CCW book shortlisted for British Army Military Book of the Year

“Lawrence of Arabia on War: The Campaign in the Desert 1916-18” by Dr Robert Johnson has been shortlisted for the British Army Military Book of the Year (BAMBY) prize.

BAMBY is a prestigious book prize, judged by a diverse panel of officers and soldiers, representing the very best military books of the previous year. BAMBY is now in its 14th year and previous winners have included the Late Lord Ashdown, Professor Andrew Roberts, and Dr Aimée Fox.

The other books on the shortlist are:

Brig (Ret’d) Ben Barry – Blood, Metal, and Dust: How Victory turned to Defeat in Afghanistan and Iraq

Prof Saul David – Crucible of Hell: Okinawa: The Last Great Battle of the Second World War

James Holland – Sicily ’43 – The First Assault on Fortress Europe 

Professor David Kilcullen – The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West

Professor Margaret MacMillan – War: How Conflict Shaped Us

Dr Julie Wheelwright – Sister’s in Arms: Female Warriors from Antiquity to the New Millenium

‘Once again, seven excellent books have been chosen for this year’s BAMBY and the challenge has been laid before our soldiers to engage with writing on the profession of arms, our people are our key advantage and developing them should be our central goal.’

-WO2 Paul Barnes

New book: Military Strategy in the 21st Century: The Challenge for NATO

Rob Johnson has edited a new volume together with Janne Haaland Matlary. Military Strategy in the 21st Century: The Challenge for NATO was published with Hurst in December 2020.

What is military strategy today? In an era when European states seek to de-escalate and avoid armed conflict, and where politicians fear the consequences of protracted operations or tactical hazards, does military strategy have any relevance?

This is the first volume to examine current military risks and threats for NATO from a military strategy vantage point. Which strategies are needed? Is ways—ends—means thinking possible as a strategic template today? The contributors probe the relative importance, utility and options of military strategy across NATO as it confronts a variety of challenges old and new, as hybrid threats, new nuclear risks and conventional force combine in complex ways. They also examine what military strategy and military integration really mean, when NATO’s multilateral framework is being weakened by degrees of self-interest. They analyse the USA’s political and military role in Europe, and assess military strategic responses to Russian aggression in Ukraine and the Middle East. Moreover, they study the role of member states’ military strategy set against Article 5 and non-Article 5 risks and threats, and explore how European states devise and implement military strategic options. This book makes a clear assessment of political level strategy and its implications for military integration.

A sobering and stimulating set of essays which remind us of the importance of military strategy and the difficulty of getting politicians to think strategically. The authors take aim at some dangerous misconceptions which, unless addressed, will continue to weaken the Western alliance.’ — Christopher Coker, Department of International Relations, London School of Economics, and author of The Improbable War: China, the United States and the Logic of Great Power Conflict

Janne Haaland Matlary is Professor of International Politics at the University of Oslo and the Norwegian Military Command and Staff College; she was formerly Norway's deputy minister of foreign affairs. CCW was pleased to host her as a Visiting Research Fellow.

"Global Britain's strategic problem East of Suez" published in EJIS

William James has published an article in the European Journal of International Security. The essay entitled ‘'Global Britain's strategic problem East of Suez” formed the basis of the CCW seminar which Will presented last term.

Why did Britain withdraw from its military bases in the Arabian Peninsula and Southeast Asia midway through the Cold War? Existing accounts tend to focus on Britain's weak economic position, as well as the domestic political incentives of retrenchment for the ruling Labour Party. This article offers an alternative explanation: the strategic rationale for retaining a permanent presence East of Suez dissolved during the 1960s, as policymakers realised that these military bases were consuming more security than they could generate. These findings have resonance for British officials charting a return East of Suez today under the banner of ‘Global Britain’.

William James wins RUSI's Trench Gascoigne essay prize

Congratulations to Dr William James, who has won first prize in the Royal United Services Institute's Trench Gascoigne essay competition.

The award was presented by the Chief of Defence Staff, General Sir Nick Carter, as well as the new RUSI Chair Sir David Lidington. 

Will’s essay was titled: 'Between a pandemic and a hard Brexit: grand strategic thinking in age of nationalism, great power competition and human insecurity'. The essay will be published in The RUSI Journal. 

Will won second prize in the same competition in 2018 and Rob Johnson also won first prize in 2016.

"Owning the Past" opens at the Ashmolean

A new exhibition open this weekend at the Ashmolean Museum. Dr Rob Johnson was pleased to give significant input to the content of the display.

This dual language (Arabic and English) exhibition highlights the long-lasting impact of the past on the present. It explores how the borders of the state of Iraq were established following the First World War when British control of the region included a fascination with its ancient past - one that led to a colonisation of Mesopotamian antiquity as much as the living communities. It questions what is meant by heritage and introduces voices and stories of people not previously visible in displays devoted to the very histories and heritage of their homelands.

The exhibition opens with a commissioned installation by the artist Piers Secunda. His powerful artwork is created from a reproduction of the Assyrian relief of a bird-headed spirit from Nimrud, Iraq, that now dominates the Museum’s Welcome Space. It acts as a metaphor for the wider destruction of individual and community identities resulting from war, colonialism, oppressive ideologies, and neglect.

The exhibition is free but tickets for General Admission (free) must be booked in advance. Please consider including a donation to the Ashmolean when booking.

Biden time for the transatlantic relationship?

Dr William James has published a short article on the likely changes and continuities in the transatlantic relationship under President Biden.

Joe Biden’s electoral victory was initially met with relief in most European capitals but has since triggered some deeper soul-searching. French President Emmanuel Macron sparked a rather extraordinary row last week by rebuking German Defence Minister, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, for her critique of European strategic autonomy and defence of the US role in the continent’s security. Their public spat masks an uncomfortable truth: Europeans are unsure about the future orientation of US grand strategy. Was Donald Trump’s eventful tenure an aberration or a symptom of deeper structural issues not just in American domestic politics but also in the US-Europe relationship? The time is ripe to assess the likely changes and continuities in the transatlantic partnership under President Biden.

UNSSC reviews CCW's Changing Character of Conflict Tool

Svenja Korth, Senior Manager for Peace and Security at United Nations System Staff College, has written a blog post on the collaboration between The UNSSC and CCW. In 2015 CCW and UNSSC collaborated on the interactive Changing Character of Conflict Tool (CCCT) which analyses changes in settings of organized violence. The tool has been critical to the "Analysing and Understanding Non-state Armed groups" curriculum, and has become a regular feature in UNSSC’s peace and security training portfolio.

Rob Johnson discusses "War in Fact and Fiction" on Radio 3

Dr Rob Johnson joined a discussion on “War in Fact and Fiction” on Radio 3 on the evening of Tuesday 3 November 2020.

From East Africa to Arabia, the First World War to Mozambique, Rana Mitter discusses the impact of war on society and culture. Margaret MacMillan's most recent book is called War: How Conflict Shaped Us and takes a deep dive into the history of conflict. Rob Johnson considers what we gain by exploring the overlooked side of Lawrence of Arabia - his thoughts on warfare and military strategy. And, the end of the Gaza empire, and the clash in East Africa between Belgian, German, British and French forces are explored in novels by Mia Couto and Abdulrazak Gurnah. They compare notes about the way fiction can trace changes in relationships due to war.

Strategic Instincts published by Dominic Johnson

Dr Dominic Johnson’s latest book, Strategic Instincts: The Adaptive Advantages of Cognitive Biases in International Politics was published today by Princeton University Press.

A widespread assumption in political science and international relations is that cognitive biases—quirks of the brain we all share as human beings—are detrimental and responsible for policy failures, disasters, and wars. In Strategic Instincts, Dominic Johnson challenges this assumption, explaining that these nonrational behaviours can actually support favourable results in international politics and contribute to political and strategic success. By studying past examples, he considers the ways that cognitive biases act as “strategic instincts,” lending a competitive edge in policy decisions, especially under conditions of unpredictability and imperfect information.

Drawing from evolutionary theory and behavioural sciences, Johnson looks at three influential cognitive biases—overconfidence, the fundamental attribution error, and in-group/out-group bias. He then examines the advantageous as well as the detrimental effects of these biases through historical case studies of the American Revolution, the Munich Crisis, and the Pacific campaign in World War II. He acknowledges the dark side of biases—when confidence becomes hubris, when attribution errors become paranoia, and when group bias becomes prejudice. Ultimately, Johnson makes a case for a more nuanced understanding of the causes and consequences of cognitive biases and argues that in the complex world of international relations, strategic instincts can, in the right context, guide better performance.

Strategic Instincts shows how an evolutionary perspective can offer the crucial next step in bringing psychological insights to bear on foundational questions in international politics.

Sovereignty and Illicit Social Order published by Christopher Lilyblad

Former CCW Visiting Research Fellow, Christopher Lilyblad, has published his first book, Sovereignty and Illicit Social Order. The book was published on 9 July 2020 with Routledge and is available as ebook or hardback.

Sovereignty and Illicit Social Order: Global Modernity, Local Agony
Contesting conventional assumptions of the modern nation-state, this book challenges us to rethink the segmentation of the political realm and its underlying economic and social processes.

Cognizant of the historical context of systemic change, Lilyblad reconstructs how illicit social order arises from agonistic competition over territory, authority, and institutions. Immersive empirical investigation traces this bottom-up process in local conflict zones, detailing how spontaneous configurations of violence, socioeconomic resources, and legitimacy transcend the divide between public and private. Ultimately, the analytical vantage of global governance assesses the sobering implications for sovereignty to more accurately reflect the world we have, not the one we may want.

By showing how these inherently local illicit social orders develop apart from – not below – the state within a global anarchic society, this book will be of interest to a wide range of scholars, including political scientists, economists, sociologists, geographers, as well as researchers in interdisciplinary fields such as International Development, International Political Economy, and Global Governance.

Illicit Flows in Armed Conflict - Annette Idler published in World Politics

Dr Annette Idler has published an article with World Politics, Volume 72, Issue 3, July 2020.

The Logic of Illicit Flows in Armed Conflict: Explaining Variation in Violent Nonstate Group Interactions in Colombia

Why is there variation in how violent nonstate groups interact in armed conflict? Where armed conflict and organized crime converge in unstable regions worldwide, these groups sometimes enter cooperative arrangements with opposing groups. Within the same unstable setting, violent nonstate groups forge stable, long-term relations with each other in some regions, engage in unstable, short-term arrangements in others, and dispute each other elsewhere. Even though such paradoxical arrangements have intensified and perpetuated war, extant theories on group interactions that focus on territory and motivations overlook their concurrent character. Challenging the literature that focuses on conflict dynamics alone, the author argues that the spatial distribution of illicit flows influences how these interactions vary. By mapping cocaine supply chain networks, the author shows that long-term arrangements prevail at production sites, whereas short-term arrangements cluster at trafficking nodes. The article demonstrates through process tracing how the logic of illicit flows produces variation in the groups’ cooperative arrangements. This multiyear, multisited study includes over six hundred interviews in and about Colombia’s remote, war-torn borderlands.

Vice-Chancellor's Award for Annette Idler

Dr Annette Idler has won a Vice-Chancellor’s Award for her CONPEACE and Conflict Platform projects

The Vice-Chancellor’s Innovation Awards recognise and celebrate high-quality research-led innovation at all levels. The range of projects, products, and models which were submitted to the awards are a testament to the excellence of the innovation taking place across the University of Oxford.

Dr Annette Idler leads an interdisciplinary 18-people-team that brings together ethnographic fieldwork with quantitative analysis, complexity science, visualization techniques, visual arts, and historical tracing to provide evidence-based guidance on the directions and pace of change in conflict.

For information on the Changing Character of Conflict Platform: https://conflictplatform.ox.ac.uk/

Call for Papers: LASA 2021

CONPEACE – From Conflict Actors to Architects of Peace

LASA 2021 | Vancouver, Canada | Hybrid Congress
26 – 29 May 2021

Panel title: Changing Security Landscapes at the Margins – Bridging the Centre-Periphery Gap
Session type: Double panel
Panel organisers: Annette Idler, Markus Hochmüller, Dáire McGill: CONPEACE, University of Oxford

Abstract: For most of the post-Cold War period, Latin American security studies have focused predominantly on violence, crime, and conflict in the political centres of the region’s states. Aiming to overcome this bias (and balance the ‘urbanisation’ of the security research agenda), recent scholarship has given more attention to (in)security in the state’s margins. This double panel, organised by the University of Oxford’s CONPEACE Programme, builds upon this ‘periphery turn’ in Latin American security studies. It aims to advance theory-building from the margins by bridging the centre-periphery divide, shifting from state-centred towards local, transnational, and human-centred analytical perspectives, and providing more analytical weight to marginalised spaces and people. The double panel brings together an interdisciplinary group of early-career and established security scholars working in and on some of the most peripheral areas in South America, the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central America. Participants present original empirical work on conflict, crime, violence, order-making, and governance in the margins, and provide novel analytical, conceptual, and theoretical perspectives that will advance this emerging field of study.

Submission:
Submission deadline for paper title, abstract (max. 250 words), and short bio: 16th August 2020

Please send your submission to: Markus Hochmüller (markus.hochmuller@pmb.ox.ac.uk) and Dáire McGill (daire.mcgill@pmb.ox.ac.uk)

We will notify interested presenters of their paper’s acceptance by 24th August 2020.

For further information on CONPEACE – From Conflict Actors to Architects of Peace please visit; https://conpeace.ccw.ox.ac.uk/

‘Naval Minewarfare' - New book from Capt Chris O'Flaherty

A new book on ‘Naval Minewarfare: Politics to Practicalities’ has been published by CCW former Visiting Research Fellow, Captain Chris O’Flaherty Royal Navy.  Selected by the journal ‘Naval Review’ as their Book of the Quarter for Summer 2020, this detailed and comprehensive work examines the recent history of naval mining and naval mine countermeasures, focussed on the 24 naval mining events since World War II. Using evidence from these events since 1945, in which over 18,400 mines were laid sinking or seriously damaging over 100 ships (including 44 warships), it draws out the strategic and operational considerations affecting the success or failure of modern naval mining events. 

 

COVID-19 in Colombia and Venezuela

Dr Annette Idler and Dr Markus Hochmüller have published two new pieces on COVID-19-related issues in Colombia and Venezuela.

“COVID-19 in Colombia’s Borderlands and the Western Hemisphere: Adding Instability to a Double Crisis” appears in the Journal of Latin American Geography. “ In Colombia’s borderlands, the COVID-19 pandemic adds a third dimension to the double crisis of continued insecurity rooted in Colombia’s ongoing armed conflict and the humanitarian emergency triggered by Venezuelan mass migration. Exacerbated through the border effect, the Colombian government’s border closure and armed groups seeking to capitalize on growing uncertainty pose a severe risk to the country’s peace agreement, regional stability, and hemispheric security.

Idler and Hochmüller have also written for The Conversation, with their article "Venezuelan migrants face crime, conflict and coronavirus at Colombia’s closed border" being published on 5th June.

The Psychic Slaves of the Internet published by Thomas Flichy

CCW Associate, Thomas Flichy as published a new book, The Psychic Slaves of the Internet.

The Psychic Slaves of the Internet
The magnetism exerted by the Internet on our brains should not be attributed to the alleged technical genius of Californian computer scientists. In reality, the power of magnetization of the screens on our mind is due to the rational exploitation of the discoveries made on animal and human conditioning since the second half of the 19th century. It is indeed the intelligent exploitation of the classics that has allowed social engineering to radically divert our attention from what it was programmed for: to identify imminent dangers in order to protect the group or the tribe, to focus in a sustainable manner on an object, to enter into communication with others by listening to the multiple languages ​​of the body or to scrutinize the mysteries situated beyond the rapid flow of earthly life. Whether we like it or not, the global internet is thriving on the reductio ad bestiam of mankind. We will therefore be treated with as much respect as Pavlov's dog, John Watson's rat or Frédéric Skinner's pigeon. However, a huge improvement has been made since the interwar period: the Internet being constantly supplied by our personal tastes, its social engineers can happily direct us to the websites and virtual spaces revealing our part of animality. The deprivation of the classics relating to the conditioning of animals and men is therefore at the root of our psychic slavery. This has been carefully orchestrated by an academic engineering, depriving students from the only intellectual tools allowing them to grow: silent reading and disputatio, to replace them with ideological conditioning and of hyperspecialization. The empty box created, fed by research centres where counterfeiters meticulously construct truncated sciences finds itself the natural ally of digital education.

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