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While information warfare (IW) has been treated by its foremost western proponents as a strategic revolution, the reasons for such a claim are actually rather weak if one considers how non-western approaches to the informational components of warfare have put forth their positions within a multidimensional context of strategy. This article ventures an Asian perspective that can potentially offer a more nuanced contribution to the study of IW. This article will pan out by first critically analyzing the predominantly American interpretation of IW as a set of five characteristics that can be contrasted to an Asian rival. Subsequently, we will elaborate a list of features likely to characterize a generic Asian IW approach, which I will argue, is more appropriately termed information operations (IO). These Asian IO features will be teased out through a reading of Sun Tzu, Mao Zedong, and Vo Nguyen Giap. An Asian IO approach will not distinguish wartime and peacetime applications, and neither will it place a premium on liberal democratic ideology as a basis for information superiority. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

“Small wars” have returned to the international political agenda in the early twentieth century with almost a vengeance. Leaving aside the factors of social media and satellite television today, the nature of small wars has adhered to its politicized, xenophobic, and asymmetrical characteristics. The latter were predicted by British and American military manuals produced in the early to middle twentieth century. This special issue aims to revisit the nature of small wars in the era of great power interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya in the 2000s. It will be apparent that two further characteristics need to be appended to small wars: chameleonic missions and virtual aggression. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Contemporary research on the international relations of Southeast Asia has neglected the latent possibilities of reading non-western indigenous forms of international relations as a contribution to worldwide debates on the nature of international politics. Drawing on one precolonial account of Southeast Asian political practices in the Malay Archipelago, the Sejarah Melayu, this article proposes that Southeast Asians have previously philosophized about “intersocietal relations” in ways that privilege noble prowess, knowledge quests, and hierarchical justice through the interdependence of trade and culture within the region, and with India, China, and the Arab world. These features can still speak to contemporary relations between peoples rather than states and to security issues within borderless regions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]