Scott Gates - War and State-Building in Afghanistan

Bloomsbury Studies in Military History

Series Editor:
Jeremy Black

Bloomsbury Studies in Military History offers up-to-date, scholarly accounts of war and military history. Unrestricted by period or geography, the series aims to provide freestanding works that are attuned to conceptual and historiographical developments in the field while being based on original scholarship.

Published:

The 56th Infantry Brigade and D-Day, Andrew Holborn (2010)

The RAF s French Foreign Legion, G.H. Bennett (2011)

Empire and Military Revolution in Eastern Europe, Brian Davies (2011)

Reinventing Warfare 19141918, Anthony Saunders (2011)

Fratricide in Battle, Charles Kirke (2012)

The Army in British India, Kaushik Roy (2012)

The 1711 Expedition to Quebec, Adam Lyons (2013)

Britain , Germany and the Battle of the Atlantic , Dennis Haslop (2013)

Military Transition in Early Modern Asia , 14001750 , Kaushik Roy (2014)

The Role of the Royal Navy in South America, Jon Wise (2014)

Scotland and the British Army 17001750, Victoria Henshaw (2014)

Forthcoming:

Conflict and Soldiers Literature in Early Modern Europe, Paul Scannell (2015)

Postwar Japan as a Sea Power, Alessio Patalano (2015)

Youth , Heroism and Naval Propaganda , Douglas Ronald (2015)

Reassessing the British Way in Warfare, Keith McLay (2015)

The D-Day Landing on Gold Beach, Andrew Holborn (2015)

Australasian Propaganda and the Vietnam War, Caroline Page (2015)

William Howe and the American War of Independence, David Smith (2015)

Australian Soldiers in the Boer and Vietnam Wars, Effie Karageorgos (2016)

Ivan Arregun-Toft is currently a Fellow at the Oxford Martin School at the University of Oxford, where he also serves as co-Chair of Dimension One (cyber security policy and strategy) of Oxfords Global Cyber Security Capacity Building Centre. He is also Departmental Lecturer in Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford, while on leave from his primary post as Assistant Professor of International Relations at Boston University. Arregun-Toft is an authority on asymmetric politics and conflict (insurgencycounterinsurgency and terrorism; cyber politics; gender politics; and Russian foreign policy), as well as strategy, strategic interaction and human security.

Pavel K. Baev is a Research Director and Professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo. He is also associated with the Brookings Institution (Washington, DC ) and French Institute for International Affairs ( IFRI , Paris). Support for his research on security matters from the Norwegian Defence Ministry is greatly appreciated.

Marianne Dahl is a Doctoral Researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo. She works on topics related to non-violent and violent conflict, authoritarian stability and democratic change. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Peace Research .

John Ferris is a Professor of History at the University of Calgary. He has published several books and more than 60 academic articles and chapters in books on diplomatic, intelligence and military history, as well as contemporary strategy and intelligence. His work has appeared in Diplomacy and Statecraft Historical Journal, Intelligence and National Security, International History Review, Journal of Military History and Journal of Strategic Studies .

Karsten Friis is Head of the Security and Defence Research Group at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs ( NUPI ). He holds the equivalent of an MP hil in Political Science from the University of Oslo and an MS c in International Relations from the London School of Economics.

Scott Gates is a Research Professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo and Professor of Political Science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. He has published nine books and more than 20 peer-reviewed articles. He is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Peace Research and is the Editor in Chief of the International Area Studies Review . Gates is the 2014 co-recipient of the Herbert Simon Award for the scientific study of bureaucracy. He is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters ( DNVA ) and the Royal Norwegian Society of Science and Letters ( DKNVS ). Gates current research interests include conflict dynamics and governance.

Kristian Berg Harpviken is Director of the Peace Research Institute Oslo. He is a sociologist with particular competence on wartime migration, transnational movements and mobilization, the dynamics of civil war, and on peace processes at large. Harpviken is a frequent media commentator, and has published in a wide range of academic and policy outlets. His first monograph was Social Networks and Migration in Wartime Afghanistan (2009).

Harald Hvoll is a retired Lieutenant-Colonel from the Norwegian Armed Forces and a former Head of the Armed Forces Joint Doctrine Centre. He is now a consultant and military analyst associated with the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs ( NUPI ) and Centre for International and Strategic Analysis ( SISA ) in Oslo. Hvoll is the author of the NUPI Security in Practice report no. 13 in 2008: COIN Revisited Lessons of the Classical Literature on Counterinsurgency and its Applicability to the Afghan Hybrid Insurgency.

Rob Johnson is the Director of the Oxford Changing Character of War Programme and Senior Research Fellow at Pembroke College, Oxford University. Specializing in the History of War, his principal fields of research are insurgency and counterinsurgency, strategy and conflicts in Asia and the Middle East. He is author of The Afghan Way of War (2011).

Hvard Mokleiv Nygrd is a Senior Researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo. He works on issues related to conflict, repression and democratization. Nygrds research has appeared in International Studies Quarterly, International Area Studies Review, Journal of Conflict Resolution, World Development and Terrorism and Political Violence .

Erik Reichborn-Kjennerud is a Researcher at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs specializing in military theory and strategic thinking. He holds an MA in Security Policy Studies from the George Washington University.

Kaushik Roy is Guru Nanak Professor at the Department of History, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India and Global Fellow, Peace Research Institute Oslo ( PRIO ), Norway. He has written and edited 24 books and more than 50 articles in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes.

Anne Stenersen ( MP hil, PhD) is a Research Fellow at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment ( FFI ). She has studied militant Islamism since 2006, with particular emphasis on the Al-Qaeda network and militant groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Her most recent publications include a book chapter in Talibanistan: Negotiating the Borders between Terror, Politics, and Religion , edited by Peter Bergen (2013).

Why another book on Afghanistan? The uniqueness and strength of this volume is its interdisciplinary appeal: it brings under one umbrella experts from the fields of history, sociology, political science, economics and international relations. The diversity of opinion among the contributors reflects the richness of this volume.

The Introduction has two interrelated themes. On the one hand, it provides a summary of the essays; on the other, it shows how the contributors engage with the principal debates. Some of the chapters are historical and thus based on solid archival sources. The other chapters, by sociologists, political scientists and international relations experts tend to be more theoretical in focus and follow a social science approach. We do not know of any volume on Afghanistan with such broad methodological fusion. In fact, the first essay of this edited collection is a joint product of an economist/political scientist, two political scientists and a historian. Overall, the edited collection merges regional/area studies with global studies approaches by fusing local studies against a backdrop of an international studies paradigm. Such an approach opens new vistas in the study of Afghanistan in particular and other regions in general. We hope that the select bibliography will aid further research.