At the End of Military Intervention ─ Historical, Theoretical, and Applied Approaches to Transition, Handover, and Withdrawal

No modern intervention is intended to endure indefinitely; indeed some fashion of exit is always envisioned from the outset. This commitment to an exit is normally informed by an exit strategy. Whilst strategies of closure have been scrutinised recently, not least in light of charges of defective intentions and planning, the relations between the strategies, operations and tactics of exit have not been contextualised. Focus on the local, specific and bottom-up manifestations of transitions offers significant enhances to historical, theoretical and applied understandings.

This book is an introduction not just to the issues of transition, handover and withdrawal, but to exit as a package of theoretical concepts and how these have been understood, shaped and employed in historic and contemporary perspective. Drawing on a wide range of post-1945 examples derived from a variety of regions and periods, At the End of Military Intervention provides researchers and practitioners with a source book on what forms a crucial and often overlooked element of past and present interventions.

Robert Johnson is the Director of the Oxford Changing Character of War programme and Senior Research Fellow of Pembroke College. A former army officer, he is the author ofThe Afghan Way of War (2011) and a specialist on historical and current conflicts in the Middle East and Asia.


Timothy Clack is a Senior Research Fellow of the Oxford Changing Character of War Programme. He has held research and teaching positions at the University of Oxford since 2006, and has current research interests into various conflict drivers, including the ownership of the past, cultural hybridization, and trans-border migration and exchange, primarily related to areas in the Horn of Africa.