Violent Politics: Irregular War and Western Response from Mao to the Islamic State

Martin Clemis, Command and General Staff College

Throughout history, politics has been a primary method for solving conflict. War has been another. Violent politics – a method that involves a mixture of political and military means and resides somewhere between war and peace – constitutes a third. Over the past century, this third way has been the most prevalent. Despite the massive conflagrations of the First and Second World Wars and other large-scale conventional conflicts, the prevailing form of armed conflict around the globe has been regional irregular wars involving revolution, guerrilla war, terrorism, insurgency and Western responses to these phenomenon. This course examines the most dominant manifestations of violent politics to occur over the past sixty years: communist revolutionary wars of national liberation during the Cold War, transnational jihad and global insurgency in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and Western reactions to both.