post-Cold War World Research Articles

Standing by the Ruins: Elegiac Humanism in Wartime and Postwar Lebanon

Standing by the Ruins: Elegiac Humanism in Wartime and Postwar Lebanon

Working towards critical realism: Scientific man, power politics and democratic decline

Morgenthau’s characterizations of the politics among nations in the twentieth century remain a contested, but still compelling, vision of international relations in the twenty-first century. Hence, different strains of ‘critical theory’ are needed as the means of crisis detection, interpretation and legitimation. Without accepting the terms of Morgenthau’s analysis uncritically, this article looks at how critical theory insights, as developed in different streams of Frankfurt School-inspired critique, can arguably guide new discourse coalitions and policy experts in coping with the challenges of crises in the post-Cold War world. The contradictions posed by the inequities of social wealth’s production and distribution are profound and obdurate. Exerting verdictive power, like Morgenthau, in managing the global crises, national security challenges or financial instability conflicts, can be useful.

Permeable Borders: Lay Christians in a Changing World

Christian laity have the capacity and the opportunity to lead in the movement toward Church unity as it may appropriately be defined in the twenty-first century. The foundations for rethinking the character and role of the lay Christian must be built from fresh thinking about the nature of the changing world where the whole Church of Jesus Christ lives and works. We start by placing our thoughts about the character and role of the laity in the context of the wider world and broad human experience. We begin with this world perspective because this is the setting in which the unity of the baptized must ultimately be realized and with which smaller communities of believers must find harmony. “Go, ye, into all the world. . . .” Then we proceed to examine today’s political communities and Christian churches where Christians first form the relationships through which they work in national and international settings. New insights emerge in each of these three arenas. These three will outline our consideration of “the lay Christian in a changing world” below. • First, profound changes in how states, governments, and peoples interact in our increasingly interdependent post-Cold War world challenge traditional thinking about the capacity of states and governing authorities acting outside partnership with their own citizens to envisage new relationships.

Russia and multipolarity since the end of the Cold War

Scholarly debates about the changing nature of international power and its distribution have been an ongoing feature of the years since the end of the Cold War in 1991. Most of these have focused on the position and role of the USA in a unipolar world. In contrast, there has been relatively little discussion about the concept of multipolarity and its various possible meanings. To the extent that such debates have been evident, they have developed to a more significant extent in Russia than in other states. In these Russian debates, three distinct strands of thinking about multipolarity have become apparent. These can be termed the “confrontationalist”, “competitive”, and “concert-based” views of multipolarity in the post-Cold War world.

Investigating Lebanon's Political Murders: International Idealism in the Realist Middle East?

This article reviews the investigation of Lebanon's 2004-2008 string of assassinations, a novel international venture precipitated by the February 2005 assassination of former prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri. It argues that shifting realist and idealist impulses on the international level, alongside a vicious struggle in Lebanon, allowed the intrusion of international justice in the form of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL), although with meager results up to late 2012. The impact on Lebanon of the uprising in Syria against the Asad regime, a prime suspect in Lebanese assassinations, has both overshadowed the affair and raised the stakes involved in the STL's pursuit of it.Between October 2004 and January 2008, Lebanon endured a series of assassinations and attempted murders of salient local personalities. Those targeted encompassed nine politicians, two journalists, and three security officials, attacked in 13 incidents with a total casualty toll of 58 dead and at least 335 wounded. The most prominent victim was former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri, murdered in a spectacular bombing that demolished a street in central Beirut on February 14, 2005. On the reasonable assumption that the incidents were interconnected, the series of political murders in Lebanon 2004-2008 represented the most dramatic assassination campaign in the post-Cold War world, threatening the Lebanese pluralist political system. From the outset, suspicion centered on the Syrian ruling clique, from whom Hariri and his Lebanese Sunni, Christian, and Druze partners had become estranged, and blame later encompassed Syria's Lebanese Shi'a ally Hizbullah.The Hariri assassination led to a UN investigation and a special international/Lebanese tribunal to prosecute those responsible for the Hariri murder and crimes that the tribunal might find to be connected to the Hariri assassination and similar to it in nature and gravity.1 On one level this involved importing international justice - the essence of liberal idealist aspiration for a principled world order - into the brutally realist political jungle of the region, where everything can be reduced to interest and where only zero-sum games of winners and losers are taken seriously. On another level the story has been more complex. Supporters of international investigation and justice have exhibited a shifting mix of realist and idealist impulses; its enemies have claimed victimhood in an unfair world of selective justice while implementing the ferocious realist maneuvers of fingered suspects. This article explores international embroilment in Lebanese political murders and the intermingling of idealist and realist dimensions in the unfolding affair. American diplomatic documents illicitly released into the public arena by WikiLeaks confirm the account derived from conventional sources.Goldsmith and Posner, in The Limits of International Law, propose that international law and institutions simply reflect state interests and rational choices of states following their interests.2 Realism trumps idealism. The argument in this article suggests that among Western states and other countries with pluralist politics, currently the majority in the international community, realism mingles with an impulse toward a standards-based international order. This impulse arises from public and political opinion that cares about human rights.3 International involvement in Lebanon's political murder saga has been characterized by the chance convergence of the interests of major powers with a more principled, idealist concern for international norms.IDEALIST AND REALIST IMPULSES IN LEBANON'S MURDER CRISISTaking responsibility for dealing with Lebanese political murders represented a new departure for the international community and occurred because of a unique conjunction of international conditions in early 2005. French and American interests at the moment regarding Syria gave international moral outrage a critical boost toward action, a conjunction of realism with idealism. …

An Asymmetric Counter to the Asymmetric Threat

ABSTRACT That a deeply religious nation like the United States should have such difficulty addressing the religious challenges of the post–cold war world is more than a little ironic. Two reasons for this situation stand out: (1) a proclivity for using our separation of church and state as an excuse for not working to understand how religion informs the worldviews and political aspirations of those who do not similarly separate the two and (2) the long-standing exclusion of religious considerations from our policy deliberations. Religious extremism married to weapons of mass destruction only makes more urgent the need to bridge this gap. One approach that shows unusual promise is a new form of engagement called faith-based diplomacy, which capitalizes on commonly shared religious values to bridge differences between adversaries. This article describes how faith-based diplomacy is being used in Pakistan to deal with the ideas behind the guns.

Sites of Contestation: What Apology Debates Tell Us about International Relations: Sorry States: Apologies in International Politics; Troubled Apologies among Japan, Korea, and the United States

Some scholars have stated that an “age of apology” began in the 1990s (Brooks 1999: 3)—that apologies now are considered standard and beneficial practice in business, domestic politics, and international affairs. Some praise this trend, seeing it as a sign that a new space has opened up in the post-Cold War world for moral concerns and “national self-reflexivity” (Barkan 2000: xvii).1 Such scholars and other commentators see a great deal of potential in apology to change relationships for the better.2 While more discussions public apologies occurred in the 1990s,3 however, it is unclear what this change means. After all, despite the increase in discussion, official apologies remain relatively rare, particularly regarding thorny historical issues (such as the Japanese regarding their imperial period or the United States regarding slavery).

Strategic Cooperation without Mutual Trust: A Path Forward for China and the United States

Strategic Cooperation without Mutual Trust:A Path Forward for China and the United States Yan Xuetong (bio) Both Chinese and American strategists have observed that the rebalancing strategy adopted by the Obama administration in 2010 has not only failed to improve mutual trust between China and the United States but also undermined their strategic confidence in each other. Many policy analysts have further argued that this lack of mutual trust is a crucial obstacle to the development of strategic cooperation, particularly at a time when both countries are undergoing leadership transitions. This belief is so popular that it overshadows all the examples of strategic cooperation between major powers without mutual trust. The United Kingdom, for example, established strategic cooperation with the Soviet Union based on the common interest of defeating Nazi Germany in World War II. China and the United States likewise developed strategic cooperation in the 1970s even though Mao Zedong did not trust Richard Nixon. With the possible exception of the U.S.-Britain partnership, hardly any strategic cooperation between the United States and a major power has been based more on mutual trust than on shared interests. Thus, even though the U.S. rebalancing strategy has eroded mutual trust between China and the United States, it is still possible for these two giants to develop strategic cooperation in the coming years. Chinese realists argue that the U.S. rebalancing strategy is driven by two factors. The first factor is China's rise. The United States wants to maintain its status as the only superpower, and China's rise challenges the unipolar configuration of the post-Cold War world. The second factor is the possible shift of the world center from Europe to East Asia, which is directly related to the first factor. Although Japan boasted the second-largest economy in the world for more than two decades, the global balance of power remained centered on the West. In contrast with Japan's modernization during the Cold War, China's rise as a comprehensive national power since 2002 has increased the possibility that East Asia will replace Europe as the economic and political center of the world. Faced with this trend, the United States seeks to strengthen its position in East Asia rather than see its global leadership role weakened. [End Page 4] Beijing thus believes that the U.S. rebalancing strategy aims at constraining China from becoming the dominant power in East Asia, in spite of assurances from Washington that the strategy does not target China. Yet faced with this policy, mainstream Chinese strategists continue to regard mutual trust as a precondition for strategic cooperation between Beijing and Washington and worry that the lack of mutual trust will undermine bilateral relations and increase the risk of war. This view is actually shared by Washington. Communication is seen as an effective approach for improving mutual trust. For instance, with the exception of Vice President Xi Jinping, who had injured his back, all of China's national leaders met with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during her visit to China in September 2012, even though they knew these meetings could not result in any common understanding. The Chinese government similarly values the U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue (S&ED) because it believes that this mechanism can help improve mutual trust with the United States. In fact, the S&ED is less useful for improving mutual trust than it is for finding common or complementary interests between the two countries. Chinese realists agree with the mainstream strategists that growing competition between China and the United States is inevitable as the gap in comprehensive national power narrows between the two countries. With China poised to become a superpower second only to the United States by 2022, the strategic competition between them will likely only intensify and proliferate into more sectors. Yet Chinese realists have confidence that selfish interests, such as the desire to avoid military clashes between two nuclear powers, will encourage U.S.-China cooperation, especially preventive cooperation. As long as both sides are vigilant, they can keep their competition peaceful. Consider, for example, that the disputes between China and Japan over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands have had...

From Recipient to Donor: The Case of Polish Developmental Cooperation

Research on development aid has focused on Western powers—the global South's 20th century colonial masters—largely ignoring the practices of donors who are not members of the West-dominated Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and its Development Assistance Committee (DAC). This article informs about the world of non-DAC donors, through examining Polish development aid and its sociocultural foundations. Since around 2000, Poland has been defined as an Emerging Donor. I argue that this category reflects contemporary shifts in global power relations and Poland's attempts to rearrange itself within the post-Cold War world order. For Poland, a country still battling its image as a Second World aid recipient detached from global relations, attempts to reverse the aid chain and constitute an effort to redefine its position within the global hierarchy of givers and receivers. This article explores how the modalities of Poland's international involvement as a donor are shaped by its past expe...

NATO and Turkey in the post-Cold War world: between abandonment and entrapment

For the last two decades, two fears have largely shaped Turkey’s view of NATO. These are fears of entrapment and abandonment. Both are symptoms of a type of security dilemma that is peculiar to military alliances and coalitions. Both fears had their origins in the Cold War in the context of Turkey’s 60-year-old NATO membership. They also led to the pursuit of autonomy in Turkish foreign policy both as a response strategy and as a strategic choice in its own right. While the former version featured a heavy dose of reliance on military means or hard power, the latter version de-emphasized the military option in foreign policy and relied instead on soft power. A multitude of dynamics accounts for variations in the Turkish approach to NATO for the last two decades: Geography and regional considerations, the transatlantic dynamics, NATO’s restructuring and transformation and Turkey’s domestic dynamics. It may be suggested that NATO membership now looms large in the strategic calculations of the new Turkish elite in the aftermath of the Arab Awakening. This development might be the harbinger of the end of an era marked by fears and the pursuit of autonomy in Turkey’s approach to NATO.

Managing great powers in the post-Cold War world: old rules new game? The case of the global war on terror

This article investigates the impact of the Global War on Terror (GWoT) on the primary institution of great power management. To this end, it first identifies a misalignment between the new post-Cold War social reality and the capacity of some traditional norms of great power management to mediate this reality. Having established and described this environment of normative uncertainty, I then probe how the GWoT propels the consolidation of new identities and norms of great power management in interstate society. I argue that since the beginning of the GWoT the primary institution of great power management has institutionalized new norms to address transnational violence within its processes. At the same time, as hard balancing amongst great powers is becoming increasingly obsolete, two distinct social structures have been constructed with the GWoT: one that privileges an inequitable social structure of friends/rivals amongst states; and another that shapes a social structure of enemies with regard to terrorist–state relations. In this process, the capacity of managing transnational violence globally has increasingly become one of the central constitutive elements of being a great power. I conclude by demonstrating how the GWoT has acted as a subtle ‘bargaining bid’ in the process of organizing the current social meaning of polarity and great power management amongst states. State practices under the GWoT have delineated, in a clearer form, underlying expectations about the pattern of interactions between the superpower and great powers. Consequently, the GWoT has exerted a symbolic and psychological impact over international society by institutionalizing not only a specific meaning of unipolarity but also further raising the threshold of what is acceptable behaviour on the part of the superpower within an interstate social structure of friends/rivals.

Introduction

Defense diplomacy is a relatively new phenomenon aimed at addressing the strategic complexity and uncertainty of the post–Cold War world. It has hitherto received little analytical attention where defense relations in Southeast Asia are concerned. Our article seeks to redress that lack. Borrowing from historical and contemporary debates on diplomacy, we offer a working definition of defense diplomacy that distinguishes its pragmatic and transformative aspects. Building on the four articles that follow, we suggest that bilateral and multilateral engagements in defense diplomacy by Asian countries have primarily been pragmatic in form and function, aimed at maintaining peaceful and stable regional relations. Our modest contribution is hopefully a useful start to what could in time become a meaningful debate and cumulative knowledge on defense diplomacy.

Terrorism and news of Africa post-9/11 coverage in The New York Times

Western media coverage of the world decreased considerably in the post-Cold War world. The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 and the western response appeared, to a limited degree, to have contributed to some renewed media interest in the outside world – primarily the parts of it that were seen as threatening western interests. But to what degree has this applied to Africa, a part of the world that has been perhaps most consistently marginalized by both policy-makers and the media? Did media coverage of Africa in the West rise following 9/11? If so, to what degree was this rise attributable to issues of terrorism or the response? Furthermore, was coverage of Africa related to terrorism focused primarily on western concerns or did they apply to a broader variety of terrorism in Africa? With a particular focus on the United States, this study aims to answer these questions using quantitative analysis of coverage of Africa by The New York Times pre- and post 9/11.

Os “combatentes inimigos” e o governo Bush: as relações entre Executivo, Legislativo e Judiciário entre 2001 e 2008

O ataque às Torres Gêmeas, em 11 de setembro de 2001, encerrou a expectativa instituída com o fim da Guerra Fria de um modelo de sociedade voltado para a valorização da economia de mercado e da democracia liberal. É neste novo cenário que se pretende compreender como as instituições domésticas americanas afetaram a atuação dos Estados Unidos no cenário internacional. O que se pretende demonstrar neste artigo é que o 11de setembro não apenas constituiu um elemento de ruptura da ordem estabelecida no plano doméstico ao longo da história do país, como também permitiu, ainda que por um breve período, a instauração de um desequilíbrio entre as instituições americanas, no qual o Executivo ocupou um espaço significativo em relação aos outros poderes. Esse desequilíbrio foi restaurado pelas decisões proferidas pela Suprema Corte dos EUA, também objeto de análise deste trabalho.

Turkish Foreign Policy

The expansion and the new directions of Turkish foreign policy over the last decade have generated a lively debate in domestic and foreign policy circles, among diplomats, analysts, academics, journalists, and businesspeople, and in civil society. The debate revolves around the transformation of Turkey's foreign policy agenda against the backdrop of major shifts in regional and global power structures. Various questions, some well informed and others rather rhetorical, are posed to assess Turkey's standing in global politics.Are Turkey's recent engagements in multiple regions a new phenomenon generated and sustained by the ruling Justice and Development party's (AKP's) domestic agenda? Is Turkey's newfound interest in the Middle East and the larger Muslim world a result of the Islamization of Turkey, as some critics claim? Has Turkey given up on the European Union and thus its traditional alliance with the west? Also, has Turkey found a balance between actor and structure, i.e., does the current foreign policy amount to more than the individual, self-proclaimed initiatives of successive AKP governments? Finally, is Turkey a model for the Arab world? These questions require a proper analysis of the major changes that have taken place in Turkey's own domestic scene, its surrounding regions, and the global order in the first decade of the 2ist century. In an age of increasing interdependence, local and global dynamics affect each other and bring about new synergies. Turkey's adjustment to the post-Cold War world and the challenges of globalization has taken various forms, ranging from a heightened sense of insecurity and new types of nationalism to embracing globalization and exploring new diplomatic and economic tools. While Europe and the US generally treated Turkey as a military ally under NATO during much of the Cold War, the new realities of volatile globalization and multiple modernities have both enabled and forced Turkey to reinvent itself as a new political, economic, and diplomatic power.1 In addition to pursuing EU membership as a strategic goal, even though not much progress has been made since 2005, Turkey has been diversifying its foreign policy agenda in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and engaging in multiple regional issues. Turkey is also rising as a soft power with a strong economy, a young population, and new cultural ties with the peoples of the Middle East and the Balkans.2To understand why and how Turkish foreign policy is transforming, I shall examine three interrelated issues. The first is the reasons behind the new dynamism in Turkey's foreign policy thinking and action. The elements that drive Turkey's new strategic thinking and modes of action need to be explained within the larger context of the new geostrategic environment in which Turkey has found itself in the 2ist century. The second is the overarching goals and principles of the new mindset that has propelled Turkey into new areas of expansion, engagement, risk-taking, and influence. These goals and principles display both change and continuity and shape Turkey's new ventures on a number of regional and global issues. The third is the instruments and mechanisms that Turkey employs in realizing its foreign policy goals. The successive AKP governments since 2002 have implemented a number of policies, including developing stronger bilateral relations, lifting visa requirements, establishing high strategic councils, and increasing Turkey's mediation efforts.My main argument is that while adjusting itself to the ever-changing dynamics of 21st-century globalization, Turkey operates from a broad foreign policy perspective that combines elements of constructivist and realist approaches to global politics and international relations. Turkey projects its sense of identity and history into its regional and global engagements, seeks to pursue a value-based and principled foreign policy, and responds to the hard realities of power struggles and national interest. …

The Trial of Peter Von Hagenbach: Reconciling History, Historiography, and International Criminal Law

It is an article of faith among transnational penal experts that Sir Peter von Hagenbach's 1474 prosecution in Breisach for atrocities committed serving the Duke of Burgundy constitutes the first international war crimes trial in history. Hagenbach was tried before an ad hoc tribunal of twenty-eight judges from various regional city-states for misdeeds, including murder and rape, he allegedly perpetrated as governor of the Duke's Alsatian territories from 1469 to 1474. Though it remains obscure in the popular imagination, most legal scholars perceive the trial as a landmark event. Some value it for formulating an embryonic version of crimes against humanity. Others praise it for ostensibly charging rape as a war crime. And all are in agreement that it is the first recorded case in history to reject the defense of superior orders. Such a perspective has arguably helped invest the Nuremberg trials with greater historical legitimacy and lent subtle sanction to the development of international criminal law in the post-Cold War world. But the legal literature typically deals with the trial in very cursory fashion and its stature as pre-Nuremberg precedent may hinge on faulty assumptions. As the 1990s explosion of ad hoc tribunal activity is nearing its end and the legal academy is taking stock of its accomplishments and failures, it is perhaps time to look more closely at the Hagenbach trial. This piece does that by digging below the surface and revisiting some of the historical and legal premises underlying the trial's perception by legal academics. In the main, international law specialists have relied on older historical accounts to conclude that Hagenbach's service as Burgundy's Alsatian bailiff constituted a five-year reign of terror that culminated in a legitimate and ground-breaking atrocity conviction. But revisionist historians tend to see Hagenbach's ordeal not as a good-faith justice enterprise but rather as a show trial meant to rebuff the territorial ambitions of Sir Peter's master, Charles the Bold. They emphasize that liability was grounded on confessions obtained through torture. And while they concede that Hagenbach may have been boorish and autocratic, they note that the first few years of his rule were relatively pacific and the 1474 uprising against Sir Peter was primarily a reaction to attempted Burgundian regional encroachments and perceived feudal suppression of growing urban and bourgeois prerogatives. The trial itself, they point out, was not international at all as the men who sat in judgment of Hagenbach were all subjects of the Holy Roman Empire. Nor was it a war crimes trial, since there was no armed conflict at the time the alleged atrocities took place. But there are shortcomings in the revisionist analysis as well. The high level of animosity shown Hagenbach, as demonstrated by the severity of the torture and the stripping of his knighthood, indicate that the atrocity allegations may not be unfounded. Moreover, there is evidence that Burgundy's occupation of the territory was hostile and so the charges against Hagenbach may very well be considered war crimes. Finally, by 1474, the Holy Roman Empire was no longer a viable political entity and so the ad hoc tribunal may indeed have been international in nature. It is no coincidence that such a unique event took place between the erosion of medieval hegemony and the imminent establishment of Westphalian sovereignty. Not until the Westphalian veil was pierced by the Nuremberg trials nearly five hundred years later, did the subject of the Hagenbach trial take on contemporary relevance in the legal literature. In the end, the piece concludes that while some of its details may be lost in the mists of time and its legal status may remain muddled in theoretic gray zones, the Hagenbach trial should continue to play an important role as an historic and conceptual pillar of international criminal law's pre-history.

The ‘God Gap’ in International Humanitarian Law: Lessons Learned from Islamic Jurisprudence

This essay bridges security and legal studies to show how contemporary debate over humanitarian legal norms today in both Islamic and international law traditions is a response to tectonic shifts in global conflict patterns now occurring in the post-9/11 security environment. If these shifts have helped raise these legal norms and their gaps to new heights of global discussion, this reflexive moment is overwhelmingly positive — provided that such attention, particularly in the Islamic context, is framed in ways adequate to the complexity of our changing international security environment. While it may sound facile to point out the obvious, that we are no longer living in a post-World War or even post-Cold War world, the fact of the matter is that both legal regimes are playing a role, albeit for different audiences, in reframing international security questions today — with implications for national and international security policies. This transnational role, as legal historian Wael Hallaq notes, is and has always been a distinctive feature of law in the Islamic tradition. The result is not only a commonality, but a symmetry to the challenges these legal regimes embody today: heightened interest in humanitarian law is, at bottom, a means to bring into discussion new and changing ethical standards to bear on new species of armed conflict.

Britain and genocide: historical and contemporary parameters of national responsibility

AbstractThis article (originally given as the Annual War Studies Lecture at King's College, London, on 25 January 2010) challenges the assumption that Britain's relationship to genocide is constituted by its ‘vigilance’ towards the genocide of others. Through a critical overview of the question of genocide in the historical and contemporary politics of the British state and society, the article suggests their wide-ranging, complex relationships to genocide. Utilising a conception of genocide as multi-method social destruction and applying the interpretative frames of the genocide literature, it argues that the British state and elements of identifiably British populations have been involved directly and indirectly in genocide in a number of different international contexts. These are addressed through five themes: the role of genocide in the origins of the British state; the problem of genocide in the Empire and British settler colonialism; Britain's relationships to twentieth-century European genocide; its role in the genocidal violence of decolonisation; and finally, Britain's role in the genocidal crises of the post-Cold War world. The article examines the questions of national responsibility that this survey raises: while rejecting simple ideas of national responsibility as collective guilt, it nevertheless argues that varying kinds of responsibility for genocide attach to British institutions, leaders and population groups at different points in the history surveyed.

International Law from a Machiavellian Perspective

Machiavelli leaves one with both an optimistic and a pessimistic prognostication for the post-Cold War world. On the one hand, the end of that conflict has opened the way for the spread of liberal, constitutional regimes, which he would say are inclined to be more and more meticulous in honoring their commitments. On the other, the temptation to use force to create new facts and thereby force international law into new paths will remain as long as politics is practiced. The contemporary relevance of Machiavelli may be seen in that he urged both realities upon us. I focus on a single incident that postdated the end of the Cold War—the show of force by the People's Republic of China (PRC) in the Taiwan Strait in March 1996.

Lost through non-translation: bringing Clausewitz's writings on ‘new wars’ back in

While Carl von Clausewitz has generally been respected as one of the most profound philosophers of war, his expertise has been regarded as somewhat limited if not even irrelevant to the so-called ‘new wars’ of the post-Cold War world. Many scholars in international relations have claimed that ‘new wars’ are essentially ‘post-Clausewitzian’ and ‘post-trinitarian’ in nature, meaning that they are no longer fathomable through a Clausewitzian framework. However Clausewitz's earlier writings were nearly exclusively dedicated to guerrilla warfare, or what he called ‘small wars’. These writings have been largely overlooked by many analysts of contemporary conflicts. By drawing on his rare and untranslated writings, the article uncovers a critical part of Clausewitz's expertise in asymmetric warfare and shows that, far from being irrelevant in an age where interstate warfare is increasingly being replaced by conflicts between states and semi-/non-state actors, Clausewitz's philosophical writings actually shed new light into the particular interactive dynamics generated during wars waged under conditions of asymmetry.