Despite the increased use of military force in peacekeeping operations in the twenty-first century, these operations are not included in traditional strategic theory. In this article, I outline the logic of four strategies for peacekeeping operations – defence, deterrence, compellence and offence – and trace the use of these strategies in two consecutive UN operations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo: MONUC and MONUSCO. The article concludes that all four strategies are indeed used in the two operations, but they are neither comprehensive nor proactive, leaving the true potential of military strategy unrealised.

This special issue explores military strategy in the twenty-first century. The articles scrutinise strategy from three perspectives: the study of strategy, and how our understanding of strategy has changed over time; new areas for strategic theory, i.e., areas where the development of war has made strategy become more important, such as peacekeeping operations and cyberspace;and the makers of strategy, more specifically why states choses suboptimal strategies and how wars in the twenty-first century influence strategy makers.

US strategic approaches in the African Great Lakes region are primarily based on security assistance for training and equipping African forces for operations in East, North, and West Africa. This assistance risks causing more incidents of violence. A new strategy, based on a comprehensive approach to the security challenges in the region, as well as the deployment of international "boots on the ground" - American or others - is needed to reduce violence and to minimze the risk of new terrorist safe havens appearing in central Africa.

Transnational insurgents are a common feature of contemporary wars, but research on how to address this problem is still scarce. This article examines the South African Defence Force's (SADF) counterinsurgency against Namibian transnational insurgents. It concludes that the South African forces focused a large amount of their efforts outside the borders of Namibia. Highly coercive operations in Angola and Zambia created the space for hearts and minds activities in Namibia, as well as forcing neighboring states to end their support for the insurgents. Although the war in Namibia is somewhat different from contemporary wars, SADF's cross-border strategy gives us some important insights into the regional dynamics of civil wars.

After the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001, several thousand Afghan Taliban forces fled across the border to Pakistan, and the area became a safe haven for Afghan insurgents. In 2014, the transnational dimension of the insurgency is still highly prominent. Although regional support for insurgents is not uncommon, how to counter this aspect is mostly ignored in counterinsurgency (COIN) theory and doctrines. In this article, a regional counterinsurgency framework is developed, using the regional counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan as an example. The framework will facilitate the systematic inclusion of regional COIN measures in theory and doctrine.

In 1992, NATO engaged in military operations in Bosnia-Herzegovina. This was the Alliance’s first-ever deployment ‘out-of-area’. Three years on when it deployed ground forces, it also became the Alliance’s first-ever ground force deployment. (NATO, 2004) Up until that point NATO had been reluctant to undertake non-Article 5 operations, and it was not until 1991 that the ‘management of crisis and conflict prevention’ was included in NATO’s strategic concept for the first time (NATO, 2010, p. 26). At the Rome Summit in November 1991, NATO announced that ‘it could undertake non-Article 5 operations, which included future roles in conflict resolution, crisis prevention, and peacekeeping’ (Hendrickson, 2006, p. 51). Hence, when the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina broke out in 1992, NATO had no experience with this kind of operations.

This thesis sets out to increase our understanding on how to conduct successful military interventions in internal wars, such as the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan. But, instead of investigating different variables which might contribute to success, the focus is on the practice of knowledge production.

Numerous scholars have focused on how to conduct military interventions in internal wars successfully. However, research is conducted in different disciplines, such as Peace Studies and War Studies. According to interdisciplinary advocates, this might impede a rational advancement of knowledge. The aim of this thesis, therefore, is to scrutinise whether military interventions in internal wars are understood and approached differently in different disciplines, and to investigate whether these differences result in different knowledge about how to conduct successful military interventions in internal wars. The investigation has been conducted in two steps.

In the first step – focusing on theory – research on peace operations and counterinsurgencies was compared, regarding underlying assumptions, independ­ent and dependent variables, causal mechanisms and methodology. Several differences were identified. Not only are the underlying assumptions, theories, and variables different between the two research areas of peace operations and counterinsurgencies, there are also differences in methodological approaches, such as the unit of analysis. These differences could imply that disciplines frame the way we understand the object of study and how we conduct research.

In the second step – focusing on practice – the ISAF mission in Afghanistan was interpreted from the two disciplinary perspectives. Several differences were identified here as well, suggesting that disciplinary approaches influence our knowledge of how to conduct successful military interventions in internal wars. Departing from the differences found between the two research areas in the first part of the thesis, different ways to overcome these differences are suggested. Following these suggestions, research on military interventions in internal wars might become more rational, potentially increasing our understanding of how to conduct these operations successfully.