The Art of War and Peace: The Changing Face of 21st Century Warfare by Dr David Kilcullen and Dr Greg Mills

During the Second World War, warfare reached previously unimaginable extremes, in which the rules of war were rewritten in an increasingly ruthless struggle, bringing mass destruction, widespread civilian casualties and systematic crimes against humanity. Mass mobilisation, industrialisation and total war reflected the entwining of ideology, warfare and perceptions of national survival; the balance of casualties shifted to civilians from a ratio of 1:1 civilian to military deaths in the 1914–18 war to 2:1 in the 1939–45 war and in the Korean and Vietnam conflicts. Economies and societies at large became part of an expanded battlespace, with all aspects of society being targeted from the air through strategic bombing, by economic warfare via blockade, the weaponisation of hunger, and psychological intimidation. What was critical was the tenacity of civilian populations not only to withstand this targeting but to actively play their part in supporting the total war effort. By 1970, Marshall McLuhan could write that ‘World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation’.

The future, in 1938 as today, is not preordained. It will be decided by how citizens respond, whether their governments act to re-establish defensive capacity and thereby deterrence, and whether they are prepared to act boldly and decisively when standards and laws governing international behaviour are flouted.

Certain social and economic changes have confused the clarity of response. Unlike in the 1930s, when the costs of war were fresh in living memory, spurring rapid industrialisation and rearmament, today, at least for most in the West, war is a distant notion, something mostly fought by others, by professional armies in distant lands, with the public conscience only occasionally disturbed when particularly horrific combat scenes make it through the media filter. The last generation to fight in a world war the youngest soldiers of the Second World War are turning ninety-seven in 2024 is vanishing. With that generation, the vigilance inspired by direct knowledge of what real war means is fading too. It is easy and not a little convenient to dismiss war as someone else’s problem, to subsume its grim realities within a debate about faceless value chains, technology, theories of inclusion and exclusion, a confusion of acronyms, commercial interests, ideological differ- ences and geography. It is common, too, that war, its causes and challenges, is subjected to topical interest group debates in the West, including climate change, LGBTQ+ rights, and the extent of welfare entitlements, reflecting a streak of self-referentialism as much as denialism and self-interest.

Yet this state of affairs cannot be someone else’s business. Critical choices about defence, foreign policy, national resilience and spending priorities belong to everyone, to elected leaders and the public alike, and will determine a future either of war or peace. We are not, after all, spectators in this unfolding drama. Moreover, while there may be a tendency to look at everything as new and unprecedented, disruptive changes to conflict are as old as war itself.

Technological innovation, for example, is one constant. The modern iteration concerns information technology, digitisation and integration through electronic media and other networks. The democratisation of information has removed traditional editorial filters to information content, while algorithms and artificial intelligence constantly reinforce certain world views among recipients. Certainly, the scale is different, with seven billion smartphones today in circulation, distributing information first-hand and constantly re-emphasising narratives. And yet human actions are still key to the management of information and influence operations, intangibles from cyber to ‘lawfare’, and the ability to work through multilateral organisations.

Other changes are taking place in the manner of the integration of technology itself, with AI and human–machine teaming, along with the proliferation of autonomous systems, creating new patterns of warfare, and revolutionising the application of tactical concepts across time, space, com- mand and control, and risk. As robotics and autonomous systems warfare becomes a ‘normal’ phenomenon, it seems unlikely that constraints on war – cultural, legal or military – can remain unchanged, especially at the inter- face of non-state actors, technology and weak governance. But this should not make the world more dangerous, even if it is more complex, with a greater number of actors, state and non-state, and a faster pace of events. Nor should the reality of complexity undercut the importance and impact of choice.

Victory in war has long required more than tactical prowess. As the historian and author James Holland observes, during the Second World War this placed greater emphasis on the operational connection between the strategic (high-level aims) and tactical (the coalface where the actual fighting is done) levels of war, concerning the war supply chain from raw materials through production and delivery via logistics. What is required is the mobilisation and meshing of economic, political and military stamina along with technological innovation, organisation and logistics, mass production and global cooperation. Technology is key to success but by itself is not enough to win wars a realisation that became familiar to the great powers in the decolonisation struggle and, more recently, in Iraq and Afghanistan, when it was turned to the asymmetrical advantage of insurgents. Technology has to be closely integrated with operational concepts, people and organisations.

Other constants remain. There is a need for sound leadership at all these levels: the tactical through the operational to the strategic. War is a profoundly human act, best understood through the stories of individuals and their choices. Such stories often centre on sacrifice, tragedy and quiet heroism. It’s a drama in which leadership has a disproportionate impact, for good and bad, as these pages will illustrate. For those on the periphery of the global economy, or at the margins of international public opinion and media cov- erage, this carries even greater possible costs. In a social-media age the establishment of a clear, coherent and convincing narrative laying out policy aims and the path and means to achieve them is key to shaping understandings of reality.

Strategies to end conflict have to mesh and match short-term actions with longer term aims. To do so, there is a need to think beyond political, electoral cycles, and not pursue strategies that simply reinforce the practices that led to conflict in the first place. For instance, in the ‘Global South’, states are overwhelmingly characterised by extractive political economies, in which access to decision making power and privilege determines patterns of wealth. Outsiders have been especially poor at understanding this operating system and how to transform it so as to ensure greater inclusiveness and a wide local stake in stability and success. A failure to undo the corruption permeating the political economy of Afghanistan, for example, lies at the heart of Western failure in the twenty-year mission to bring peace to that country, one compounded by a failure to sync Western stamina with political ambition and develop a military approach to defeat the Taliban, who ultimately outlasted, outmatched and outmanoeuvred its rival.

That the West never fundamentally altered but simply amplified the Afghan political economy and this operating system through increasing financial flows only worsened the practices of corruption and undid any efforts to improve governance. While there is a need to see the world the way it is, not the way you would like it to be, ‘do no harm’ must also be a key operating principle. It is one that is frequently neglected. Within the Arg, the Afghan presidential palace, key individuals were constantly on the take, their greed increasing as the government system crumbled. These inflows were not only from the West, of course, but from supposed Middle Eastern allies as well as the usual set of opponents. Without undoing this political economy, the relationships between insiders and outsiders were simply transactional. Outsiders, too, had their own self-interests, from arms manufacturers to aid empires.

Diplomacy appears to be increasingly impotent and divided in the face of ratcheting global crises, its institutions no longer fit for purpose. The constant use of Western language that ‘condemns’ and is routinely ‘concerned’ about conflicts suggests a coterie that is overstretched and has run out of ideas. They are not retreating into the world of vacuous and platitudinous statements because others are solving these conflicts in the absence of Western agency.

On the contrary.
While the world has been focused on Ukraine and the Middle East, state- led violence continues elsewhere. In the Horn of Africa alone, the cost in human lives from conflict has topped at least one million since 2020. At least 150 000 troops were killed in the two-year war in Tigray starting in 2020, along with perhaps as many as 600 000 civilians.6 Since then, conflicts elsewhere in the region, such as in the Amhara and Oromia regions of Ethiopia and in Sudan and South Sudan, have added to the grim tally. In Sudan, in addition to the deaths from the fighting between the Rapid Support Forces and the Sudanese Armed Forces, more than 6.5 million people have been internally displaced, and there are more than 2 million external refugees. Fighting between various factions in South Sudan cost an estimated 400 000 lives between 2012 and 2018, in the aftermath of the war of independence from Sudan, in which 1.9 million were killed. We don’t know how many more people have been killed since then in South Sudan, but the number is likely to be in the hundreds of thousands. To these numbers should be added the instability in Somaliland and Somalia among other insurrections, in which more than 70 000 have died this century. If we add the casualties in Oromia (between 200 000 and 300 000) and the Amhara region to the picture, the regional figure since 2020 certainly tops 1 million, perhaps 1.5 million. In these parts, genocide unfolds every day, but curiously it does not cause outrage.

One problem is not a lack of money, but perhaps rather too much. Between 2007 and 2020, for example, the United States spent at least US$2.5 billion on counter-terrorism operations in Somalia, excluding defence and intelligence costs. Official development assistance (ODA) for Somalia has totalled just under $2 billion annually over the past ten years, creating a very high aid to GDP ratio of around one-quarter: this is more likely to produce dependency than development. Looking at the results of aid in the comparatively stable and democratic Somaliland (about $20 million a year), one would have to say that too little aid may not be the problem. Indeed, the results of the failure of the international mission in Afghanistan, in which $2.3 trillion was spent by the US alone – a thousand times more than spending on Somalia also suggest the same answer. More is not necessarily better.

The routine failure to convert war into peace through mediation and negotiation, and the manner in which disputes seem to progress invariably into full-blown conflict, suggest that the problem lies elsewhere. In the world of peace-making, which increasingly resembles the 1930s, when the pre- eminent international organisation (the League of Nations) foundered after the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, this is not surprising. The post–Second World War order is certainly no longer what it once was.
This failure both reflects and is compounded by the inability to positively manage external spoilers. The Cold War offered wiggle room to African dictators from Mengistu in Ethiopia to Mobutu in Zaire. Now, in what is a far cry from the simplicity of the brief, single superpower era of the 1990s, the growing role of Russia, the Emirates, Qatar, Turkey, Iran and China, among others, creates a welter of options for African leaders seeking to sidestep international pressure. And yet how a war ends determines how the peace is won, what form it takes, and its likelihood of enduring. Various levels of analysis  from grand strategic and military-strategic to operational and tactical should link policy with strategy and campaigning with the conduct of battle. These are sometimes called levels of war, and are discussed in detail later in this book, but they apply equally in preserving or making peace, and in the transition from war to peace an important subset of strategy, known as ‘war termination’, which has sadly been ineffective in Western practice.

There is a premium on leadership not only to prepare properly for war but also to make peace. For conflicts to end peacefully, there is usually a need for equal pressure on the belligerent parties, from the outside, to get them to the negotiating table. The parties also need to see that there is more to be gained from ending the fighting than continuing with it, and they need a clear methodology for making peace, a sense of timing and leadership. The last component is critical but elusive, not least in the endless wars of the Middle East. A political plan is imperative unless war is only to set the stage for the next round of fighting, a lesson from Israel’s wars with the Palestinians as much as anywhere. But for this you need two willing partners; in the Middle East just as between Ukraine and Russia, or in the Horn of Africa.

If a peace process is only a device to allow enough time to recover between bouts of conflict, for one party or another to exit from the conflict, or as a means of legal or diplomatic subterfuge, or if one party or another remains more interested in war than peace, then war will likely resume. Once a peace process has been concluded, then other strategic aspects come into play, including economic and legal redress, as well as safeguards to prevent the resumption of conflict.

Making agreements stick has proved another challenge entirely. Paul Collier reminds us that nearly half the countries that have ended a civil war resort to conflict soon afterwards. There were more than 5 000 conflict mediation efforts between 1945 and 2000, in which some type of agreement was reached in 45.5 per cent of inter-state and an almost identical 44.3 per cent of intra-state disputes. Yet just one in four inter-state dispute settlements during this period held longer than eight weeks, and only 17.2 per cent of intra-state disputes. Finding ways to lower this risk is imperative, particularly in Africa given the prevalence of conflict on the continent: of thirty-three conflicts globally in 2022, half were in Africa, with nine in Asia, five in the Middle East, two in Europe and just one in the Americas. In an inversion of Carl von Clausewitz’s observation on the primacy of politics in war, peace can be misused, and be viewed by its participants as war by other means. The need for vigilance over irrational exuberance is clear from those peace pro- cesses in which early optimism was replaced by failure, as in southern Africa and parts of Latin America.

The division of labour and the balance of focus between insiders and outsiders in ensuring stability is a source of ongoing debate among practitioners, and one that both of us have examined in detail in previous books. The question is what leverage, aside from moral suasion, outsiders can bring to bear. Outside parties both non-governmental and international can help both to pressure and to facilitate peace efforts, mobilising communities and creating awareness. They can also help build trust and consensus, provide a neutral arbiter for difficult and sensitive issues, and create alternatives to violence. While attention is often given to high-profile diplomatic efforts to end a conflict, local actors have a critical role to play in establishing the conditions for peace. When it was suggested to Stalin that the Pope might appreciate an end to his oppression of Catholics in Russia, he scoffed, ‘The Pope? How many divisions has he got?’ Stalin’s lack of respect for moral authority may have been extreme, but it is far from unique.

In his work on the Thirty Years’ War, written in 1805, Clausewitz criticised those scholars who treated war only with a sense of horror and superiority as a formless, brutish struggle which some would have preferred to ignore altogether.11 The centrality of motives interests and values has historically found expression in Just War Theory, comprising jus ad bellum (the ‘right [to resort] to war’) and jus in bello (‘right [conduct] in war’). Several criteria exist for a just war: its declaration by a lawful sovereign, a just and righteous cause, possessing rightful intentions in seeking to advance good and curtail evil, a reasonable chance of success, war as a last resort, and goals propor tionate to the means being used. Proportionality also applies in the conduct of war, regarding how much force is necessary and morally appropriate to the ends being sought and the injustice suffered. All these principles, which have formed the basis of the work of the United Nations and the rules of the inter- national system since 1945, are at stake in today’s conflicts notably Ukraine and Gaza. The fact that Western countries, during the war on terror and before, arguably breached these just war criteria themselves, reduces their moral legitimacy in seeking to hold adversaries to account. But this is a criticism of Western hypocrisy, not an argument against others’ right of self-defence. There are other constants in history. Motive matters. So does fighting will. Mass (whether achieved physically or by massing effects) remains critical to battle, as does logistics capacity. Properly harnessed and supported, technology can be an enabler. How all these aspects mesh with each other is critical in determining deterrence the business of avoiding conflict and in determining how wars end and whether peace ensues.

We are not alone in seeking answers to this pressing challenge of conflict. In Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine, published in 2023, David Petraeus and Andrew Roberts highlight the critical mistakes made by leaders in applying new weapon systems, theories and strategies to contemporary conflict. Mike Martin’s How to Fight a War (2023) covers much of the same ground in understanding why wars seldom go to plan, from over- ambitious goals to disregarding intelligence, terrain or enemy capabilities. In covering conflict from the nineteenth century until today, Sir Lawrence Freedman’s The Future of War (2017) describes how wars are not always a rational response to political pressures, and points out the fallacies of believing in short wars and conflicts of choice. In The Arms of the Future, published in 2023, Jack Watling analyses how technology is shaping the risks and opportunities on the battlefield, and how armies might be structured to overcome them. War remains a driver of technological development and can be a catalyst for social change. The sociologist Michael Mann’s On Wars (2023) delves into the role and make-up of individuals in opting for war or peace.

Our book seeks to add to this recent, fine literature but is different in three important respects. First, it focuses on wars in which we have had direct personal experience, including some in Africa, a continent often neglected in war studies even though it is the site of the majority of the world’s conflicts. The book has deliberately not been written from a high-level perspective, but rather from among the dust and detritus of places where wars are fought, and in the company of those that fight them. While we don’t pretend or seek to cover every contemporary conflict, we dig down into the personal in endeavouring to draw out lessons and guidelines from which others might learn and on which they might, hopefully, act.

Second, this is thus a book about human dynamics and tactical action as much as the need for strategy. Admiral Jackie Fisher’s succinct and poetic phrase ‘Think in oceans; shoot at sight!’ makes this connection between the strategic and the tactical, and speaks of the need for big conceptions, quick decisions and local actions. Tactical reality therefore lies at the heart of this book in the journey from war to peace and, sadly often, back again.

Finally, the book is designed to provoke thinking about solutions, drawing inspiration from Eisenhower’s statement ‘Whenever I run into a problem I can’t solve, I always make it bigger. I can never solve it by trying to make it smaller, but if I make it big enough, I can begin to see the outlines of a solution.’ Perhaps this is less about enlarging the problem, but increasingly, in this instance, and through the use of detailed case studies, placing these problems – and solutions – under intense scrutiny.

Benjamin Franklin may have said, ‘There never was a good war or a bad peace.’ But peace does not always prevent war  sometimes with devastating consequences. Deterrence, defined as ‘the ability to decisively affect an adversary’s decision calculus by altering its perception of the costs and bene- fits of pursuing a given course of action versus those of restraint’, does not alone centre on diplomacy: rather, it involves all elements of national power. Just as aggression is not founded alone on opportunism but also on fears about security or lack of alternatives, deterrence has to be flexible but also firm in being backed up by a credible threat of force while at the same time leaving space to defuse the crisis.

All this is important since global security challenges are likely to worsen and not wane over the next generation. If we want to ensure that today does not turn out like 1938, or even like 1940 after the fall of France, a lull during which it was uncertain whether the appetite of Hitler’s Germany was sated or merely whetted, we should act with alacrity. The twin threats of ignorance and inaction could otherwise as those who misread the signs of global war during the previous century discovered engulf a way of life that, whatever its failings, has brought greater global prosperity and inclusion than ever before. And the costs of any global conflagration, as the last century vividly shows, are likely to be painfully high.

When atomic weapons were used at the end of the Second World War, some observers initially thought they would make war obsolete. Instead, the presence of a nuclear threshold – beyond which lay national and, perhaps, planetary annihilation forced adversaries to find alternative channels for competition. The focus of great-power competition shifted from the central front (in a divided Europe) to the global periphery, and a combination of conventional, asymmetric and guerrilla warfare. It played out through inter-state wars (in Korea, the Middle East, India–Pakistan, Iran–Iraq, and Eritrea–Ethiopia, for example), intra-state conflicts including insurgencies and civil wars (Malaya, Kenya, Nigeria, Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Angola and Vietnam), and through what Nikita Khrushchev labelled ‘wars of national liberation’. The last category exposed the impotence of regular militaries from developed economies in fighting self-determination from Vietnam to Afghanistan. While supposedly ‘limited’ in that they did not involve direct combat between the superpowers, these wars had impacts that were far from limited, highlighting the danger of viewing warfare through the lens only of great power protagonists.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union two years later, the great struggle of the twentieth century between liberty and totalitarianism seemed to have ended in a decisive victory for individual freedoms, democracy and free enterprise. As George W. Bush put it in 2002, it seemed that in the century to follow, ‘only nations that share a commitment to protecting basic human rights and guaranteeing political and economic freedom will be able to unleash the potential of their people and assure their future prosperity’. And, he added, ‘the duty of protecting these values against their enemies is the common calling of freedom-loving people across the globe and the ages’.

If these words seem quaint today, an echo from a vanished past, that may be because the intervening two decades of the inconclusive, brutal Global War on Terrorism have seen a reversion to great power competition. Representative government is in retreat in the face of resurgent authoritarianism. Global liberty declined for the seventeenth consecutive year in 2023, according to Freedom House, which has been charting these trends for half a century. Freedom of trade is increasingly constrained, as economic decoupling between China and the United States takes hold, and with the widespread imposition of sanctions against Russia following its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Democracies now inhabit a world, as Tom Tugendhat has noted, ‘where multilateral institutions can no longer provide the stability or security they once promised’. This weakness, of course, does not only apply to Western democracies. Or as Hanna Maliar, then Ukraine’s deputy minister of defence, told us, ‘The main lesson between 2014 and 2022 is that all the instruments elaborated since World War II are not working anymore.’

This may help to explain why, for instance, despite unprecedented levels overall of global prosperity today, conflict rages in parts of sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and Central Europe. There are other, worrying longer-term trends. The late, lamented Anthony Cordesman wrote of ‘winter wars’, which include nuclearisation, the arms race, terrorism, population pressures, and threats from ‘fragile, divided, authoritarian, and undeveloped states’, along with regional areas of tension including the Koreas and North Africa, in addition to those already mentioned.

The contemporary simultaneous nature of these threats is historically unusual, perhaps even unique. One senior European intelligence official of a southern Mediterranean country summarised the ‘threat vectors’ facing Europe from the Sahel as the combination of jihadism, weak domestic governance and widespread corruption, economic collapse worsened by climate change, ethnic division and its corollary in nationalist struggles, and an exploding demography coupled with an external spark in the form of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict along with foreign interference, both directly and indirectly through influence operations and contestation over supranational structures such as the United Nations. As a consequence, he said, the Sahel region, which by 2050 will hold a population of 330 million across its five core countries (Niger, Burkina Faso, Mauritania, Mali and Chad) alone, double what it is today, ‘is on the brink of becoming a failed macro-state’. This setting demands a hard look at how we got to this point, and how the failure of external policies has contributed to the situation in which we now find ourselves. Sun Tzu wrote that ‘he will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight’. The same rule applies as much to making peace as to making war. To understand and apply the essence of war and its corollary, the essence of peace implies making sense of a rapidly changing, complex environment. Good intentions are not enough to manage this environment and the interlocking crises present. As Oleksandra Matviichuk notes, we require instead ‘a rational perspective and clear-eyed strategy’.

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Dr David Kilcullen and Dr Greg Mills The Art of War and Peace: The Changing Face of 21st Century Warfare Bonnier Books/ Harper Collins India, 2025. Pb. Pp.336

How have the character and technology of war changed in recent times? Why does battlefield victory often fail to result in a sustainable peace? What is the best way to prevent, fight and resolve future conflict?

The world is becoming a more dangerous place. Since the fall of Kabul and Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the US-led liberal international order is giving way to a more chaotic and contested world system. Western credibility and deterrence are diminishing in the face of wars in Europe and the Middle East, tensions across the Taiwan Strait, and rising populism and terrorism around the world. Can peace, mutual respect and democracy survive, or are we destined to a permanent chaos in which authoritarians and populists thrive?

Using decades of experience as policy advisors in conflicts in Iraq and across Africa, and on recent fieldwork in Israel and Taiwan, the authors analyse the nature of modern war, considering state-on-state and intra-state conflicts. They investigate how technology can be a leveller for small powers against larger aggressors and the role of leadership, diplomacy and economic assistance.

Weighing up past lessons, present observations and predictions about the future, The Art of War and Peace explores how wars can be won on the battlefield and how that success can be translated into a stable and enduring peace.

Sir Nick Carter, former UK Chief of Defence Staff says in his foreword:

“The strategic content is increasingly complex, dynamic and competitive. The free world, and the multilateral system that has assured our security and stability for several generations, are facing ever increasing and -proliferating threats from resurgent authoritarian powers, hostile alliances and non-state actors.

These threats blend old elements — competition for resources, territory and political power — with new approaches. Our rivals engage in a continuous struggle involving all the instruments of statecraft, ranging from what we call peace to the threat of nuclear war. Their strategy of ‘political warfare’ is designed to undermine cohesion to erode economic, political and social resilience, and to challenge our strategic position in key regions of the world.

…

The pervasiveness of information and the pace of technological change are transforming the character of warfare. Old distinctions between ‘peace’ and ‘war’, between ‘public’ and ‘private’, between ‘foreign’ and ‘domestic’, and between ‘state’ and ‘non-state’ are increasingly out of date. The triumph of the narrative increasingly determines defeat or victory.

….

[The authors comprise of] an American-Australian and a South African…a metaphor for the international cooperation necessary by which the efforts of good people can success over evil. …I had the privilege of working with both of them in Afghanistan, two men who care deeply about ending conflict, both brave to a fault.

This is a book about strategy, about how to plan, prevent and fight modern wars and, once the fighting has stopped, how to win the peace. It is a book about how to re-establish deterrence, a product of assiduous planning, painstaking training, selfless sacrifice and enlightened allies.

For there are no instant wins in standing up to authoritarianism.

…
Martin Niemoller, the German theologian and pastor, is best known for his opposition to the Nazi regime and his 1946 poem on the dangers of inaction in the face of terror: “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out – because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me — and then there was no one left to speak for me.”

Dr. David Kilcullen is Professor of International and Political Studies at the University of New South Wales, Canberra, Professor of Practice at Arizona State University, and CEO of the geopolitical risk analysis firm Cordillera Applications Group. He is a leading theorist and practitioner of guerrilla and unconventional warfare, counterinsurgency and counterterrorism and the author of five prize-winning books. He was awarded the 2015 Walkley Award (Australia's equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize) for longform journalism for his war reporting on the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

Dr Greg Mills heads the Johannesburg-based Brenthurst Foundation, established in 2005 by the Oppenheimer family to strengthen African economic performance. He holds degrees from the Universities of Cape Town (BA Hons) and Lancaster (MA cum laude, and PhD), and was, first, the Director of Studies and then the National Director of the SA Institute of International Affairs from 1994-2005. He is the author of the best-selling books Why Africa Is Poor and Africa's Third Liberation. His writings won him the Recht Malan Prize for Non-Fiction Work in South Africa.