About the Author\nBeatrice Heuser, Chair of International Relations, University of Glasgow\nBeatrice Heuser holds the Chair in International Relations at Glasgow University. Her degrees are from the Universities of London (BA, MA) and Oxford (DPhil), and the Philipps-University of Marburg (Habilitation). From 1991-2003 she taught at the Department of War Studies, King's College London, ultimately as Chair of International and Strategic Studies. She has also taught at Sciences Po' and the Universities Paris I, IV (Sorbonne), and VIII (St Denis), and at two German universities. From 1997-1998, she worked in the International Staff at NATO headquarters in Brussels. Between 2003-2007 she was Director for Research at the Military History Research Office of the Bundeswehr in Potsdam.\nWar has been conceptualised from a military perspective, but also from ethical, legal, and philosophical viewpoints. These different analytical perspectives are all necessary to understand the many dimensions war, the continua on which war is situated - from small-scale to large-scale, from limited in time or long, from less to extremely destructive, with varying aims, and degrees of involvement of populations. 
Western civilisations have conceptualised war in binary ways denying the variety of manifestations of war along these continua. While binary definitions are necessary to capture different conditions legally, they hamper analysis. The binaries include inter-State and intestine war, just war and unjust war (the latter including insurgencies), citizen-soldiers and professionals, civilians and combatants. Yet realities have mostly straddled such demarcations. Even citizen-armies have usually included professionals, civilians have been treated as enemies and sometimes even formally defined as enemies, and rules have not conformed with binary distinctions, if they were respected at all. While customary rules governing the conduct of war have been turned into International Law, this is the only aspect of war that has developed in a fairly linear way, while the rise, disappearance, and renaissance of the just war tradition has been anything but linear. This non-linearity also applies to the 
brutality with which war has been fought, especially towards civilians, who for long stretches of European history must have been the main victims of war, notwithstanding increasing protection they were afforded in theory by customary law. To understand war, we must shed some of these binaries.

War: A Genealogy of Western Ideas and Practices

Politics & Social Sciences

Heuser, Beatrice

Social Sciences

Oxford University Press

The Strategy Makers: Thoughts on War and Society from Machiavelli to Clausewitz (Praeger Security International)

History

Military

Praeger

This book reintroduces readers to the lives and writings of the greatest military minds of the modern era, writers whose ideas and teachings continue to shape the conduct of war in the 21st century.
The word "strategy" only came into usage in West European languages after the work of a Byzantine emperor was translated around the time of the French Revolution. Nevertheless, there was writing on strategy – relating political aims to the use of the military – also in Western Europe, well before this. This book surveys and analyzes the existing literature. It presents commented excerpts of the work of the Elizabethan writer Matthew Sutcliffe (who wrote the first modern comprehensive strategic concept) and translations into English of excerpts from the writing of the Machiavelli-admirer the Seigneur de Fourquevaux (1548) and his French compatriot Bertrand de Loque, who also went by the name of François de Saillans (1589); the Spanish diplomats and military officers Don Bernardino de Mendoza (1595) and the Third Marques of Santa Cruz de Marcenado (1724-1730); the Frenchmen Paul Hay du Chastelet (1668) and Count Guibert (1770); and the Prussian contemporary of Clausewitz, Rühle von Lilienstern (1816). 
Key concepts such as preventive war, the fight for the hearts and minds of the population to combat insurgents, the "democratic peace theory," and debates such as the preference for defense or the offensive, the desirability of battle, the purpose and function of war, the advantages of conscript or professional soldiers, can thus be shown to go back far longer than generally assumed and appear in a new light.

This book reintroduces readers to the lives and writings of the greatest military minds of the modern era, writers whose ideas and teachings continue to shape the conduct of war in the 21st century.

The Strategy Makers: Thoughts on War and Society from Machiavelli to Clausewitz: Thoughts on War and Society from Machiavelli to Clausewitz

This book argues that the immediate analysis in the West of the Tito-Stalin split was misguided and that to consider the split as a 'defection' on the part of Yugoslavia is in itself misleading. This book should be of interest to students of history and politics.

Western 'Containment' Policies in the Cold War: The Yugoslav Case, 1948-53

Politics & Government

Routledge

Is there a 'Western way of war' which pursues battles of annihilation and single-minded military victory? Is warfare on a path to ever greater destructive force? This magisterial new account answers these questions by tracing the history of Western thinking about strategy - the employment of military force as a political instrument - from antiquity to the present day. Assessing sources from Vegetius to contemporary America, and with a particular focus on strategy since the Napoleonic Wars, Beatrice Heuser explores the evolution of strategic thought, the social institutions, norms and patterns of behaviour within which it operates, the policies that guide it and the cultures that influence it. Ranging across technology and warfare, total warfare and small wars as well as land, sea, air and nuclear warfare, she demonstrates that warfare and strategic thinking have fluctuated wildly in their aims, intensity, limitations and excesses over the past two millennia.

The Evolution of Strategy: Thinking War from Antiquity to the Present

Cambridge University Press

This tightly argued and profoundly thought provoking book tackles a huge subject: the coming of the nuclear age with bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, and the ways in which it has changed our lives since. Dr Heuser sets these events in their historical context and tackles key issues about the effect of nuclear weapons on modern attitudes to conflict, and on the ethics of warfare. Ducking nothing, she demystifies the subject, seeing `the bomb' not as something unique and paralysing, but as an integral part of the strategic and moral context of our time. For a wide multidisciplinary and general readership.

The Bomb (Turning Points)

Americas

The Bomb: Nuclear Weapons in Their Historical, Strategic, and Ethical Context (Turning Points)

Longman Pub. Group

Clausewitz's On War, first published in 1832, remains the classic study of the nature and conditions of warfare. Best remembered for his pronouncement that war is a continuation of politics by other means and for his observations on total war, he gave a new philosophical foundation to the art of war. Complex and often misunderstood, Clausewitz has fascinated and influenced generations of politicians and strategic thinkers. Beatrice Heuser's comprehensive study is the first book on how to read Clausewitz and how others have read him—from the military commanders in World War I through Lenin and Mao Zedung to strategists in the nuclear age. The result is an accessible and illuminating introduction to the most influential study of the art of war.

Reading Clausewitz (Pimlico)

Pimlico

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Heuser, Beatrice. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Heuser, Beatrice

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Heuser, Beatrice. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

War: A Genealogy of Western Ideas and Practices

The Strategy Makers: Thoughts on War and Society from Machiavelli to Clausewitz (Praeger Security International)

The Strategy Makers: Thoughts on War and Society from Machiavelli to Clausewitz (Praeger Security International)

The Strategy Makers: Thoughts on War and Society from Machiavelli to Clausewitz: Thoughts on War and Society from Machiavelli to Clausewitz

Western 'Containment' Policies in the Cold War: The Yugoslav Case, 1948-53

The Evolution of Strategy: Thinking War from Antiquity to the Present

The Evolution of Strategy: Thinking War from Antiquity to the Present

The Bomb (Turning Points)

The Bomb: Nuclear Weapons in Their Historical, Strategic, and Ethical Context (Turning Points)

Reading Clausewitz (Pimlico)