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Popular music was the most immediate way in which the cultural response to 9/11 manifested itself. Initially music offered a way of mourning and coping with grief. As the United States moved toward the invasion of Iraq, pop music also began to reflect the divisions in society between patriot-artists who supported the invasion, most notably in country music, and protest-artists who articulated critical attitudes to war. These anti-war songs did not attain the stature of those that characterized the era of protest during the Vietnam War, nor did they offer a musical accompaniment to a social movement with any enduring political significance. One little observed dissonance that a longitudinal survey of the musical response to political violence reveals, however, is that over time the attitudes of protest songwriters and the patriots transvalued. Ironically, interventionist "rednecks" became disillusioned with the endless wars of intervention, whilst the "protest" writers lost their voices after President Obama came to power. Ironically, icons of popular music instead turned their ire on those who voted for an anti-establishment President Trump who vowed not to involve the U.S. in further military adventures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In theory, the idea of strategy is easy to comprehend but in practice it is a hard taskmaster because it often involves calculations of political values that are rarely amenable to the kind of rationalistic application of "expert" opinion to which Western nations invariably default when considering overseas interventions. Based on remarks to the Oxford Changing Character of War Centre, this research note argues that foreign policy experts frequently find themselves out of touch with the sentiments of their own populations, which in part is responsible for the poor strategic outcomes that Western foreign policies have incurred in recent years. A number of remedies are suggested, based principally on returning Western policy making to a tradition of prudential realism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The escalation of militarized interstate disputes (MIDs) into interstate wars has been studied extensively with opportunity and willingness frameworks. In this article, we conceptualize and operationalize proto-insurgencies as a civil war equivalent to MIDs. Just as most MIDs do not escalate into interstate war, most proto-insurgencies never make the key tactical transitions needed to produce the onset of civil war. We separately examine proto-insurgency formation and proto-insurgency escalation to onset. We find that proto-insurgency formation is associated with political persecution, such as denial of access to justice, regime corruption, and mid-range levels of repression. Our theoretical focus is on how state repressive violence creates diffusion effects that push proto-insurgencies toward the tactical transitions that enable the escalation to civil war. Proto-insurgency escalation to civil war onset is driven by high levels of state repressive violence directed against proto-insurgency and its area of origin. This leads to the dispersal of proto-insurgents and the displacement of surrounding populations, inducing the spread of state repression to a larger number of administrative units. This creates the foundation for guerrilla warfare and establishes the conditions for rebels to offer sanctuary to displaced persons in return for active support, marking the onset of civil war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since its substantive development after the Second World War, Strategic Studies has seen different waves of research foci, each rising as the other declines. This special issue uses a 'fashion' lens to analyse these frequent thematical shifts and their related conceptual creations. It looks at both long-term and short-term changes in strategic thought, addressing changes in content and their underlying dynamics and patterns. This issue contributes to our understanding of the history and sociology of Strategic Studies, but also sheds new light on recent debates in the field, including on hybrid warfare, counterinsurgency, and cyber war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The North-West Frontier of British India, a semi-independent mountainous borderland, was the site of continuous Pukhtun armed struggle against colonial intrusion throughout the nineteenth century and into the first half of the twentieth. Persistent tribal armed attacks and major rebellions were followed by 'butcher and bolt' or 'burn and scuttle' British military expeditions, including one of the biggest Victorian small wars–the Tirah Campaign of 1897/98. Two features are particularly distinctive about the Pukhtun insurgencies: 1) The fierce and consistent nature of Pukhtun opposition to the encroaching British military state; 2) The insurgents' success in warding off annexation and inflicting decisive military defeat time and time again propelled the colonial state into an ongoing reflexive about its failure to 'pacify' the region and control the tribes. Focusing on Afridi insurgency in the nineteenth century, this article examines some themes that draw attention to causes, grievances, and toward the insurgent actors. While our fleeting glimpses into insurgents motives and actions come largely from colonial accounts of counter-insurgency operations, by drawing on my extensive archival and field research in the North-West Frontier, including Afridi oral testimonies, this paper focuses its lens on the Pukhtun perspective of the North-West Frontier 'small wars'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Challenging a popular view that China's rise will lead the United States and China to fall into the 'Thucydides trap'—a possible hegemonic war between the two—this paper proposes an 'institutional peace' argument, suggesting that the ongoing international order transition will be different from previous order transitions in history. Instead of using military means to change the international order, China and the United States have relied on various institutional balancing strategies to compete with one another for an advantageous position in the future international order. The discussion on the institutional competition between China and the US around the AIIB and the ARF-related multilateral security architecture supports the 'institutional peace' argument: institutional competition in the form of institutional balancing strengthens the dynamics and utility of international institutions, encourages states to offer new public goods, and could lead to a more peaceful order transition in the international system. However, this institutional peace argument is constrained by two caveats: the continued validity of the MAD nuclear deterrence and a limited degree of ideological antagonism between the US and China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]