How Can Weak Powers Win

Although the history of war can be characterized as the strong defeating the weak and the many defeating the few, there are examples throughout history of ‘Davids defeating Goliaths’. They include the guerilla war against Napoleon's occupation of Spain, the American war of independence, Yugoslavian guerilla attacks against Nazi fascism, the Chinese Communist Party's war of resistance against the Japanese, the American war in Vietnam, and the present wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. All are examples of asymmetric conflicts, and of the tendency on the part of the weak to defeat the powerful (or to be more precise, of the inability of the powerful to defeat the weak) in such conflict. Asymmetric conflicts constitute the majority in the post-World War II period, according to available statistics. As international armed conflict and its outcomes are important phenomena in international relations, and taking into account how many instances there have been in recent years of weaker powers triumphing over stronger adversaries, why the weak are so often able to defeat the powerful is a critical question

Economics · Political economy · Political science · International Relations and Foreign Policy · Post-Soviet Geopolitical Dynamics

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