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Chiara Libiseller, "Reconceptualizing War: The Rise and Fall of Fashionable Concepts in Strategic Studies" (Oxford UP, 2026)
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Dr. Chiara Liby Seller
Network
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Chiara Liby seller about her book titled Research Reconceptualizing the Rise and Fall of Fashionable Concepts in Strategic Studies published by Oxford University Press in 2026. Now this book takes as its subject really strategic studies as a field and asks kind of why certain terms are a big deal at certain points and then maybe are less of a big deal and then maybe come back and maybe there's a new phrase. But actually a lot of the content is the same. And this I think is a really interesting form of analysis because often strateg studies is looking at kind of strategy and term use and normative change in other fields, but of course those things are relevant to the field itself too. So I don't want to give too much away at this point, but I think we're going to have a lot to discuss. So Chiara, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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Dr. Chiara Liby Seller
Well, thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, I'm very pleased that you said yes to this. Could you please start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to Write this book. I mean, what sorts of questions were motivated as this project developed?
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Dr. Chiara Liby Seller
Yeah, sure. So I'm now a Lecturer in Strategic Studies at the Department of War Studies at King's College London. And the book that we're discussing today actually started off as my PhD thesis, which I also did at the Department of War Studies. But actually my interest in this topic goes back even further. So it was already when I did my master's degree in 201415 that I was really surprised by all the talk about hybrid warfare. So 201415 was exactly the time when this concept became fashionable and it was all the rage, no matter where I looked. It was there in my courses, in the news, internal publications, and so on. And at this time, I was also taking a course on military strategy. And I just didn't get the attraction of the term hybrid war. I thought its content and insights were at the same time very obvious in the sense that all wars are hybrid. But the concept was also very general and malleable and thus quite meaningless or useless. And yet so many people were using it. And obviously NATO and the EU were building their security strategies around it. So obviously, I wasn't the only person who was skeptical of this term. But what was even more interesting is that when I talked to people who had been working in strategic studies for a while, I realized that this was actually a recurring phenomenon. There have repeatedly been these episodes where one concept suddenly pops up everywhere and everyone's using it, and therefore it also becomes rather vague. Then, luckily, my PhD supervisor, Jeff Michaels, encouraged me to tackle this topic more broadly and look at a couple of different concepts over time. The purpose of the book really is to understand why we've got these fashionable concepts. What is it about these concepts that makes them so attractive? What is it about the field of strategic studies that makes it susceptible. Susceptible to fashions? And what about US scholars is it that makes us fall for fashions? And then I was also interested in learning about what these fashions actually mean for the study of war. So are they problematic? Should we be concerned about them? And if they are problematic, is there actually even anything that we can do about them? And that's sort of the questions that I address throughout the book.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Thank you for that lovely introduction and laying out very clearly what the book is doing and hopefully what our conversation can do, too. Before we get too far, though, into strategic studies to investigate the answers you came up with, I want to sort of pause for a moment and not take the fact that we're focusing on strategic studies for granted. Right. Because in many ways, a bunch of the things that you've mentioned there about like, hang on, why are there these terms? Why do they pop up? What does it mean? Obviously is relevant to strategic studies, but could be, you know, those questions could be asked about other fields too. So why have you focused on strategic studies specifically? Is it that you are. I mean, obviously you're in it, so that's kind of a good reason in and of itself. But is there anything, as you mentioned, about kind of this field in particular that maybe makes it more prone to creating or following fashionable ideas?
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Dr. Chiara Liby Seller
Yeah, I think that's an excellent and very important point. And I absolutely think that this question is relevant to all academic fields. And fashion generally is something that we can see in all spheres of life and in all academic fields. So I've taken a lot of inspiration from the field of management studies, where the study of fashions is quite established. Because in management you see this rather quick turnover of management principles quite a lot. Everyone who's worked in a slightly bigger organization will be familiar with that. So that's one field where we do see quite a lot of fashionable thinking and also quite a lot of research on that in other fields. As far as I know, there hasn't been too much research into that. So I really hope that going forward there will be more studies that look into fashionable thinking in different fields. The reason I looked at strategic studies is firstly, obviously, as you said, I am part of that field and interested in how it works. But of course, the field also quite literally deals with a matter of life and death than we were. So I think it's very important that we critically reflect on how the knowledge we produce and reproduce, how that is created and what affects that. And that's a process that I wanted to encourage with this book. On the question whether strategic studies is more prone to fashions, honestly, I can't really say because for that we need this sort of comparative approach across different fields. And I think, as I've mentioned before, we really do see fashions in different fields. And it doesn't really have to be just concepts. Right. It can also be methods. For example, if you look at international relations at the moment, you see that for the past five to ten years or so there's been this sudden rise in the use of survey experiments and other experimental approaches. And I think that's really interesting and something worth looking at, because what fashion stew, among other things, is that they align behavior, they attract or coerce people into behaving in a certain way. So for Example, you might want to be part of the ongoing trend, or you might feel like you have to be part in order to be acknowledged or to belong. So essentially this means that there's less variety and diversity. And so experimental approaches, for example, if we stick with that, clearly have a place in international relations. But if everyone in IR is doing experiments, there's only a certain type of knowledge that the field will be able to produce. And the same goes for concepts. If everyone's looking at hybrid warfare, for example, other topics are marginalized. So to come back to this question of whether strategic studies is particularly prone, I'd say probably not. But firstly, we need more studies. And secondly, there could potentially be different dynamics at play in strategic studies as compared to other fields. So what I found was a quite important factor when it comes to fashions in strategic studies is the close connection between practitioners and academics in the field. And you see that when actors who are considered important in a defense realm, such as the United States or NATO, for example, when they adopt a new concept, this will of course create a certain amount of academic interest, on the one hand, because it's important for us to study what these actors are doing and thinking and talking about, but on the other hand, also because GoAS want the research to speak to ongoing policy issues, and therefore when the policy focus changes, so does research interest in strategic studies. And then when you've got a big part of the field that focuses on addressing urgent policy problems, that means that not enough time is spent on more profound theoretical thinking. And the frequent change in research focus just drags the field in different directions, which makes it more difficult to accumulate a coherent body of knowledge. And that's possibly a dynamic that might be more pronounced in strategic studies than in some other fields. And it's certainly a dynamic that I think we need to understand better.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, that's very helpful to sort of situate this research and the stakes of it too. So thank you for explaining all of that. Now, obviously, as you've mentioned, hybrid warfare is one of the sort of specific concepts that you investigate all of this in. What are the other concepts that you examine? And sort of why did you choose these? What kind of framework are we using to investigate them? Tell us about that aspect, please.
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Dr. Chiara Liby Seller
Sure. So I actually look at three concepts and these are all concepts that have been fashionable in strategic studies. And together they cover a 30 year period. And I chose three fashionable or previously fashionable concepts specifically so that by comparing them I could understand what they have in common and thus draw conclusions on the nature of Fashions in the field. So the first concept I look at is the so called revolution in military affairs. That's an idea that was especially prominent in the United states in the 1990s. And it's really difficult to give you like a decent definition of these concepts because it's in their very nature to be ambiguous once they become fashionable. But very basically the rma, as it's also called, suggested that if precision munitions and stealth technology and information technology were effectively combined and integrated into military services and doctrine and weapons systems, then this will give the United States a major advantage over any peer competitor in the near future. And then the second concept I look at is counterinsurgency. Now that obviously is a concept that has existed for decades, but it gained renewed prominence in the context of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that started in 2003 and 2001 respectively. And it's that period that I look at. And in this period we see a very specific interpretation of counterinsurgency becoming popular, namely population centric counterinsurgency that aims to win the hearts and minds of the population rather than coercing them or focusing on killing insurgents. So it's this version of counterinsurgency that I look at. And then finally, as we've already discussed, there's hybrid warfare. This was also coined at least in 2007 already, but it only really took off in 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea. And at this point its meaning was changed quite fundamentally. Basically what it refers to today is the use of non military means below the threshold of conventional war. So I think what you see with those concepts is that they existed prior to becoming a fashion, and that's very important to highlight. The fashion life cycle is different from the concept life cycle, and it's primarily the fashion life cycle that I look at. And this fashion life cycle, that's again an idea that I took from management studies. As I've previously mentioned, there's a lot of useful research going on there, but there's also a lot of interesting research on fashions in sociology, for example. And so that's sort of the framework that I use to study those concepts. And I think it's probably important to clarify what I mean by fashion. And fashion is essentially a dynamic. So anything can become a fashion, an idea, an object, a type of behavior. But in relation to concepts, whether or not a concept is in fashion changes how we engage with it. So a fashionable concept is widely used, it's embraced intensely, and then as it diffuses, there's different meanings being attached to it. Different research agendas are linked to it. And so the concept becomes broader and vaguer, but nevertheless, people continue using it, not because it's analytically useful, but because everyone else, or at least the relevant people and institutions are using it. And I think that's just very important to understand. I've already mentioned that fashions align behavior. So essentially, really, fashion is about power, and this power becomes inherent to the concept itself. And that's why I think it's so important to understand those dynamics better.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, again, talking about stakes. So thank you for explaining that. And I think the comparative aspect is also really key because it lets us look into sort of what's happening in terms of fashionable cycles for each of the terms, as you do in the book, and also kind of put them together and go, well, hang on a second. What similarities and differences might we see? So, looking then at the kind of why this concept, you know, why does each of these concepts, why do they become popular when in the moment that they are, and how they became popular? To what extent is there a kind of similar process going on between these three things in terms of kind of why this, why now?
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Dr. Chiara Liby Seller
Yeah, that's a really interesting question, and it's sort of difficult to answer. So, for example, every concept could be the next fashion. It's not really about the. The original content of the concept. It's rather about what actors do with a specific concept at a specific moment in time, as you already alluded to. So what I'm trying to say is that also concepts don't just become fashionable, but rather there are actors behind it that push for a specific interpretation of it. And the timing really also matters. So you see, at least if you look at the three concepts that I looked at, you see certain processes and dynamics that are relevant in each case. And I'd say maybe there's at least four aspects that you can identify at the beginning of this sort of fashion cycle that really matter. So firstly, you need actors creating a certain interpretation, pushing this interpretation. Secondly, you need a kind of triggering event, if you will. I have described this as cognitive crisis, which refers to the feeling that a situation is so new or different that we need new vocabulary to grasp it. And thirdly, the concept needs to offer a promising solution to this cognitive crisis. And four, at the same time, the concept really needs to be malleable and adaptable enough so that different actors can interpret it in a way that suits their interests. And I think it's also really worth noting that in the three cases, I looked at academic interest in the concept was set off only by its institutionalization by defense actors. So once the United States or NATO adopted these concepts in their official policy or doctrine, then academic interest really took off. So this institutionalization grants authority to the concept and it presents a ready made definition, which is one of the reasons why fashions are problematic, especially within academia.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hmm, interesting. Indeed. Then, to look at these processes, you talk about cognitive crisis. Can we discuss that further in terms of why it's an important element to look at these terms, as you said, kind of being made into dominant ones?
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Dr. Chiara Liby Seller
Yeah, absolutely. And maybe it's useful to look at an example. So if we look at the revolution in military affairs concept, we see that this idea and different elements of that idea, as well as the technology that was relevant for this concept, all these things had been around for a while or were being developed for a while. But it was really only in the 1990s that this concept suddenly became very dominant. Essentially, it became the guiding concept for US defense policy and strategy in the 1990s. And I would say that timing is quite interesting. So after the end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union, the United States didn't have a clear enemy to which they could tailor their defense policy. And the security environment was sort of uncertain and the defense budget was declining. And if you look at national security strategies at the time, you see that that is how they start their description of the environment, of their strategy. It's this uncertainty and the pressure of declining defense budgets. But what you also see is that the United States nevertheless wanted to remain the military superpower that it was. It just was a bit more difficult to justify defense spending when there's no clear threat. And that's sort of the situation that I characterized as cognitive crisis. And for the RMA concept. So to deal with this cognitive crisis, the RMA concept actually was quite handy because it suggested that if only the United States invested in the right technologies and integrated them in their military systems and doctrines and so on, it would give the United States a major advantage over any peer competitor. So having this vision of being technologically superior, so superior that no other state could challenge the United States, that was very convenient. Because what the RM8 essentially did is to promise to maintain US military superiority at lower costs. So essentially exactly what the US Needed at this stage. But of course, that was no coincidence. At least that's what I argue. So the ARMA concept encapsulated this very powerful promise. It offered the United States strategic guidance. And so for that reason, I suggest practitioners and politicians also clung very heavily to this idea. But it's again, this promise that both makes the concept powerful and fashionable, but also problematic because it overemphasizes the role of technology in war. And it also focused solely on wars between states. So for that reason, the United States did very well in the 99 Gulf War. It did well in the initial phases of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars of the 2000s. The overwhelming military power really allowed them to defeat the governments quickly. But then when the United States faced popular resistance, which was a very different kind of conflict and one that could not be won through the application of overwhelming force, they again faced a cognitive crisis. And this is when the RMA concept started to lose its power. The fashion life cycle ended, and a new fashion essentially was taken on, namely counterinsurgency.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, I mean, that really goes back to the point you were making earlier about how tightly the relationship is between what's happening in the policy world and what's happening in academia. That's a very clear example of that. In terms then, of kind of this cognitive crisis, it's clearly quite central. If we're thinking, though, about that relationship and the kind of back and forth between the different. The different kinds of people, I suppose, doing the analysis, does it matter which direction that's going in? Like, for instance, if the term is no longer working for the military leaders and decision makers, does that make the adoption of a new term or the losing of fashionability of the existing one, does that happen faster if, like, the problem or the mismatch is coming from the policy side rather than coming from the academic side?
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Dr. Chiara Liby Seller
Yeah, that's a really interesting dynamic. And I think in the three cases that I study, we clearly do see that. So it's the practitioners who sort of coin or theorize the concept and push it, and then also when it fails in practice, or when they become dissatisfied with it and therefore drop hit, that's also when academic interest then declines. So I think this really comes back to this close connection between scholars and practitioners in strategic studies, and it shows the impact of this connection. So I think for this field in particular, there is this proclivity to. To focus and take up concepts that come from the defense establishment. But there's also interesting counterexamples. So one would be, for example, the concept of new wars, which was created by an academic, Mary Caldor, in the late 1990s, and it diffused very widely in academia. It did not diffuse, however, in strategic studies, which was always very skeptical of this concept. So for that reason, I didn't look at this concept. But I think if you go beyond strategic studies and want to understand fashionable concepts, New wars would be a really interesting one to look at and try to understand what kind of impact concepts have when they are coined by academics, because I think this one also traveled from academia to the sphere of practice. But that's really something for someone else to hopefully investigate.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Thank you for explaining. Now, through multiple questions, I've asked you to go into quite a lot of detail about cognitive crises. Right. That's clearly a big part of what's going on here. But nothing only ever happens, kind of for one reason.
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Dr. Chiara Liby Seller
Right.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Cognitive crisis isn't the only thing that is making a term fashionable. So what else is kind of going on besides these moments of cognitive crises to make a sort of term seem like a solution that can be fashionable?
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Dr. Chiara Liby Seller
Yeah. So, I mean, solution really is the key word. Right. And that's actually something I found very interesting during this research. So the concepts, when they are theorized at this moment of cognitive crisis, they are sort of re theorized, so they are redefined before they become fashionable. In this process of redefinition, what we see is that a specific interpretation of the problem is created and a specific solution to it, and these are sort of combined together into one coherent narrative. And I think this combination of problem and the solution, obviously presenting a solution, that's really what makes these concepts so attractive to people, especially practitioners, in this moment of cognitive crisis. So if we look, for example, at counterinsurgency, as I've mentioned, that was rediscovered in the early 2000s at a very specific moment in time. So to summarize a much more complicated and complex situation, the United States and their coalition partners have defeated the incumbent governments in both Afghanistan and Iraq, but then faced popular uprisings and violence in each country. Right. And they realized that they needed a different approach to the war. At least military practitioners in the field realized that they needed that. And so members of the US Military actually started to look into different approaches, started to look into history. And the U.S. army and Marine Corps drew up this field manual that essentially built on previous counterinsurgencies and distilled some lessons and defined principles of counterinsurgency based on this historical evidence. And the message inherent in that was that counterinsurgency had been done successfully before, hence it can be done successfully now. We just need to learn from previous experiences, from previous writings and thinking. And creating this counterinsurgency tradition, I'd say, gave credibility to their approach. It rendered counterinsurgency a promising solution to the quagmires in Afghanistan and Iraq. And it's this promise that also granted power to the concept. It also tends to be this promise and the ready made interpretation of the problem and solution that we see diffuse in the literature. I think that is a key problem with fashionable concepts. If the interpretation of the problem and the solution, the appropriate behavior, become inherently linked into one narrative, it becomes so much more difficult to challenge either element. And this narrative, it just essentially takes a few assumptions for granted. It tells you what the situation is, that it's a situation of insurgency, it tells you how to deal with it, that you need to follow those 10 principles, and then that you'll sort of be able to solve the situation, you'll be able to win this war after all. And by doing that, it also defines the starting point of the debate. It sets clear boundaries to the discourse. It defines what can be said, what can be discussed. So again, this is this creation of a coherent narrative that becomes powerful, that is key with fashionable concepts and one reason why they are problematic, both for practitioners and academics.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, that's very helpful to analyze those terms and also sort of serves a little bit as a way to identify other terms. Right? Going around and going, well, hang on a second, is this a term that, is this a fashionable term? What else can we do to kind of show that a term has become fashionable? What other things might we look for either in terms of, well, the concept itself or what kinds of methods of diffusion might we want to examine?
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Dr. Chiara Liby Seller
Yeah, that's a very good question. I think the basic characteristics of fashionable concepts I sort of touched on along the way. So they are used widely, they are vague, like immensely vague. I understand that there's no concept where all academics agree on the definition, but if you think of hybrid warfare, for example, the academic literature often just doesn't define a term. And if the term is defined, it's not through its essence, but by offering a list of means that supposedly fall under it. And this means that this list of means can continuously be expanded. So any activity can potentially fall under this umbrella of hybrid warfare. And from an analytical perspective, this makes the concept quite meaningless and useless. But at the same time, from this fashion perspective, we can understand that it's no coincidence, it's actually functional. It allows all kinds of people with different interests to get onto this bandwagon and link their research and interests to it. So you've got this vagueness, you've got also the power, the ability of concepts to communicate belonging, to even exclude people. Like if you don't know what hybrid warfare is, then people in strategic studies might look, maybe potentially somewhat weirdly, at you. So it does create boundaries and the dominant narrative at the heart of the concept, which I think is really important. And you can see this in the language quite clearly sometimes. So in the counterinsurgency literature at the time, what you would see is that practitioners and academics repeatedly referred to supposed maxims or truths of counterinsurgency theory. And that was supported by quite a selective reading of history, a selective reading of the ongoing wars that highlighted exactly those aspects that supported the dominant narrative but ignored others. And something similar happened with hybrid warfare. So the dominant narrative around this concept in 2014 told us that Russia had successfully used hybrid warfare in Ukraine and was likely to do so elsewhere. And this was accepted as a fact. Barely anyone looked into the use of hybrid warfare in Ukraine. So this combination of different tools and how this combination enabled Russian success rather than anything else. So what we see with fashionable concepts, really, is that they become an article of faith of sorts, and people don't really investigate or even define a concept as much as they should, especially for a research project, for an academic article, you really want to define your key concepts. And once that's not happening anymore, you might start to wonder why that is the case. And then in terms of diffusion mechanisms, I'd say bandwagoning really is a key mechanism. And that means that people use a concept primarily because other people have been using it. So they don't use it for analytical purposes, or they don't choose it because it's the most appropriate concept for their analytical purposes. And the consequence of that is
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
they
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Dr. Chiara Liby Seller
don't really engage with the concept in detail. As I mentioned, they don't define it, and they just rely on its dominant narrative and thereby, of course, constantly reproduce this dominant narrative without looking at the underlying assumptions. But what I also want to highlight is that this refers only to one part of the academic literature on each concept. It's admittedly a large part, but it's this sort of part that accepts the concept and builds on the concept and wants to explore it further or wants to apply it to a case. There is also literature that engages critically with each concept and really aims to uncover the flaws of each of those concepts.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
And, of course, that can be brought to bear in terms of the declining fashionability of some of the concepts, as well as when they seem to no longer meet the cognitive crisis that were sort of created for or became fashionable through. Are there any other kind of key reasons that terms might decline? Fashionability I mean, for example, political reasons.
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Dr. Chiara Liby Seller
Yeah, I think in terms of the three concepts that I looked at, you really, again, see this connection between politicians and practitioners on the one hand and academics on the other, and I mean, it's difficult to really show causality here, but again, the timing is just quite revealing, I'd say. So with the rma, I've already mentioned that it was dropped by practitioners and by politicians when it sort of didn't deliver success in Afghanistan. And then once politicians and practitioners dropped it, academic interest declined as well. And you can see that even more clearly with counterinsurgency. So once the counterinsurgency effort in Afghanistan didn't really come to fruition or didn't really deliver the results that people had hoped for, the United States quite clearly dropped this concept and distanced themselves from it. So I'm talking about politicians and practitioners here again. And at that point, really, academic interest declines as well. It's not as straightforward in reality. It's obviously more complicated. And again, we have to distinguish the concept from its fashion cycle. So obviously, the terms revolution in military affairs and counter insertion, they are still used in economic discourse. They are actually quite firmly established. But what they don't do is hold the same power. They are just two of many concepts used in the study of war, and that's sort of the key change when they become unfashionable. But the problem is, of course, I mean, there's a couple of problems with that. But just because practitioners decide to drop a concept, it doesn't mean that the phenomenon in reality has disappeared. Right. And so for that reason, it's problematic that academics decide too to drop the concept and then turn their attention elsewhere.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's definitely interesting to think about kind of what happens at the end. So that means then that we have covered to some extent the sort of rise and fall of a number of these concepts, which is, of course, a big goal of the analysis of the book. Stepping back, then, from that, what can we sort of take as some big picture, sort of summaries of all of this? I mean, for one thing, if these terms are going through cycles of rise and fall, that, as you've shown, really can be compared against different terms, like there is a cycle going on here, regardless of which concept we're talking about. Does that mean the concepts are entirely useless if they're going to fall?
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Dr. Chiara Liby Seller
Yeah, that is the key question, obviously. And I think the basic answer is it depends. It depends on who you are and what your aims are. I think, speaking from an academic Perspective, which I obviously take and also implicitly took in writing this book. I think each concept actually was useful before it became fashionable. But the problem with fashionable concepts then is that they are very narrow. They are narrow versions of the original concepts, and that limits our understanding. But nevertheless, even fashionable concepts can inspire good research. So if you take the example of counterinsurgency, again, the specific version of that concept that became popular in the 2000s relied on a few historical myths about earlier counterinsurgencies. So that prompted historians to go back to those instances and clear up those myths. So in that sense, the fashion was very productive. Maybe not in the way you'd expect, but it had very productive effects. But overall, if you look at the concept itself, I think once it becomes fashionable, it does more harm than good. And I've alluded to a couple of those or discussed a couple of the reasons for that already. But the short version really is that fashionable concepts offer a narrow, ready made interpretation of events and thereby limit our perspective, our understanding, and they marginalize other approaches, other topics. So from an academic perspective, this means, I would argue, that we are actually less able to understand war. And from a practitioner's perspective, it means that if you focus on the concept of the day, on the fashion of the day, you are only looking at and preparing for a very specific kind of war, which means you might easily be caught off guard if you end up in a war that looks very different. And because the fashion is so narrow, the chance that you end up in a war that looks different is quite big, actually. So I think both from an academic perspective and a practitioner's perspective, in the end, there's a very good reason to be wary of fashionable concepts. But again, sort of before the concept becomes fashionable, and potentially afterwards, these concepts can be useful. It's really more about once it becomes fashionable, then there are so many dynamics at play, so many power dynamics, that purely for analytical purposes, those concepts aren't useful anymore.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, that's very important to be aware of. Are there any other key implications, either for practitioners or academics from this?
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Dr. Chiara Liby Seller
I guess the one key message that I'd like everyone to take away is that concepts shape how we understand a problem and what solutions thus are possible. So for many, this might be all too obvious, but I feel like in strategic studies and also within the practitioner's world, there isn't a lot of this reflection happening. We don't tend to reflect on how the concepts we use affect how we look at the world. A concept like the revolution in military affairs, for example, that really encourages you to see change and it downplays the role of continuity. And with hybrid warfare, what happened, I think, is that people were so fixated on all kinds of unconventional means that Russia was using around and after 2014 that they weren't really able to, or they weren't really open to the possibility that Russia would actually start a full scale conventional invasion of Ukraine in 2022. So I think whether you're an academic, a military planner, a policy expert, it's just really key to continuously challenge underlying assumptions and test if they are actually accurate. And going beyond that, I think my research also shows that there are some underlying assumptions and issues when it comes to the study of strategy. So for one thing, I think there's certainly need for more theorization, more theoretical groundwork in strategic studies. And the other thing in regards to fashion specifically, is that, well, in my book, in the book's conclusion, actually, I make some suggestions about how to deal with conceptual innovations, how to deal with fashions, so people are invited to look at that. But I think at the same time, I do understand that fashions are a social phenomenon and therefore they are unlikely to disappear. But I just hope that the book at least helps people identifying fashions and understanding why intellectual fashions are problematic and why we need to adopt a practice of constant reflection.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, obviously books that do this sort of analytical work help with all of that. So now that this book is out in the world, is there anything you're currently working on? You want to give us a sneak peek? You of.
- [46:51]
Dr. Chiara Liby Seller
Yeah, happy to. I've recently started a new quite exciting project. It's a small project with two colleagues that further looks into knowledge production and strategic studies. And amongst other things, we are working on launching a survey for scholars in strategic studies with the purpose to understand their views on the field as well as the broader setup of the field in terms of diversity of backgrounds, research interests, methodological preferences, and so on. So I think that's a really nice continuation of some themes I discuss in this book. And it's also meant to, again, encourage the critical reflection that I think is currently a bit marginalized in the field. And for my next book project, that's still very early stages, but essentially I like to look into how our understanding of war interacts with our understanding of technology. And the reason for that is that I think there's a dominance of technologically instrumentalist and determinist views in strategic studies. So here again, I'd like to intervene to critically examine and broaden our thinking. But as I mentioned, it's very early stages. So at this moment, I'm just excited to see where that takes me.
- [48:26]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, that all sounds exciting. So best of luck. And of course, while you're pursuing those projects, listeners can read the book we've been discussing, published by Oxford University Press in 2026, entitled Reconceptualizing the Rise and Fall of Fashionable Concepts in Strategic Studies. Chiara, thank you. So, joining me on the podcast.
- [48:45]
Dr. Chiara Liby Seller
Well, thank you, Miranda. It's been a pleasure, really.