Month: December 2022

Most years I teach PLSC 36100: Civil War to graduate students; this year is no different. It’s become totally impossible to “represent” the field given the extraordinary amount, and heterogeneity, of civil war research, so the syllabus is increasingly a curated jumping-off point for students’ own research projects. I dumped hundreds of recommended readings into this document back in 2019, which maybe someday I will update; it gives a broader view of the field.

My syllabus certainly has its biases and limits, but hopefully at least gives a meaningful taste of almost every major research approach in the field (it’s weak on formal theory, I know, but there are dozens of excellent formal theorists on my campus to whom I’m happy to point students). Here’s the draft syllabus for Winter 2023; it’s also interesting to see what has and hasn’t changed compared to the first version I taught back in 2010.

I’ve spent a couple of days in Oxford giving a talk and acting as external examiner on a dissertation, and staying at All Souls College. All Souls has a famously-difficult exam to become an Examination Fellow. The 2016-2022 Politics exam questions are on the website – a very fun read (at least for those of us not taking the exam!). I particularly enjoyed thinking about the following questions (different than having any idea how to answer them, to be clear):

• Is there a non-Marxist account of class?
• Scholars have long scrutinized the causes of political revolutions yet have typically failed to predict them accurately. Why?
• Has Enlightenment humanism lost its appeal?
• Does the observed decline in military coups portend an equivalent decline in the incidence of authoritarian regimes?
• Is populism an ideology?
• ‘This narrow world, strewn with prohibitions, can only be called in question by absolute violence’ (FRANTZ FANON). Is violence the only way to meet societal oppression?
• Does the rise of religious fundamentalism reveal a fatal flaw in Max Weber’s theory of disenchantment?
• ‘Political science provides answers, but political theory asks the questions.’ Discuss.
• Is a nuclear second-strike ever permissible?
• ‘At the core of conservatism lies an irreconcilable tension between nationalism and free-market economics.’ Do you agree?
• Is the US state a weak state?
• Can one be a Hobbesian democrat?

P.S. the History questions are also very interesting.

I enjoyed a fascinating new paper by Terrence Peterson that examines the – to me, puzzling – influence of French counterinsurgency writing/doctrine. I find it puzzling because despite the failures of French COIN in Indochina and Algeria, future practitioners and theorists would nevertheless reach for their Trinquier and Galula for insight. Read Peterson’s work (and his 2015 War on the Rocks take as well):

“Networking the Counterrevolution: The École Supérieure de Guerre, Transnational Military Collaboration, and Cold War Counterinsurgency, 1955–1975“

Over the past several decades, scholars have devoted considerable attention to tracing the influence of French counterinsurgency practices developed in Indochina and Algeria on other militaries during the Cold War. This article builds on that literature to offer an explanation for why French counterrevolutionary knowledge circulated so broadly, and to connect the French military more concretely to an emerging literature on anticommunist internationalism. At the center of French efforts, this article argues, stood the Army’s École Supérieure de Guerre (ESG) in Paris, which trained growing numbers of high-ranking foreign officers after 1945. The ESG taught counterrevolutionary warfare directly, but as this article argues, it also helped constitute an audience abroad for such ideas by cultivating affective bonds, strategic preferences, and personal connections over the longer term. In tracing the partnerships cultivated through the ESG in this period, this article also illustrates the broader entanglements between counterinsurgency, international military cooperation, and professionalization at midcentury. For military partners seeking to professionalize their own forces, the attractiveness of French doctrines lay as much in the easily accessible set of materials, training, and expertise the French military offered as in their capacity to combat subversion. By tracing the transnational networks of exchange knit together by military academies in this period, this article concludes, scholars can better historicize the rise of counterinsurgency as a key paradigm of cold warfare.

A couple recent, valuable pieces on the evolution of Myanmar’s war in Frontier Myanmar:

‘Fear causes more hate’: Beheadings haunt Myanmar’s heartland

“The country has seen a grisly surge in beheadings since the coup – with both pro-military and anti-military figures targeted – a pattern observers say reflects the military’s brutality and the subsequent rage of the people it oppresses.”

‘This small flame’: Hunted and cash-strapped Yangon guerrillas vow to continue struggle

A core group of committed urban fighters continue to wage a guerrilla war against the military, despite mass arrests, civilian casualties, limited success and dwindling financial support.