laager mentality

Their refusal to do so had more to do with a laager mentality than with calculations that by spinning out the conflict they could buy time to mop up more territory.

The first development, one we can already see, is resort by the contented in the larger cities to a laager mentality - the hiring of personal, neighbourhood or apartment security guards or the escape to presumptively safe suburbs.

The Afrikaner's Boer War experience, including the death of 29 000 woman and children in concentration camps, and the wholesale destruction of homesteads, reinforced their laager mentality, so as to preserve themselves and their way of life against the British Empire.