Over the course of the five case studies in this book, external actors sought to impose change upon a range of indigenous societies in order to satisfy chosen strategic objectives. Through an amalgamation of political measures and military action acting in combination to create a form of political warfare, a range of techniques were deployed to engineer favourable outcomes according to the preferences of that intervening power. Be it in the form of pacification, stabilisation or counterinsurgency, when coming up against populations that were perceived as holding the key to success these actors engaged in a variety of measures to both secure support and crush armed dissent: the offering of economic incentives and opportunity, the implementation of ambitious civic-action initiatives, the empowerment of key local leaders, the attempted reform of local and national governance structures accompanied a range of other actions designed to aid the betterment of local society. Alongside this lay the design and use of population control measures, the dissemination of propaganda, the use of psychological operations, and the attempted mobilisation of alliances and collaborators from among local groups be they class-based, tribal, ethnic or sectarian in nature. Underpinning all of these measures was the ready application of lethal violence when required.

The British experience on the North-West Frontier had revealed some of the inherent tensions that accompanied the ‘political’ approach to pacification. Most obvious of these had been the rival perspectives adopted by civilian officials and administrators on the one hand and their military partners on the other. Lurking beneath had been the question of whether the specialists detailed for the purpose of engineering a relationship between the tribes and government were sufficiently qualified to undertake that task, and whether the process was controllable in the way that they believed. And of course there was the extent to which the government was able to place the broader pacification effort in its proper strategic context and whether it could resist the temptation to allow constant challenges to its authority in the tribal areas to distort its attempts to adopt a measured approach to protecting its interests there. The Algerian War of 1954–62 would see a similar range of challenges (re-)emerge, but in far starker, far more problematic and, in the end, far more extreme ways.

The Paris Peace Conference convened in January 1919 and did not officially close until one year later, after Germany formally ratified the Treaty of Versailles, but Wilson, Lloyd George, and the leading foreign dignitaries left for home in late June, as soon as the Germans signed their treaty. The Allies designated ambassadors or under-secretaries to represent them in the conclusion of the treaties for Austria (St. Germain), Bulgaria (Neuilly), Hungary (Trianon), and the Ottoman Empire (Sèvres), the latter two not signed until 1920. As the US secretary of state, Lansing, had feared, Wilson’s direct involvement at the conference reduced him to the level of just another negotiator and his Fourteen Points to mere bargaining chips, most of which were sacrificed in whole or in part to achieve the fourteenth: the creation of the League of Nations. While the provisions regarding Germany (reparations, war guilt, near-disarmament, and loss of territory and colonies) received the most attention, outcomes haunting the world into a second great war (and in some cases, beyond it) included the borders drawn in the dismemberment of Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, as well as the decision of the conference to disregard the interests of Russia and, to a lesser extent, Italy.

The entry of the United States doomed the Central Powers in the long run but not during 1917, as the collapse of Russia deprived the Allies of their largest army at a time when the Americans could not yet make good the loss. Unable to afford a repeat of the bloody battles of 1916, the Germans resolved to stand on the defensive in the west while the U-boats (and the Bolsheviks) did their work. Meanwhile, the failure of Nivelle’s spring offensive nearly broke the French army, leaving it paralyzed by mutiny for much of the rest of the year, while British and Imperial troops attacked at Arras and Vimy Ridge in the spring, then at Passchendaele in the summer and autumn, gaining little ground at great cost. A November attack at Cambrai, ultimately indecisive, showed how tanks could be used effectively. On other fronts, Russia’s attempt to use Czech deserters against Austria-Hungary was more successful than Germany’s efforts to use Polish deserters against Russia, but not decisively so. The Allies added Greece to their ranks by overthrowing its pro-German king, but nearly lost Italy after the Central Powers achieved a decisive victory at Caporetto, and lost Romania when Russia sued for peace.

Chapter 6 covers the post-uprisings period. Whatever the poor harvest in terms of democratic advances nine years later, many Arab states have witnessed an unprecedented wave of changes and reactions (counterrevolutionary moves) similar in importance to the revolutions of the 1950s–1960s. The term revolution (thawra) was first widely used, with the Tocquevillian caveat about the relevance of the state and the power structures of old regimes both for the breakdown and then regime re-formation – and the effect of huge social mobilization should not be assessed only with the notion of a unified outcome (success or failure) at the macro-level in the short term. This chapter shows the tentative deployment of the military's institutional power with different outcomes. Notwithstanding the enduring Tunisian exception and the case of full civil war in Syria, the picture is mixed with reinforced militarism in Egypt, attempts elsewhere in a context of acute threats and boiling regional context, yet with inherent weaknesses and risks of fragmentation.

The European war quickly escalated into a world war, owing to the global nature of European colonial empires, commercial interests, and naval presence. The entry of Japan, honoring its alliance with Britain, caused the fighting to spread to East Asia and the Pacific islands. Admiral Graf Spee’s squadron abandoned Germany’s Chinese base at Tsingtao (which Japan took in November 1914), then steamed eastward across the Pacific to the coast of Chile, where Spee defeated a British squadron off Coronel in November before being crushed by another British squadron off the Falklands in December. While Japanese, Australian, and New Zealand troops occupied Germany’s Pacific island colonies, British, French, and Belgian forces attacked Germany’s four African colonies. Three of them fell quickly, but in German East Africa (the future Tanzania), troops under Lettow-Vorbeck resisted Allied forces for over four years, until the Armistice. During and after the pursuit of Spee’s squadron, Allied (mostly British) warships swept the world’s oceans of German cruisers, ending the naval war beyond European waters and the North Atlantic. This decisive success facilitated the unimpeded movement of men and supplies from around the world to bolster the Allied cause in Europe, and led Germany to embrace unrestricted submarine warfare.

Chapter 4 deals with monarchical armies, as these allegedly specific cases are usually less addressed in studies about Arab militaries. Italso delves into differences within the monarchies, with Jordan, Morocco and Oman closer to the model of professional/institutionalized Arab armies (with these terms strongly qualified), in contrast to the specific militaries of the Gulf oil states, characterized with overspending in some dimensions (infrastructure and equipment), the maintenance of an understaffed (yet well-paid and “cocooned”) army and the overreliance on the American (or Western) security alliance. It shows that monarchies are not so alien to the military, though they maintain a specific composition. Whatever the differences (and violent encounters) with republics in their trajectory of political development in the two post-independence decades, both types of regimes, monarchies as well as republics, converged in similar authoritarian control after the 1970s. And this chapter also explores a new sense of military assertiveness after 2011 in the UAE and Saudi Arabia.