I took a case from The Algerian War, a Frenchman one from The Boer War, a British imperial military officer and then one from the American Revolutionary War, a Hessian mercenary who goes back to Germany after the war and writes some of the earliest written documents in how to fight irregular wars. The cases were manuals (a manual being a record of what the author learned about counter-insurgency), so you look at the learning output of the manual, personal writings, memoirs, diaries that sort of thing to get to the learning process and you reconstruct to get to how they arrived at the conclusions they did, thereby explaining why we have lots of different ways of fighting these wars. My PhD was in the history of counterinsurgency so I looked at cases of policy learning, or failure to learn as the case may be, in irregular wars. Q) Can you tell me a little about your academic background? Also I wanted to have a look at the system here, see how things work and what the new program will entail. We’re working on related topics from several other points of view. Professor Yamashita is also a great person to work with for this, so it was a good fit. It’s always nice to get some time to spend in another institution Japan interests me, though the project is not strictly about Japan, but it involves early modern east Asian history ‘writ large’. Q) What was your motivation for applying? I am partnered with Professor Yamashita of Ritsumeikan’s College of International Relations, who I had been on a panel with at a conference about a year ago at the International Studies Association, where he was giving a talk which was a precursor to what I’m doing here so, my relationship with Professor Yamashita, together with a call from ANU to come up here to build relationships for the new ANU-RU Dual Degree Program, led to my putting in some paper work and it was pretty much just that. It was the coming together of two things. Q) Can you tell me about how you came to be involved with the Program? Joseph Mackay’s office opened on the fourth floor of a spacious building on Kinugasa Campus, beyond the name plate that gave the impression of permanency, stood a welcoming and engaging man by an open laptop – clearly enjoying the quiet of a private study with an enviable mountain-view and the opportunity to engage in some (almost) uninterrupted research and writing.
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