A core contention woven into the fabric of Sun Tzu’s thinking is that all situations faced by a strategic actor, even those that appear on their face to be losing ones, hold seeds of opportunity that, if grasped correctly, can be parlayed into strategic advantage.1 An illustrative statement starts off Passage #5.1 below.

This methodologically oriented chapter starts by defining military concepts: strategy, logistics, tactics, operations. Sun Tzu himself did not distinguish between strategy and tactics, so this is a modern lens on Sun Tzu’s thinking. Next, a standardized five-part format is introduced, to be used to provide uniform structure for the fourteen chapters analyzing fourteen major Sun Tzu themes: (a) list of Sun Tzu passages chosen to illustrate a given theme (just a list, not the passages themselves); (b) Sun Tzu (1) analysis of Sun Tzu’s ideas pertaining to that theme; (c) further Sun Tzu (1) analysis of facets of the given theme that conditions of war and politics in Sun Tzu’s time suggest that Sun Tzu might plausibly have discussed, yet did not discuss; (d) Sun Tzu (2) and (3) "frontiers" of the theme, generalizing Sun Tzu’s relevant ideas in selected Sun Tzu (2) and (3) directions; (e) passages listed in Part (a) (in Griffith’s translation), often with brief commentary . The chapter ends by introducing notational conventions used throughout this study to refer to Griffith verses and passages.

This methodologically oriented chapter starts by defining military concepts: strategy, logistics, tactics, operations. Sun Tzu himself did not distinguish between strategy and tactics, so this is a modern lens on Sun Tzu’s thinking. Next, a standardized five-part format is introduced, to be used to provide uniform structure for the fourteen chapters analyzing fourteen major Sun Tzu themes: (a) list of Sun Tzu passages chosen to illustrate a given theme (just a list, not the passages themselves); (b) Sun Tzu (1) analysis of Sun Tzu’s ideas pertaining to that theme; (c) further Sun Tzu (1) analysis of facets of the given theme that conditions of war and politics in Sun Tzu’s time suggest that Sun Tzu might plausibly have discussed, yet did not discuss; (d) Sun Tzu (2) and (3) "frontiers" of the theme, generalizing Sun Tzu’s relevant ideas in selected Sun Tzu (2) and (3) directions; (e) passages listed in Part (a) (in Griffith’s translation), often with brief commentary . The chapter ends by introducing notational conventions used throughout this study to refer to Griffith verses and passages.

Chapter 6 analyzes firm-level patterns of collective action and finds that law-abiding firms are more likely to experience collective action for interest-based demands. Using the strike map dataset of the China Labour Bulletin, it shows that interest-based protests are less likely to invite state repression, in part because they do not target state authorities. Contrary to the assumption that those protest that ask more than the legal minimum might be more politically threatening than law-based protests, the findings in this chapter demonstrate that interest-based protests rarely breach the physical boundary of individual firms.

The Mongol military centered on armies of decimally organized mobile horse archers. This system provided the Mongols with both a rationally organized military and a means of incorporating defeated enemies, as soldiers now belonged to units of a thousand rather than retaining old tribal identities. As the Mongol Empire expanded, new groups joined their ranks and the Mongols found new ways of accommodating them into their war machine without fundamentally disrupting their own ways of war. The Mongols also realized that regional needs sometimes dictated the use of other forces. Siege engineers, infantry, heavy cavalry, and naval forces all found use within the Mongol military. The Mongols showed flexibility not only in using personnel and military units, but also in adopting technologies, including gunpowder. After the dissolution of the United Mongol Empire, Mongol armies primarily fought each other in internecine wars. It became increasingly difficult to share training, technology, and personnel.

Chapter 3 proposes an original conceptual framework built on gender and security studies and supported by existing international legal standards and norms to reframe the interpretation of the refugee definition and better reflect the nature of violence in armed conflicts. In doing so, it reasserts the Refugee Convention as the cornerstone of international protection. This chapter claims that the ongoing dynamics of violence in situations of armed conflict provide a more valuable lens to interpret the Refugee Convention definition where persons flee armed conflicts as it focuses on the nature of violence, including its continuum, features, application, direction, motivation and impact. A micro-level analysis of this type also enables the identification of gender dynamics that are essential in understanding violence in armed conflicts. The framework outlines the knowledge that should be incorporated into the process of interpreting the refugee definition to ensure effective protection of refugees fleeing armed conflicts. The chapter is broken down into the characteristics of contemporary armed conflicts and how these features relate to the refugee definition, including the temporality of armed conflicts, the rise of non-state actors, weak states, and the objectives, gendered strategies and tactics of fighting parties.

The Conclusion summarises the findings and makes recommendations for interpreting the Refugee Convention in a manner that better responds to the characteristics of contemporary armed conflicts. The effective international protection of persons fleeing contemporary armed conflicts would require a shift in assumptions and consideration of evidence that goes beyond the conventional warfare perspective currently adopted by appellate authorities in EU MS to focus instead on the gendered dynamics of violence. The book recommends a more detailed examination of armed groups’ strategies and tactics in conflicts, including their means, as this provides a better understanding of their reliance on violence against civilians to control populations and territories and support the financial costs of fighting. Examining the tactics and means of parties to conflicts locates a logic in the choice of violence leading to highly visible forms of human rights violations. This, in turn, enables the conceptualisation of particular incidents, such as kidnappings or sexual violence and rape at checkpoints, as strategic choices of violence rather than criminal by-products of conflicts. Thus, better understanding the dynamics of violence in conflict helps identify the Refugee Convention reasons for persecution and highlights the increasing importance of imputed Refugee Convention grounds.

Just as spectacle was integral to Victorian culture, the understanding and active critique of performance in its myriad forms and situations was integral to Victorian political life. Liberals and Radicals applied this to a variety of organisational formats and gatherings – pre-eminently, meetings linked to other events through performance chaining – to enhance their impact. A dramaturgical approach reveals how performance and performance critique were integrated into political work. Starting with Thomas Thompson, this is evident across three generations of the Thompson-Chesson family. George Thompsons lecturing acumen built from this, establishing the basis for the Trans-Atlantic Anti-Slavery Movement during the 1830s. Frederick Chessons acumen as a political organiser helps show how the realm of the sensible (arts) was integral with reform in a dramaturgy of the intelligible starting in the 1850s. While this recenters liberalism within aesthetics, Amelia Chessons additionally provides ways to revise the historiography of the public/private divide.

Introduces the book as an empirical case study of the 1917 Entente spring offensive which analyses five key command tasks to illustrate the story of the German army in the First World War. Situates the book in the debate about how Germany was able to hold out for four years. Explains the significance of the offensive and its defeat for Germany, Britain and France at each level of war – grand strategic, strategic, operational and tactical.

Reviews scholarship on the offensive and German command, then explores German thinking on command from Moltke the Elder to 1917 and the linked question of the army’s ability to adapt. Emphasises its unresolved dichotomy between modernity and conservatism. Outlines modern thinking on command. Draws all this together to deduce the army’s five command tasks, explores the sources for analysing them and demonstrates the new insights into the German army and First World War produced by this approach.

In this chapter, we examine the role of NGO activism as a driver of sustainability. Such activism offers opportunities and poses challenges to firms; examining the role of activism is important to appreciate the broader question of what makes businesses more sustainable and more socially responsible. We provide an overview of what activist NGOs are and explore ways by which they seek to influence corporate policies, ranging from collaboration and partnerships to contestation and protest. We then discuss which firms are more likely to encounter NGO activism as not all firms are equally susceptible to NGO activism. Firm size, industry and visibility to consumers are important elements, as well as their historical record on CSR and sustainability issues. Finally, we discuss how firms may respond to NGO activism. For a firm to take responsibility implies that it moves beyond the defence of its own economic interests, to consider the questions of what kind of corporation the firm wishes to be, what role in society it aspires to fulfil and how to relate to its various stakeholders. Ultimately, these are questions of ethics.

Thucydides served as elected general (strategos) for Athens, and it is likely that he had (perhaps extensive) personal experience of warfare. His work is therefore an important guide both to the practicalities of warfare in 5th-century BCE Greece and to the wider function(s) that war played in politics and society. This chapter analyses what the History tells us about the ‘art of war’ in this period, discussing the use of land troops (light-armed soldiers and cavalry as well as hoplites) and naval forces. It discusses military strategy and tactics, the nature of combat and the consequences of warfare, for non-combatants as well as soldiers.

The maritime aspects of the wars of the French Revolution and Empire were asymmetric, between a British seapower empire of oceanic connectivity and a French dominated European system that focussed on territorial control and economic restriction. The inclusive British political system privileged naval strength, the defence of trade, and sea control. This position was based on battle fleet dominance, which remained undefeated across two decades. British identity became ever more closely linked to naval success as Nelson, the Nile and Trafalgar added new names to national culture. This sustained long-term funding for major infrastructure projects, new ships, and high levels of skilled manpower. Superior ships and men enabled the Royal Navy to defeat naval rivals, and attacks on commercial shipping by national warships and privateers. Naval dominance sustained a hard-line economic war that broke the Russian economy, and seriously damaged that of France, while the City of London and the British economy more generally continued to support the national war effort through extensive capital loans, and private measures, such as those of Lloyds Patriotic Fund. Seapower could not defeat Napoleon, it supported a grand alliance that would achieve that aim. By 1815 Britain had become a global seapower empire of unrivalled wealth and influence.

Fighting in the Napoleonic Wars was in the continuity of the eighteenth century and even the two preceding ones. Major changes in weapons on a large scale would not occur before the years 1850. Generals and officers were still nurtured by the military writers of the eighteenth century, but among these writers some had envisioned what war could become if large-scale ‘operations’ were conducted and if armies grew in size. With the Revolution and the dictatorial power Napoleon inherited from it, France set the tone for waging war with more intensity, in the movement of armies as well as in tactics on the field of battle. Other powers simply had to follow, but interior conditions and social imperatives resulted in partly adaptations and half-measures.

This chapter develops how surveillance shapes cleaners’ everyday work life. Cleaners experience being watched by clients, security guards, CleanUp management, and even co-workers. Surveillance constitutes an attack on their sense of worth. It stands for distrust in their work ability and efforts, and the resulting need to control them. Cleaners respond to surveillance by engaging in tactics ranging from what I term turning off and away from surveillance to turning against those who watch them. Cleaners’ urge to counter surveillance in order to retain a sense of dignity – no matter how fragile and short-lived – can surpass the fear of getting into trouble. Surveillance can come with a degree of thrill, excitement and even a sense of superiority in the hunt for ways to outwit and resist it. However, it can also summon feelings of degradation and indignity, especially when cleaners get caught. But no matter how strenuously cleaners resist surveillance, it does not follow that they resist work too. Indeed, for cleaners, maintaining dignity requires a balancing act of outwitting surveillance, finding autonomy, and working hard enough to uphold a work ethic and related sense of self-worth.

This chapter similarly relies on analysis of the Les Affiches advertisements to examine the ways maroons reimagined their status and identity, took possession of forms of capital and raw materials that upheld and sustained plantations’ divisions of labor, adopted tactics of militancy, and reclaimed their time. The fugitive advertisements give some revelation into the minds of runaways by speculating the actions they took perhaps in minutes or days just before or after they fled. Rather than interpret these actions through the lens of enslavers’ foreshadowing of maroons’ movements for the purposes of surveillance and re-enslavement, this chapter employs subaltern analysis of maroon actions as linked to a broader sense of collective consciousness regarding freedom and liberation. Runaways exhibited more oppositional behaviors such as passing for free, appropriating material goods, bearing arms, and escaping for longer durations of time – leading to escalating grand marronnage before the Haitian Revolution.

Chapter 6 examines the representational tools that members of Congress who are building or maintaining reputations as disadvantaged-group advocates can employ and how their use of these tools can vary based on the group that they are seeking to represent. The chapter argues that members make choices about representational actions that they will engage in based on the likelihood that their action will attract attention, the risk associated with that attention, and the potential for actually creating policy change. It finds that members of Congress with reputations as disadvantaged-group advocates devote a greater portion of their sponsorship and cosponsorship activities to actions impacting their groups than non-advocates, but that this is conditioned by how deserving of government assistance the group is generally perceived to be, and how well that group’s interests map onto the committee structure.

This chapter similarly relies on analysis of the Les Affiches advertisements to examine the ways maroons reimagined their status and identity, took possession of forms of capital and raw materials that upheld and sustained plantations’ divisions of labor, adopted tactics of militancy, and reclaimed their time. The fugitive advertisements give some revelation into the minds of runaways by speculating the actions they took perhaps in minutes or days just before or after they fled. Rather than interpret these actions through the lens of enslavers’ foreshadowing of maroons’ movements for the purposes of surveillance and re-enslavement, this chapter employs subaltern analysis of maroon actions as linked to a broader sense of collective consciousness regarding freedom and liberation. Runaways exhibited more oppositional behaviors such as passing for free, appropriating material goods, bearing arms, and escaping for longer durations of time – leading to escalating grand marronnage before the Haitian Revolution.

Chapter 4 introduces the rules and importance of theory, then derives a Unified War Theory (UWT) that leverages insights from earlier chapters to define key aspects and relationships pertaining to politics, strategy, and combat. The chapter also establishes theory’s relevance to strategy, historical analysis, warfighting, and doctrine, then relates politics, power, influence, and ideology to war, including how autocratic and democratic governance reduces but cannot eliminate the potential for conflict. The chapter defines the nature and character of war, outlines the levels of war and strategy, and explains that cause, capacity, and will to fight comprise the “engine of war.” Additional analysis includes war’s fractal nature, warfighting domains, chance, chaos, and momentum. Next, the chapter presents a “fluidic” metaphor and defines force “viscosity,” a property based on directness, acceleration, restriction, cohesion, and concentration that reconciles war’s regular and irregular forms. The chapter offers a “war-viscosity algorithm” that illustrates the dynamics of viscosity, including how and why war’s forms change, and it concludes by examining the UWT’s value and implications vis-à-vis historical analysis, domain theory, terrorism, nuclear weapons, and ethics.