Clausewitz on Small War

Widely recognized as one of the most important theorists of warfare, important strands of Carl von Clausewitz's thinking on the subject are not widely known. In the English-speaking world, few are familiar with anything other than his major, though unfinished and posthumously published, opus On War, which is available in numerous translations. Although the corpus of Clausewitz's writings on the topic of warfare is far greater, most of these texts have never been translated.

In Clausewitz on Small War, Christopher Daase and James W. Davis begin to redress this unfortunate state of affairs. In this volume they have assembled and translated Clausewitz's most important texts devoted to the analysis of asymmetric, unconventional, guerrilla, and small unit warfare, including Clausewitz's Lectures on Small War, held at the Prussian War Academy in 1810 and 1811. Augmenting our understanding of Clausewitz with his early writings on Small War leads to the conclusion that asymmetric warfare is not an historical development that can be termed pre- or post-Clausewitzian as many contemporary scholars of war and military strategy argue. Rather, Clausewitz himself emerges as an early theorist of insurgency and asymmetric warfare with insights that are relevant today. The book is a must read for soldiers, military strategists, historians of war, and students of international security.

Christopher Daase is Professor of International Organization at the Goethe University of Frankfurt, and has held academic appointments at the Vrije Universiteit in Brussels, the University of Kent at Canturbury, and the University of Munich. In 1996, he received his doctorate at the Free University of Berlin with a thesis on unconventional warfare, for which he was awarded the Ernst-Reuter Prize in 1997. He is author and editor of numerous books and articles and the former editor of the leading German-language journal on international relations, the Zeitschrift fur Internationale Beziehungen.

James W. Davis is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Institute of Political Science at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. Davis holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University and has published in leading journals on questions of international institutions, foreign policy, military strategy and arms control. A former Associate Editor of theEuropean Journal of International Relations, Davis was a Fellow of the John M. Olin Foundation of Harvard University, Associate Professor at the University of Munich and Visiting Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He has served as a member of the Bundestag's commission on foreign military deployments and the German Chancellor's Expert Committee on Germany's image abroad.