The Art of Creating Power ─ Freedman on Strategy

The Art of Creating Power explores the intellectual thought and wider impact -- on military affairs, politics and the universities -- of Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman, one of the world's leading authorities on strategy, conflict and international politics. In this volume, senior scholars of international relations and military history trace the long trajectory of Freedman's career, examining his scholarly contribution to a whole host of areas from nuclear strategy to US foreign policy via terrorism, the Falklands War, and Iraq.

Individually, these essays provide fascinating and innovative insights into strategy, contemporary defence and foreign policy, and conflict. Taken together, however, they are greater than the sum of their parts as they both reflect and explore the theoretical approach adopted and taught by Freedman - one that has made him one of the great intellectual figures in the canon of international politics, strategy and war.

Throughout his professional life, Freedman explored many of the uncertainties that plague our highly unstable world. But as conflicts continue to erupt across the globe, it seems we may be entering an even more precarious and uncertain era. There could hardly be a better time than today to gain a deeper understanding of Freedman's strategic insights.

Benedict Wilkinson is Lecturer in the Defence Studies Department at King's College London and holds a Research Fellowship in the Policy Institute at King's.
James Gow is Professor of International Peace and Security at King's College London. He is the author of several books on the former Yugoslavia, among them The Serbian Project and its Adversaries: A Strategy of War Crimes (Hurst, 2003), Triumph of the Lack of Will: International Diplomacy and the Yugoslav Way (Hurst, 1997) and Legitimacy and the Military: The Yugoslav Crisis (1992). He was the first prosecution witness to be called at the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.