From the editors

The first two essays in this issue focus on the performance of the British army, and deal with the relationship between doctrinal ideas and military action. Both essays argue that the relationship is never a straightforward one of perfecting doctrines, accumulating knowledge and articulating principles to the troops and their commanders.¹

Christian Tripodi of King’s College London argues the efforts of western militaries to comprehend the social, economic and cultural environments, within which they operate in irregular warfare, create the ‘illusion of control’. No amount of local cultural knowledge can overcome the fundamental obstacles to building stable societies, economies and political institutions. Andrew Sanders of Texas A&M University examines the performance of the British Parachute Regiment in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s to show that the unit not only at times failed to adhere to the principle of limited force, but also often deliberately contravened it because of a culture of aggression that was endemic to that unit.²

The period of de-colonisation since the Second World War witnessed a wave of violent wars of liberation. The new and partitioned states that emerged frequently fought again. Why do recently partitioned successor states go to war? In their contribution, Michael Woldemariam of Boston University and Alden Young of Drexel University explore this question systematically, looking beyond shopping lists of factors such as the division of territory and inter-communal hatreds. After comparing the cases of Ethiopia in 1993 and Sudan in 2011, they argue that the key factor is the way in which the experience of violence before partition shapes attitudes towards it afterwards. While the partition of Ethiopia yielded states led by regimes that were victors of the preceding war, the war of partition in Sudan produced new states that emerged out of military stalemate. This distinction, Woldemariam and Young argue, explains why Ethiopia and Eritrea waged a costly border war that Sudan and South Sudan managed to avoid.

The era of de-colonisation and partition in the former colonial world also promoted the development of United Nations (UN) Peacekeeping as a tool to resolve conflicts. Some argue that peacekeeping is a Cold War era practice premised on a neutral external actor that is ill-suited to current conflicts. In his essay, Mats Berdal of King’s College London challenges that argument. He examines the case of the UN’s mission to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to highlight the limits and possibilities of contemporary peacekeeping, particularly the use of force by UN forces to protect of civilians. According to Berdal, the case of the Congo shows that the UN needs to adapt and fully explore the possibilities of peacekeeping as a tool for independent, constructive and even coercive political action.³

The final article by Yelena Biberman of Skidmore College asks, why do states outsource violence to ill-disciplined and uncontrollable formations in place of regular military and police in times of civil war and insurgency? After all, the choice of proxy formations carries real costs to a state’s international reputation and may in fact through the excessive use of violence stoke irregular conflicts. To answer this question, Biberman compares the mixed campaigns India and Turkey have fought against Kashmiri and Kurdish separatist movements. Her conclusion is at once parsimonious and compelling: states such as India and Turkey outsource their violence in civil conflicts to blunt the advantages insurgents gain by operating as guerrilla forces. Understanding this dynamic, she added, tells us much about contemporary states that have adapted to an increasingly complex security environment.⁴

Notes

¹ This question runs through many recent essays including: Sergio Catignani, ‘Coping with Knowledge: Organizational Learning in the British Army?’, Journal of Strategic Studies 37/1 (2014), 30–64; Li Chen, ‘Operational Idealism: Doctrine Development of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army under Soviet Threat, 1969–1989’, Journal of Strategic Studies 40/5 (2017), 663–95; Torunn Laugen Haaland, ‘The Limits to Learning in Military Operations: Bottom-up Adaptation in the Norwegian Army in Northern Afghanistan, 2007–2012’, Journal of Strategic Studies 39/7 (2016), 999–1022; Jan Willem Honig, ‘The Tyranny of Doctrine and Modern Strategy: Small (and Large) States in a Double Bind’, Journal of Strategic Studies 39/2 (2016), 261–79; Benjamin Jensen, ‘Escaping the Iron Cage: The Institutional Foundations of FM 3-24. Counterinsurgency Doctrine’, Journal of Strategic Studies 39/2 (2016), 213–30.

² Also see Brian Holden Reid, ‘What is Command Culture?’, Journal of Strategic Studies 38/1–2 (2015), 215–31.

³ Also see: Mats Berdal and David H. Ucko, ‘The United Nations and the Use of Force: Between Promise and Peril’, Journal of Strategic Studies 37/5 (2014), 665–67; David Capie, ‘The United States and Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief (HADR) in East Asia: Connecting Coercive and Non-Coercive Uses of Military Power’, Journal of Strategic Studies 38/3 (2015), 309–31; James Cockayne, ‘The Futility of Force? Strategic Lessons for Dealing with Unconventional Armed Groups from the UN’s War on Haiti’s Gangs’, Journal of Strategic Studies 37/5 (2014), 736–69; Alan Doss, ‘In the Footsteps of Dr Bunche: The Congo, UN Peacekeeping and the Use of Force’, Journal of Strategic Studies 37/5 (2014), 703–35; James Sloan, ‘The Evolution of the Use of Force in UN Peacekeeping’, Journal of Strategic Studies 37/5 (2014), 674–702.

⁴ On this theme see: Stephen Biddle, Julia Macdonald and Ryan Baker, ‘Small Footprint, Small Payoff: The Military Effectiveness of Security Force Assistance’, Journal of Strategic Studies 41/1–2 (2018), 89–142; Thomas Bruneau, ‘Impediments to Fighting the Islamic State: Private Contractors and US Strategy’, Journal of Strategic Studies 39/1 (2016), 120–41; Avinash Paliwal, ‘India’s Taliban Dilemma: To Contain or to Engage?’, Journal of Strategic Studies 40/1–2 (2017), 35–67; Luigi Scazzieri, ‘Europe, Russia and the Ukraine Crisis: The Dynamics of Coercion’, Journal of Strategic Studies 40/3 (2017), 392–416; Alex Wilner, ‘The Dark Side of Extended Deterrence: Thinking through the State Sponsorship of Terrorism’, Journal of Strategic Studies 41/3 (2018), 410–37.