People's war in the context of Naxalite-Maoist insurgency

Attrition warfare represents an attempt to grind down an opponent's ability to make war by destroying their military resources by any means possible, including scorched earth, people's war, guerrilla warfare and all kind of battles apart from a decisive battle. Elements of this kind of warfare had already been used in the Peninsular war. The Russian attrition warfare against Napoleon began on 24 June 1812 when Napoleon's Grande Armée crossed the Neman River into Russia and ended on 14 December 1812 with the total defeat of the Grande Armée. A visual representation is given by the drawing of Charles Joseph Minard. The Trachenberg Plan was used in the Sixth Coalition in Germany 1813 and in France 1814. The Seventh Coalition defeated him at Waterloo in 1815 and exiled him to Saint Helena, where he died six years later.

The Historic Eight Documents are a set of eight monographs authored by the Indian Maoist revolutionary Charu Majumdar that outline the ideological principles on which the Naxalite militant communist movement in India was based. They laid down the idea that the Indian State was a bourgeois institution and that the main Indian communist parties had embraced revisionism by agreeing to operate within the framework of the Constitution of India. They urged a Maoist protracted people's war to overthrow the Indian State. They denounced the Soviet Union both for being revisionist, as well as for supporting the Indian State.

The Naxalite–Maoist insurgency is an ongoing conflict between the Indian government and left-wing extremist groups. The Naxalites are a group of communist groups following Maoist political sentiment and ideology, and claim to fight a rural rebellion and people's war against the government.

The insurgency started after the 1967 Naxalbari uprising and the subsequent split of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) leading to the creation of a Marxist–Leninist faction. The faction later splintered into various smaller groups. Declared terrorist organisations under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act of India (1967), the Naxalites' armed wing, the People's Liberation Guerrilla Army, has been responsible for the deaths of over 4,000 civilians and 2,500 security personnel since the 2000s.

The Shining Path (Spanish: Sendero Luminoso, SL), officially the Communist Party of Peru (Partido Comunista del Perú, abbr. PCP), is a far-left political party and terrorist guerrilla group in Peru, following Marxism–Leninism–Maoism and Gonzalo Thought. Academics often refer to the group as the Communist Party of Peru – Shining Path (Partido Comunista del Perú – Sendero Luminoso, abbr. PCP-SL) to distinguish it from other communist parties in Peru.

When it first launched its "people's war" in 1980, the Shining Path's goal was to overthrow the government through guerrilla warfare and replace it with a New Democracy. The Shining Path believed that by establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat, inducing a cultural revolution, and eventually sparking a world revolution, they could arrive at full communism. Their representatives stated that the then-existing socialist countries were revisionist, and the Shining Path was the vanguard of the world communist movement. The Shining Path's ideology and tactics have influenced other Maoist insurgent groups, such as the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist Centre) and other Revolutionary Internationalist Movement-affiliated organizations.

The New People's Army (NPA; Filipino: Bagong Hukbong Bayan, BHB) is the armed wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP). It acts as the CPP's principal organization, aiming to consolidate political power from what it sees as the present "bourgeois reactionary puppet government" and to aid in the "people's democratic revolution". Founded on March 29, 1969, by the collaboration of Jose Maria Sison and former members of the Hukbalahap led by Bernabe Buscayno, the NPA has since waged a guerrilla war based on the Maoist strategy of protracted people's war. The NPA is the primary belligerent in the ongoing communist rebellion in the Philippines, the longest ongoing conflict in the country.

Historically based primarily in the Philippine countryside, the CPP–NPA's area of influence has fluctuated significantly. In 2018, the CPP claimed to operate in 73 out of the country's 81 provinces across over 110 guerrilla fronts. However, by August 2025, the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) and the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) declared that there were no active guerrilla fronts remaining in the country, citing a reduction in NPA strength to fewer than 800 combatants.