M L R Smith
Biographic Data
| ID | 334547 |
|---|---|
| NAME | M L R Smith |
| GIVEN NAMES | M L R |
| FAMILY NAME | Smith |
| SIGNATURE | SMITH M L R |
| AFFILIATIONS | King's College London |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7530-0997 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 78 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 178 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 78 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Virtue and Violence
A Front Row Seat at the End of History
Why is the West so rotten at strategy
Why has western foreign policy exhibited a record of sustained strategic failure, from Afghanistan to Ukraine? Why is it that despite the intellectual attention devoted to identifying the foundations of good strategy, outcomes remain so poor? This study seeks to bring a process of academic rigour to these questions. It pinpoints an inability to relate to problems proportionately as the major factor that accounts for bad strategic results and the …
Havoc the laws of regular warfare do not sanction
Why did British military commanders in the Victorian age resort to punitive violence in so-called small wars? This study argues that the lack of military manuals or literature on conducting small wars resulted in the implementation of Jominian strategies in a non-European context. This, combined with Victorian assumptions that the enemy was ‘inferior’ and unable to adhere to reciprocal codes of military conduct, along with the constraints of oper…
Shadowing ‘the exceptional’ behind the ‘ordinary’
Under the imperative of ‘prevention’, the process of information production for investigatory purposes forms a crossover between intelligence gathering and law enforcement. Digital surveillance programmes collect personal data prior to any probable cause of suspicion, whereas law enforcement activities are concerned with collecting evidence of crimes after the event. When future looking preventative approaches to the prosecution of crimes are for…
Blowin’ in the Wind? The Musical Response to the War on Terror
Popular music was the most immediate way in which the cultural response to 9/11 manifested itself. Initially music offered a way of mourning and coping with grief. As the United States moved toward the invasion of Iraq, pop music also began to reflect the divisions in society between patriot-artists who supported the invasion, most notably in country music, and protest-artists who articulated critical attitudes to war. These anti-war songs did no…
The Age of Ambiguity
9/11 and its aftermath was to have a dramatic impact on the visual arts and the artistic response to the War on Terror. This study surveys the evolution of these responses from the dramatic events of 11 September 2001 to the longer term reactions generated by the two-decade long encounter with the so-called War on Terrorism, primarily via the Imperial War Museum’s Age of Terror/Art Since 9/11 exhibition of 2017–2018. The analysis suggests that th…
Setting the Strategic Cat among the Policy Pigeons
In theory, the idea of strategy is easy to comprehend but in practice it is a hard taskmaster because it often involves calculations of political values that are rarely amenable to the kind of rationalistic application of “expert” opinion to which Western nations invariably default when considering overseas interventions. Based on remarks to the Oxford Changing Character of War Centre, this research note argues that foreign policy experts frequen…
Agon ising choices
Tragedy is one of the oldest metaphorical lenses of International Relations. The tragic vision of politics, from Thucydides to contemporary realist theorists, lies at the core of classical realism. However, it is striking how rarely the concept of tragedy has been applied to the discourse of humanitarian intervention. This lacuna is a weakness on both the intellectual and political levels, as nowhere are clashes between competing ethical perspect…
Handbook of Terrorism and Counter Terrorism Post 9/11
Almost two decades after the events of 9/11, this Handbook offers a comprehensive insight into the evolution and development of terrorism and insurgency since then. Gathering contributions from a broad range of perspectives, it both identifies new technological developments in terrorism and insurgency, and addresses the distinct state responses to the threat of political, or religiously motivated violence; not only in the Middle East and Europe, …
Coca, Clausewitz, and Colombia
Studies of micro-level violence make various claims to universality: namely, that there are patterns of violence in civil wars that are observable across time and space. The analysis of rebel violence against civilians constitutes one of the enduring themes of these studies. By evaluating the actions of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) during the latter half of the Colombian civil war, this paper demonstrates that the claims of m…
Theorizing Territorial Withdrawal
This article examines what factors cause states to withdraw from foreign territorial interventions. Scholarly analyses of withdrawal are rare, whilst within the broader research area of territorial conflict, studies are often dichotomized into neorealist or constructivist-inspired works, emphasizing a select few variables and one level of analysis alone. We argue these excessive simplifications of international politics lack utility for understan…
The Political Economy of the Provos
Few academically rigorous accounts exist of the financial activities that sustained the rise of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) during the Northern Ireland Troubles. Through a sustained methodology this study seeks to challenge some popular preconceptions and address omissions in the limited historical record. The article explores the organization's evolving financial sophistication by analyzing PIRA's acquisition of capital rather t…
Iconoclasm and strategic thought
This article analyses the way in which the group calling itself the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (Islamic State) manages cultural heritage sites under its control. By drawing on three different cases—Palmyra; Sufi, Shi'a and Sunni heritage sites; and Mosul—it examines the way in which the logic of Islamic State's iconoclasm might also be considered a strategy. To be considered strategic the contention is that three factors need to prevail: the…
Northern Ireland and minimum force
The debate over whether there exists a British counter-insurgency tradition of minimum force is one that has been thoroughly discussed. Is there anything left to say? This study suggests there is further insight to be attained if one explicitly evaluates the concept of minimum force in relation to the conduct of the security forces in the years of the Northern Ireland conflict. Through an examination of three key periods in the conflict, it will …
Boko Haram
An insurgency in Nigeria by the Islamist extremist group Boko Haram has left thousands dead, shaken Africa's biggest country and worried the world. Yet it remains a mysterious - almost unknowable - organisation. ̃ rough exhaustive on-the-ground reporting, Mike Smith takes readers inside the con° ict and provides the ÿ rst in-depth account of the violence and unrest. He traces Boko Haram from its beginnings as a small Islamist sect in Nigeria's re…
The Rise of Dark Americana
In the wake of the 9/11 attacks the American film industry took a while to react to the Islamist threat at home and abroad. From 2005, however, Hollywood responded to the threat to the homeland and the War on Terror “over there” in Iraq and Afghanistan in a variety of ways. This article examines the nature of that response and whether it evinces, as critics allege, that the American film industry reflects and shapes a capitalist and imperialist a…
Return to reason
Twenty-first-century political crises stretching from Europe to the Middle East and the Asia—Pacific have undermined the worldview that governed post-Cold War western thinking about a liberal end of history. This worldview assumed that shared norms and transnational institutions would transform the state based-order. In this context, the use of force is considered appropriate only for humanitarian ends meeting a set of predetermined axioms laid d…
Sacred Violence
Sacred Violence and Religious Violence examines the place that ideology or political religion plays in legitimizing violence to bring about a purer world. In particular, the book examines Islamism and
The Rise of Gulf War Paradigm 2.0
The 'rhinofication' of South African security
The rhino-poaching crisis in South Africa raises questions about whether it should be tackled through judicial processes or by the application of hard-power methods. The poaching of wildlife has traditionally been met with a harsh response to send a clear message of punitive deterrence. While the reaction of the South African authorities has been no different, the contemporary threat posed by poaching intersects with, and is complicated by, wider…
Asian Security and the Rise of China
East Asia is without question a region of huge economic, political and security significance. Asian Security and the Rise of China offers a comprehensive overview and assessment of the international politics of the Asia-Pacific since the end of the Cold War, seeking to address the overarching question of how we can most convincingly explain the central dynamics of Asia's international relations. Via a realist perspective on the dynamics and frict…
Asian Security and the Rise of China
Black Tigers, Bronze Lotus
Although much has been written on the Sri Lankan state's civil war with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), less has been said about how the conflict's dynamics evolved. How did the parties come to utilize the methods they did? Why did the war become so brutal, characterized by a predisposition toward extreme violence on both sides? Using the typology of “dirty war,” this investigation seeks to address such questions, demonstrating how t…
Myth and the small war tradition
In recent years a number of commentators have posited that the British reputation for conducting small wars has suffered in the wake of setbacks in Iraq and Afghanistan. The argument here contests whether such a tradition can be truly said to have ever existed. A close examination of this supposed tradition reveals it to be a myth. In fact, rarely have the British armed forces claimed a facility for counter-insurgency or small war. Invariably, co…
We're All Terrorists Now
This article reviews the new journal Critical Studies on Terrorism. The fashionable approach that this journal adopts towards the contemporary phenomenon of terrorism maintains that a “critical” and “self-reflexive” approach to the study of terrorism reveals a variety of shortcomings in the discipline. These range from a distorting over-identification with the Western democratic state perspective on terrorism to a failure to empathize with the mi…
Asean and East Asian International Relations
Academic and accepted orthodoxy maintains that Southeast Asia, and Asia generally, is evolving into a distinctive East Asian regional order. This book questions this claim and reveals instead uncertainty and incoherence at the heart of ASEAN, the region's foremost institution. The authors provide a systematic critique of ASEAN's evolution and institutional development, as well as a unified understanding of the international relations and politica…
The Intellectual Internment of a Conflict
Journal Article The Intellectual Internment of a Conflict: The Forgotten War in Northern Ireland Get access M.L.R. Smith M.L.R. Smith 1King's College, London, UK, and Nanyang Technological University, Singapore Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 75, Issue 1, January 1999, Pages 77–97, https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2346.00061 Published: 16 December 2002
Motorman's Long Journey
Operation Motorman – the ending of the ‘no-go’ areas in Belfast and Londonderry – was one the biggest deployments of British forces since 1945, yet few analysts have grasped its enduring significance. This article argues that Motorman helped break the vicious circle of violence and atrocity that characterised the most violent years of the early troubles. In hindsight we can see that the aftermath of the operation irrevocably altered the strategic…
Strategic terrorism
This article seeks to lay out a comprehensive framework by which those who utilize a campaign of strategic terrorism seek to attain their ends. It identifies a distinctive modus operandi: 1) disorientation: to alienate the authorities from their citizens, reducing the government to impotence in the eyes of the population; 2) target response: to induce a target to respond in a manner that is favorable to the insurgent cause; 3) gaining legitimacy:…
Myth and the small war tradition
In recent years a number of commentators have posited that the British reputation for conducting small wars has suffered in the wake of setbacks in Iraq and Afghanistan. The argument here contests whether such a tradition can be truly said to have ever existed. A close examination of this supposed tradition reveals it to be a myth. In fact, rarely have the British armed forces claimed a facility for counter-insurgency or small war. Invariably, co…
Ira 2.0
Despite an increasing number of attacks by violent anti-Good Friday Agreement (GFA) Republicans from 2009 there is still relatively little understanding of the nature of these organizations or the likely longevity of their campaign(s). This analysis argues that the current upsurge of violence is likely to continue for the foreseeable future, due to a combination of factors that entrench republican ideology. The fractured nature of anti-GFA groups…
Whose Hearts and Whose Minds? The Curious Case of Global Counter-Insurgency
Traditionally regarded as a secondary activity in military thinking and practice, the notion of counter-insurgency (COIN) has undergone a remarkable renaissance. This analysis traces the origins of this renaissance to two distinctive schools: a neo-classical school and a global insurgency school. The global insurgency school critiques neo-classical thought and presents itself as a more sophisticated appreciation of current security problems. An e…
Iconoclasm and strategic thought
This article analyses the way in which the group calling itself the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (Islamic State) manages cultural heritage sites under its control. By drawing on three different cases—Palmyra; Sufi, Shi'a and Sunni heritage sites; and Mosul—it examines the way in which the logic of Islamic State's iconoclasm might also be considered a strategy. To be considered strategic the contention is that three factors need to prevail: the…
The 'rhinofication' of South African security
The rhino-poaching crisis in South Africa raises questions about whether it should be tackled through judicial processes or by the application of hard-power methods. The poaching of wildlife has traditionally been met with a harsh response to send a clear message of punitive deterrence. While the reaction of the South African authorities has been no different, the contemporary threat posed by poaching intersects with, and is complicated by, wider…
Thompson in Helmand
British operations in Helmand province, Afghanistan, have been contextualised within the theory and practice of counter-insurgency. The theories of Sir Robert Thompson are held to represent the basis for successful counter-insurgency campaigning. This analysis takes the simple premise of posing the question as to whether British conduct in Helmand between 2006 and 2008 has represented the effective utilisation of Thompson's principles. Evaluating…
The Rise of Dark Americana
In the wake of the 9/11 attacks the American film industry took a while to react to the Islamist threat at home and abroad. From 2005, however, Hollywood responded to the threat to the homeland and the War on Terror “over there” in Iraq and Afghanistan in a variety of ways. This article examines the nature of that response and whether it evinces, as critics allege, that the American film industry reflects and shapes a capitalist and imperialist a…
Escalation in Irregular War
If all violence is intended to achieve political effects, what is distinctive about escalation in irregular war? Indeed, what is irregular war? To answer such fundamental questions this analysis employs the principles of strategic theory in an attempt to offer a theoretical and practical framework that will facilitate an appreciation of the subsequent contributions to this special issue. The assessment seeks to articulate how the escalation proce…
Guerrillas in the mist
The argument advanced here seeks to demonstrate that terms like ‘guerrilla warfare’ and ‘low intensity conflict’ are fundamentally flawed. They do not exist as proper categories of war. Often they constitute inappropriate distinctions that impede intellectual understanding of internal war phenomena, which has in the past had a negative impact upon policymaking. The usage of these terms in strategic studies literature does not facilitate understan…
War in the Gray
This study explores the meaning of "dirty war;" a term that has been in increasing usage in popular and academic discussion. It endeavors to detach the phrase from its normative connotations, and using a strategic methodology along with supporting case studies, seeks to arrive at a theoretical exposition of the dirty war concept. The investigation attempts to provide a working definition that helps make sense of the term, and develops some notion…
No Fixed Values”
The so-called Battle of Algiers (1956–1957) was a pivotal event in the history of French decolonization and was controversial because it involved brutality and the use of torture. The tactical success of the French Army in the battle has been credited to the theory of guerre révolutionnaire, which evolved in French military thinking after the army's debacle in Indochina. The theory situated anti-colonial insurgencies within the Cold War struggle …
Missing the Plot? Intelligence and Discourse Failure
The Changing Security Agenda in Southeast Asia
The regional economic crisis of 1997-98 placed a large question mark over the advocacy, much proclaimed between 1990 and 1997, that ASEAN was at the centre of a shift in the global order toward a Pacific Century premised on the Association's practices of multilateral cooperation, dialogue, consensus, and non-interference. Does the aftermath of the crisis, and the new agenda posed by the forces of economic globalization and the seemingly irresolva…
Misreading Menzies and Whitlam reassessing the ideological construction of Australian foreign policy
Conventional understandings of Australian foreign policy hold that a decisive break with the past in external relations occurred only after 1972 and the arrival of Gough Whitlam as Prime Minister. Whitlam, it is claimed, began the process of severing out-dated imperial attachments to Britain, thus setting Australia on an independent course in world affairs based on a more mature assessment of the national interest that defined Australia as part o…
Blowin’ in the Wind? The Musical Response to the War on Terror
Popular music was the most immediate way in which the cultural response to 9/11 manifested itself. Initially music offered a way of mourning and coping with grief. As the United States moved toward the invasion of Iraq, pop music also began to reflect the divisions in society between patriot-artists who supported the invasion, most notably in country music, and protest-artists who articulated critical attitudes to war. These anti-war songs did no…
Northern Ireland and minimum force
The debate over whether there exists a British counter-insurgency tradition of minimum force is one that has been thoroughly discussed. Is there anything left to say? This study suggests there is further insight to be attained if one explicitly evaluates the concept of minimum force in relation to the conduct of the security forces in the years of the Northern Ireland conflict. Through an examination of three key periods in the conflict, it will …
War and wildlife
Carl von Clausewitz might seem an unusual thinker to invoke in the name of wildlife protection but his insights into the nature of war provide a unique perspective into an arena that arguably poses more complex moral questions of responsibility to protect than with humans. The increasingly dangerous world of wildlife conservation offers a prism for examining many issues linked to sovereignty, especially in developing countries. This study highlig…
Reconciling Policing and Military Objectives
In contemplating the use of force within liberal democratic societies, policing faces what is known as the "paradox of police governance:" the irreconcilable objective of using minimum force set against the inherently escalatory nature of violence itself. This analysis explores the relevance of Clausewitzian theory for understanding this paradox with regard to policing in the United Kingdom. With reference to recent security incidents in which fo…
Greetings from the cybercaliphate
One of the paradoxical effects of the 7 July bombings in London was to expose the ambivalence in the British government's attempt to wage war on terror by forcefully prosecuting war against those who resort to jihad abroad, actively participating in coalitions of the wining whether in Afghanistan or Iraq, while affording some of Islamism's key ideologists and strategists a high degree of latitude in the United Kingdom itself. This indicates a num…
The Political Economy of the Provos
Few academically rigorous accounts exist of the financial activities that sustained the rise of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) during the Northern Ireland Troubles. Through a sustained methodology this study seeks to challenge some popular preconceptions and address omissions in the limited historical record. The article explores the organization's evolving financial sophistication by analyzing PIRA's acquisition of capital rather t…
Asean, Asian values and Southeast Asian security in the new world order
(1997). ASEAN, Asian values and Southeast Asian security in the new world order. Contemporary Security Policy: Vol. 18, No. 3, pp. 126-156
A still distant prospect
Eamonn Mallie and David McKittrick, The Fight for Peace: The Inside Story of the Irish Peace Process, 2d ed. (London: Mandarin, 1997), 436 pp
The Intellectual Internment of a Conflict
Journal Article The Intellectual Internment of a Conflict: The Forgotten War in Northern Ireland Get access M.L.R. Smith M.L.R. Smith 1King's College, London, UK, and Nanyang Technological University, Singapore Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 75, Issue 1, January 1999, Pages 77–97, https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2346.00061 Published: 16 December 2002
Decommissioning and paramilitary strategy in Northern Ireland
This study examines the problems of paramilitary decommissioning in Northern Ireland. It analyses why decommissioning has become so contentious in the Northern Ireland peace process. Decommissioning, though, is not a unique or intrinsically insurmountable problem. This is demonstrated by highlighting the issue in international context. Three examples of decommissioning in conflict resolution processes are assessed: the Lebanon, El Salvador and Mo…
Misreading Menzies and Whitlam reassessing the ideological construction of Australian foreign policy
Conventional understandings of Australian foreign policy hold that a decisive break with the past in external relations occurred only after 1972 and the arrival of Gough Whitlam as Prime Minister. Whitlam, it is claimed, began the process of severing out-dated imperial attachments to Britain, thus setting Australia on an independent course in world affairs based on a more mature assessment of the national interest that defined Australia as part o…
War by Other Means
This article examines the interaction between the Irish political party, Sinn Fdin, and the paramilitary group known as the Irish Republican Army (IRA). It argues that the relationship between Sinn Féin and the IRA turns the conventional Clausewitzian understanding of political control of the military on its head. Rather, in the Irish republican movement the military has had the dominant role in devising military and political strategy and Sinn F…
Hear the Silence
This study examines how Cold War images of the discipline of international relations have been represented by contemporary thinkers wishing to advance different theoretical approaches in the post-Cold War era. In particular, it focuses on the increasing use of the term 'silences' in writings in the field. The paper argues that the debate over exclusion in international relations is poorly explicated and engenders false discontinuities in the inte…
The Changing Security Agenda in Southeast Asia
The regional economic crisis of 1997-98 placed a large question mark over the advocacy, much proclaimed between 1990 and 1997, that ASEAN was at the centre of a shift in the global order toward a Pacific Century premised on the Association's practices of multilateral cooperation, dialogue, consensus, and non-interference. Does the aftermath of the crisis, and the new agenda posed by the forces of economic globalization and the seemingly irresolva…
Fighting for Ireland
Fighting for Ireland? is the first in-depth account of the evolution of Irish Republican strategy. It is highly topical in the light of the faltering peace process and the growing speculation over the IRA's next move: further violence or a new non-violent strategy? This new, updated paperback edition is essential reading for those who wish to disentangle the complex issues and motives behind IRA violence.M.L.R. Smith challenges many assumptions a…
From Konfrontasi to Disintegrasi
This article evaluates the development of militant Islamic threats in Southeast Asia from the early 1990s onwards and its security implications for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). The analysis contends that the extent of extremist Islamic infiltration of the region was obscured by governmental rhetoric, along with much Western opinion, which argued erroneously that ASEAN was following a unique developmental path based on share…
Guerrillas in the mist
The argument advanced here seeks to demonstrate that terms like ‘guerrilla warfare’ and ‘low intensity conflict’ are fundamentally flawed. They do not exist as proper categories of war. Often they constitute inappropriate distinctions that impede intellectual understanding of internal war phenomena, which has in the past had a negative impact upon policymaking. The usage of these terms in strategic studies literature does not facilitate understan…
The Dynamic of Irwin's Forgotten Army
The dynamic of irwin's forgotten army: A strategic understanding of the british army's role in northern ireland after 1998
An edifice of denial
This article examines the question of why a generation of Australian specialists in Southeast Asian security and political affairs failed to take seriously evolving threats to Australia's security, in the form of radicalized Islam, that were developing across the region, most notably in Indonesia. These threats culminated in the Bali bombing of October 2002, in which many Australians perished. This analysis maintains that, despite the relative ea…
Missing the Plot? Intelligence and Discourse Failure
Strategic terrorism
This article seeks to lay out a comprehensive framework by which those who utilize a campaign of strategic terrorism seek to attain their ends. It identifies a distinctive modus operandi: 1) disorientation: to alienate the authorities from their citizens, reducing the government to impotence in the eyes of the population; 2) target response: to induce a target to respond in a manner that is favorable to the insurgent cause; 3) gaining legitimacy:…
Motorman's Long Journey
Operation Motorman – the ending of the ‘no-go’ areas in Belfast and Londonderry – was one the biggest deployments of British forces since 1945, yet few analysts have grasped its enduring significance. This article argues that Motorman helped break the vicious circle of violence and atrocity that characterised the most violent years of the early troubles. In hindsight we can see that the aftermath of the operation irrevocably altered the strategic…
Greetings from the cybercaliphate
One of the paradoxical effects of the 7 July bombings in London was to expose the ambivalence in the British government's attempt to wage war on terror by forcefully prosecuting war against those who resort to jihad abroad, actively participating in coalitions of the wining whether in Afghanistan or Iraq, while affording some of Islamism's key ideologists and strategists a high degree of latitude in the United Kingdom itself. This indicates a num…
Asia Rising (Again)
Constructing and Deconstructing Regions
Index
An Imitation Community for Imitation States
The Delusions of Aseanology
The Contradictions in the Political Economy of East Asian Regionalism
Political Illiberalism and the War on Terrorism in Southeast Asia
Introduction
Introduction: the age of delusion in the Asia-PacificThe dominant international relations paradigm of the late 1980s and early 1990s assumed that regions represented the necessary structures that underpinned an emerging post-Cold War global order.This regional re-ordering, it was asserted in works like Paul Hirst and Grahame Thompson's Globalization in Question (1996) and Susan Strange's The Retreat of the State (1997), would occur at the expense…
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