Military maladaptation : counterinsurgency and the politics of failure

Tactical learning is critical to battlefield success, especially in a counterinsurgency. This article tests the existing model of military adaption against a ‘most-likely’ case: the British Army’s counterinsurgency in the Southern Cameroons (1960–61). Despite meeting all preconditions thought to enable adaptation – decentralization, leadership turnover, supportive leadership, poor organizational memory, feedback loops, and a clear threat – the British still failed to adapt. Archival evidence suggests politicians subverted bottom-up adaptation, because winning came at too high a price in terms of Britain’s broader strategic imperatives. Our finding identifies an important gap in the extant adaptation literature: it ignores politics.PostprintPeer reviewe

Situating 1816, the ‘year without summer’, in the UK

The immediate local impacts of the eruption of Mount Tambora, Sumbawa, Indonesia in April 1815 were devastating, resulting in the loss of an estimated 60 000 lives on this and neighbouring islands. However, the longer term effects of the largest known historical eruption on global weather and climate and the related consequences for human health and wellbeing have maintained the prominence of the eruption in public memory. Among the most notable effects were global weather anomalies the following year, which has come to be referred to as ‘the year without summer’. Scholars across the sciences and humanities continue to investigate the eruption, seeking insights into the likely meteorological and societal impacts of future volcanic eruptions. The bicentenary of the ‘year without summer’ in 2016 provides a timely moment to revisit this weather episode. In this paper, we draw on a range of archival materials and contemporary publications to reconstruct the weather year and explore how the summer of 1816 was experienced and recorded across the UK. We also wish to demonstrate the importance of historical contingency in understanding the potential implications of the event at the local level, and of situating events within their appropriate temporal context. We do this by considering the summer of 1816 as set against the wider weather and cultural contexts of the 1810s. Our findings illustrate that in a UK context, summer 1816 was characterised by unusual and extreme weather events. Importantly it also took place within a sequence of years that were similarly replete with anomalous and challenging weather conditions

On the Trail to Increased Client Protection: Attorney Contingent Fee Contract Termination in Light of Hoover v. Walton Recent Development.

Abstract Forthcoming

On the Trail to Increased Client Protection: Attorney Contingent Fee Contract Termination in Light of Hoover v. Walton Recent Development.

Abstract Forthcoming

Reading Clausewitz, reimagining the practice of strategy

Strategy and organization theory enjoy a reawakening interest in historical analysis. In this essay we suggest that this engagement should include strategy’s linkage to the history of military strategy. We develop our argument through an exegesis of Carl von Clausewitz’ treatise On War. We claim that Clausewitz’ theorization of strategy advances the ongoing scholarly conversation on the practice of strategy in three specific ways. First, he defines a distinctive locus for the notion of strategy as the bridge between policy and tactics; in so doing he addresses what has been criticized as strategy’s conceptual drift. Second, with Clausewitz we can pose the question of strategy’s effectiveness in a critical, reflexive way. This opens up a way to answer the “so-what” question that has hampered strategy as practice research. Third, as an educator in military affairs of the Crown Prince, Clausewitz invites reflection on strategy’s pedagogy. Following Clausewitz, strategy may not want to concern itself with distilling the next practice from past history; but immerse strategy students in great detail in history in order to develop their critical faculties

The logic of tact:How decisions happen in situations of crisis

The mass-migration of refugees in the fall 2015 posed an immense humanitarian and logistical challenge: exhausted from their week-long journeys, refugees arrived in Vienna in need of care, shelter, food, medical aid, and onward transport. The refugee crisis was managed by an emerging polycentric and inter-sectoral collective of organizations. In this paper, we investigate how, during such a situation, leaders of these organizations made decisions in concert with each other and hence sustained the collective's capacity to act collectively. We ask: what was the logic of decision-making that orchestrated collective action during the crisis? In answering this question, we make the following contribution: departing from March's logics of consequences and appropriateness as well as Weick's work on sensemaking during crisis, we introduce an alternative logic that informed decision-making: the logic of tact. With this concept we (a) offer a better understanding of how managers make decisions under the condition of bounded rationality and the simultaneous transgression of their institutional identity in situations of crisis; and we (b) show that in decision-making under duress cognition is neither ahead of action, nor is action ahead of cognition; rather, tact explicates the rapid switching between cognition and action, orchestrating decision-making through this interplay

Conflict as a Part of the Bargaining Process

This paper investigates the use of conflict as a bargaining instru-ment. It first revises the arguments explaining the role of confrontation as a source of information and its use during negotiations. Then it of-fers evidence illustrating this phenomenon by analyzing a sample of colonial and imperial wars. The second part of the paper explores a bargaining model with one-sided incomplete information. Parties can choose the scope of the confrontation they may want to engage in: An absolute conflict that terminates the game or a limited conflict that only introduces delay and conveys information about the even-tual outcome of the absolute one. It is shown that confrontation has a double-edged effect: It may paradoxically open the door to agreement when the uninformed party is so optimistic that no agreement is feasi-ble. But it can also create inefficiency when agreement is possible but the informed agent has an incentive to improve her bargaining position by fighting

Terrain, politics, history

This article is based on the 2019 Dialogues in Human Geography plenary lecture at the Royal Geographical Society. It has four parts. The first discusses my work on territory in relation to recent work by geographers and others on the vertical, the volumetric, the voluminous, and the milieu as ways of thinking space in three-dimensions, of a fluid and dynamic earth. Second, it proposes using the concept of terrain to analyse the political materiality of territory. Third, it adds some cautions to this, through thinking about the history of the concept of terrain in geographical thought, which has tended to associate it with either physical or military geography. Finally, it suggests that this work is a way geographers might begin to respond to the challenge recently made by Bruno Latour, where he suggests that ‘belonging to a territory is the phenomenon most in need of rethinking and careful redescription; learning new ways to inhabit the Earth is our biggest challenge’. Responding to Latour continues this thinking about the relations between territory, Earth, land, and ground, and their limits