Organised violence, its causes and its termination.
11 topics · 14 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Twenty-Seven Articles
T. E. Lawrence · 1917
Field notes for a foreign officer advising an Arab-led revolt, arguing influence over local forces is won by deference to their own customs and…
+2 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda
Human Rights Watch · 1999
Reconstructs the 1994 Rwandan genocide from testimony and documents to show it was centrally planned through existing state administrative…
+4 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
On War
Carl von Clausewitz · 1832
War is the continuation of policy by other means, and friction — not planning — is the medium every plan has to survive.
+5 more at this level
12 of 14 works
T. E. Lawrence
Field notes for a foreign officer advising an Arab-led revolt, arguing influence over local forces is won by deference to their own customs and command rather than by taking the fight over yourself.
link checked 17 Sept 2026United Nations
Defines genocide in international law as specific acts committed with intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, making it a punishable crime whether committed in peace or war.
link checked 17 Sept 2026International Committee of the Red Cross
Sets the core rules of the laws of armed conflict — humane treatment of the wounded, prisoners of war and civilians — as obligations binding on parties to a conflict regardless of reciprocity.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Human Rights Watch
Reconstructs the 1994 Rwandan genocide from testimony and documents to show it was centrally planned through existing state administrative structures, not a spontaneous eruption of ancient ethnic hatred.
link checked 17 Sept 2026United Nations
UN peacekeeping had been sent into conflicts without the mandates, resources or rules of engagement to keep a peace that did not yet exist, and recommends robust mandates and realistic resourcing rather than strict impartiality between victim and aggressor.
link checked 17 Sept 2026United States Army & United States Marine Corps
Counterinsurgency succeeds by protecting and winning the allegiance of the population, not by killing or capturing more insurgents than the enemy can replace.
link checked 17 Sept 2026World Bank
Modern violence recurs in cycles of weak institutional legitimacy rather than one-off civil wars, so rebuilding requires citizen security, justice and jobs together rather than elections or peacekeepers alone.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Congressional Research Service
Surveys forty years of US arms control agreements to show they cluster into three distinct regimes — bilateral strategic arms control, multilateral nonproliferation, and chemical/biological/conventional weapons treaties — each with its own verification logic.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Carl von Clausewitz
War is the continuation of policy by other means, and friction — not planning — is the medium every plan has to survive.
Assumes the Napoleonic wars as a reference point, and tolerance for a book its author never finished editing
about 20 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026David Galula
Reconstructs Galula's own command in Kabylia to argue counterinsurgency is a political contest for the population's allegiance, won by simultaneous, sequenced military and civil action rather than by either alone.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Johan Galtung
Founds peace research on a distinction between direct violence, done by an identifiable actor, and structural violence, built into unequal social arrangements, and argues peace must mean the absence of both.
link checked 17 Sept 2026James D. Fearon
War is always ex post inefficient for at least one side, so its recurrence despite rational leaders must come from private information with incentives to misrepresent it, commitment problems, or issue indivisibility, not from irrationality or unclear preferences.
36 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026