Clausewitz and African War: Politics and Strategy in Liberia and Somalia

Military Review,  July-August, 2005  by Robert M. Cassidy

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CLAUSEWITZ AND AFRICAN WAR: Politics and Strategy in Liberia and Somalia, Isabelle Duyvesteyn, Frank Cass Publishers, London, 2004, 160 pages, $115.00.

Clausewitz and African War: Politics and Strategy in Liberia and Somalia lies at the intersection of political science and war studies. Originally a doctoral dissertation at King's College, London, this work is now recast as a book. Its author, Isabelle Duyvesteyn, is a lecturer at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

Prima facie, this book seems germane to the military reader since its title implies an analysis of failed states and small wars, and an argument in favor of or against the continued relevance of the theories of military strategist Carl von Clausewitz. However, this book is only of marginal use to Military Review's readers because it offers a somewhat self-evident and nearly tautological framework for analysis.

Duyvesteyn's principal aim is to refute the notion that Clausewitz's work is irrelevant to non-Trinitarian wars by proving that these wars are essentially Trinitarian. Her comparative analysis focuses on the wars in Liberia and Somalia during the early 1990s.

The book begins with a short explanation of Trinitarian war, non-Trinitarian war, and Duyvesteyn's hypotheses. She provides short overviews of the conflicts in Liberia and Somalia, which any military reader familiar with those conflicts can rapidly skim. Three chapters analyze and compare the wars through the lenses of three stated variables: political actors, political interests, and political instruments in the context of conventional war. The book concludes with policy implications for similar future interventions. Although some of Duyvesteyn's proposed solutions to these implications are rather Pollyanna-ish, this section of the book is most relevant to military professionals. Principally, Duyvesteyn argues that the three components of the Clausewitzian trinity--the state, the army, and the people--are still present in wars with nonstate armed groups in failed states.

Duyvesteyn substitutes the idea of "political actors" for the actual legal entity of the state. Her supporting postulation is that actors undertaking armed conflict in failed states are in fact political actors who fight for political interests, pursue political interests, use military force as a political instrument, and fight conventionally. Curiously, perhaps to complete Clausewitz's timing, she considers it necessary to prove that the factions in these types of wars fight conventionally. For example, she says: "The use of the military instrument for political purposes in a conventional manner will further prove the continuing validity of Clausewitzian thinking."

Clausewitz and African War describes topical subjects. Its analysis of these wars raises issues and challenges that the U.S. military is still confronting in Afghanistan and Iraq. The conclusion poses three principal questions: What do you do with the leaders of armed factions? Do you disarm them or establish security first? How do you win over a population that has been brutalized by conflict? Duyvesteyn also emphasizes the enduring questions of conflict that must be answered before the United States and other Western militaries undertake these types of interventions: Who is fighting, why are they fighting, and how are they fighting?

The book has two flaws that make reading a bit onerous: Duyvesteyn uses passive voice and her syntactical constructs are bothersome. Also, she poses a theoretical framework that postulates that Clausewitz is still germane to non-Trinitarian war by attempting to demonstrate that two such wars were in fact Trinitarian, which seems somewhat tautological.

LTC Robert M. Cassidy, USA, Kuwait

COPYRIGHT 2005 U.S. Army CGSC
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning