Resilience and Resistance: Interdisciplinary Lessons in Competition, Deterrence, and Irregular Warfare

Check out this JSOU publication, Resilience and Resistance: Interdisciplinary Lessons in Competition, Deterrence, and Irregular Warfare, which offers what the editors describe as “the first canon for SOF, interagency, and conventional forces to understand irregular warfare, competition, and deterrence.” This volume helps practitioners and students “appreciate the dynamics of intrastate conflict as well as internationalized intrastate conflict” while examining how adversaries employ “asymmetric strategies… to subvert the world order, including the malign activities of the CCP, Russia, North Korea, Iran, and violent extremist organizations.” The book also delivers practical relevance by emphasizing that “practitioners can use this information to inform campaign planning as well as contingency plans.”

Identifying Gray Zone and Hybrid Warfare

Part I “provides foundations in resilience and resistance” through interdisciplinary perspectives in military science, political science, sociology, and history, supported by case studies including Cuba, Laos, Tibet, and Colombia.

Part II then “builds on those foundations” by operationalizing these concepts through “a data-centric approach to understanding and quantifying intrastate conflict” and by examining “the strengths and weaknesses of a coalition approach to achieving collective security.”

The volume also explores how “cyber, AI, and space will intersect with the deployment of SOF teams,” and has an applied case study on Iran that demonstrates how resilience and resistance frameworks can help in “measuring and quantifying available opportunities to influence change.”

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