TY - JOUR
AU - Sepp, Kalev I.
AB -  The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One by David Kilcullen. New York, Oxford University Press, 2009. 346 pp. $27.95. At a recent Afghanistan planning conference, a Special Forces general lamented the difficulty in weighing professional opinions: “Nowadays, everyone calls himself a counterinsurgency expert.” A singularly credible voice is that of David Kilcullen, and his testament is The Accidental Guerrilla. An engaging renaissance soldier with a doctorate in political anthropology, he has risen from infantryman and graduate student in Australia to one of the worldʼs foremost authorities on insurgency and terrorism, and how nations should understand and confront them. In his revealing study of this latest generation of irregular wars, Kilcullen describes his journey and a striking discovery—that very often, local insurgents, aggrandized as “terrorists,” “fight us not because they seek our destruction but because they believe we seek theirs” (p. 263). He successfully blends his boots-on-the-ground experience in conflicts from Lebanon to Cyprus to East Timor with his in-the-field dissertation research on the effects of insurgency on traditional societies—notably, separatist Islamist groups in the Indonesian archipelago (where he became fluent in several dialects of Bahasa). The Accidental Guerrilla is Kilcullenʼs narrative of 
TI - The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One by David Kilcullen
JO - Political Science Quarterly
DO - 10.1002/j.1538-165x.2010.tb02035.x
DA - 2010-06-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-accidental-guerrilla-fighting-small-wars-in-the-midst-of-a-big-one-8bn2rGkfl2
SP - 356
VL - 125
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -