A Violent Peace: A Global Military History of the Interwar Period (Hardcover)

A cutting-edge analysis of the interwar period as one fundamentally international in scope and deeply violent in nature.

World War I destroyed the world that had come before. It shattered three empires and fueled new nationalisms and ideologies that threatened to destroy those that remained. It left millions in its wake with military training and access to weaponry, creating networks of violence that would spread across much of the globe. This violence in the interwar period resulted in more deaths than during the Great War, most of them outside of Europe.

While studies of the First and Second World Wars have become more international and interconnected, our understanding of the interwar period remains dominated by national narratives. A Violent Peace offers a new perspective, stretching across four continents and drawing together a multitude of conflicts, large and small: from the Spanish Civil War to the Wewel Incident in Ethiopia; from the small RAF force involved in Somaliland to the hundreds of thousands in the Chinese Nationalist Encirclement Campaigns; from the conflicts surrounding newly formed states in the Polish-Soviet War to a settling of much older accounts in South America. The themes and patterns from this global era are drawn together in a cohesive analysis, including key studies on the utilization of technology, the growing importance of ideology, and how the Great War shaped the nature of these conflicts.

A Violent Peace provides a fresh angle on a tumultuous era and challenges readers to reconsider their preconceived ideas about the interwar period.

Reviews

"A Violent Peace reinvigorates interwar military history. By combining operational military history and war and society approaches while blending national and global perspectives it allows the interwar era to emerge from the shadows of the World Wars. It is essential reading for military historians, scholars of the twentieth century, and students of modern warfare."— Andrew Orr , author of Facing the Victorious Turks: How the French Misread the Turkish War of Independence

"This book focuses on the violent history of imperial powers in the years between the two world wars. Exploding the outdated notions both of an ‘interwar period’ and of a ‘30 years war,’ these essays provide a subtle and powerful narrative of the military history of conflicts underway before 1914 and still in motion after 1945. This book should be read by anyone interested in the ‘phantom years of peace’ of the first half of the twentieth century."— Jay Winter , author of War Beyond Words: Languages of Remembrance from the Great War to the Present

"Recent scholarship on modern European and global warfare, of which this volume is a robust and impressive continuation, has demanded better answers to the question of when and where the Great War ended and when the long, global Second World War began. A narrow western European geography, even expanded to include western Europe’s overseas empires, still ignores crucial conflicts that formed and destroyed states across the twentieth century. A Violent Peace highlights that the period between major global conflicts was anything but peaceful, and that the decades of ‘small’ wars were crucial to the legacy of the First World War and the destructiveness of the second. The chapters within demonstrate the durable value of military history and the absolute necessity of collaboration among scholars of modern warfare, whatever we decide to call the tumultuous and peaceless decades between the World Wars."— Jadwiga Biskupska , author of Survivors: Warsaw under Nazi Occupation

"A Violent Peace examines the violent interlude between the two world wars, which outside of Western Europe, was anything but peaceful and hardly could be termed an interwar era. Crafters of an excellent work of global military history, the contributors examine conflicts on four continents, many of them all but forgotten today in the wider context of the three-decade struggle in Europe and Asia that remade the international order. In their depth and complexity, these twelve essays show the connective tissue linking the two world wars through the intervening conflicts around the world."— Peter R. Mansoor , author of The GI Offensive in Europe: The Triumph of American Infantry Divisions, 1941–1945

About the Author

Ian Ona Johnson is P. J. Moran Family Associate Professor of Military History at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of Faustian Bargain: The Soviet-German Partnership and the Origins of the Second World War.

Robert Clemm is Associate Professor of Strategy in the Global College of Professional Military Education at Air University.