Separatists (the French-speaking movement in eastern Canada), and to a lesser extent separatists in the former Yugoslavia. In the 1990s, we see references to the separatist movements in Georgia, Slovenia, and Lithuania, as well as Kurdish separatists in Turkey. However, it is also used frequently in the phrase “white separatist movement” — which refers to extreme right-wing racist groups in the U.S.  In recent years, the corpus includes Chechen separatists (Russia), Basque separatists (northern Spain), and Kurdish separatists (this time in Iraq).

Rebel

This word is far more common in the corpus! Just in the period of 2000-2006, it was applied to groups in Burma, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Sierra Leone, Ethiopia, Colombia, Myanmar (Burma), Macedonia, and Afghanistan.

Notice already that there is no overlap between these places and those where Time writers talk about “separatists.”

Insurgent

It will be no surprise if you read the newspapers that this word is most closely tied to Iraq and Afghanistan right now –Iraqi insurgents, Taliban insurgents, Baathist insurgents, and (often) just “insurgent leaders.” Interestingly, this word was used far less frequently in the 1980s and 1990s. In the 70s, it was used in reference to the Vietnam War and in Colombia (“Khmer insurgents”). But it was far more common in the 1920s, when it was used to talk about domestic politics (mostly “insurgent Republicans”). I’m going to need to check my history books to understand that one!

Militant

Today, this word has been applied to Hamas, Al Qaeda, and other radical Islamist organizations, as well as groups in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Turkey, and Pakistan. (Do you notice a geographical pattern here?) However, in the 1960s and 1970s, it was mostly used in reference to the militant black movement (a branch of the civil rights movement), but there were also militants in New Mexico, Puerto Rico, India, and elsewhere. The IRA in Ireland is also described here as a militant group (I think we would get a different result if we searched a British/Irish corpus).

Why an insurgent can’t also be a militant

Interestingly, only one of these words is commonly attached to each situation. For example: insurgent occurs 3x more frequently in reference to Iraq than militant. However, Islamist collocates with militant (and militancy) , but never separatist, rebel, and only once with guerrilla (referring to the Philippines). For the recent situation in Chechnya, we find these collocates: war, rebels, guerrillas, separatists, fighters.

As for the question of why and how these words become attached in this way, I can’t really say! Clearly, you can only be a separatist if you want to separate your region from another country, but the other words are much closer in meaning, and most of the words discussed here are pretty negative (although not as strong in meaning as terrorist, for example).

If you have an idea or question, please leave a comment!