Episode 4: The Dangers of Strategic Fashion: Dr Chiara Libiseller

Strategic thinking runs aground when it sees what it is looking for and not what is really there. When ladies’ skirts became longer and more voluminous in the 1950s, this fashion was referred to as “the New Look”, a term then borrowed to describe the USA’s new nuclear strategy. The term obscured the dual nature of this strategic change: at once it was a strategy of deterrence by denial by introducing battlefield nuclear weapons, and one of deterrence by punishment, by holding at risk massively major cities within the Soviet sphere of power. Similarly, other fashionable labels have been used in strategic thinking from Low Intensity Conflict in the Vietnam War era, to the more recent Revolution in Military Affairs, Counterinsurgency, or Hybrid Warfare – three terms explored by Chiara Libiseller. They are latched onto by those wishing to be seen as ahead of the curve. As officials and academics are forever inventing new definitions, confusion arises as to the meaning of such terms, for they are used differently by individual scholars and often thought to mean different things by the practitioners who try to use them in their work.

Dr Chiara Libiseller is a Lecturer in Strategic Studies for the Department of War Studies, King's College, London, where her research focuses on Western knowledge production about war and strategy and its effects on practice. She is also the deputy editor of the Journal of Strategic Studies and part of the Advisory Committee of Women in International Security in the United Kingdom.

• 1:9. Colin S Gray, Strategic Culture and What is Good Enough?
• 1:12. A Practitioners Perspective: Creating National Security Strategy. 
• 2:Extra. Reflections on a Pedagogy for Strategy. 
• 3:12. Petraeus’s ‘Big Four’: Brainstorm, Communicate, Implement, Assess. 
• 5:7. H.R. McMaster on National Security Strategy Making. 
• 6:3. Lord Mervyn King: Effective Strategy for Radical Uncertainty. 
• 6:21. Delivering National Security Strategies. 
• 7:1. Avoiding Strategic Surprise: Lessons from NATO. 

• Futter, Andrew. “Cyber-Semantics: Why We Should Retire the Latest Buzzword in Security Studies.” Journal of Cyber Policy 3, no. 2 (2018): 201–16.

• Libiseller, Chiara. Reconceptualising War: The Rise and Fall of Fashionable Concepts in Strategic Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2026.

• Marks, Michael. Metaphors in International Relations Theory. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

• Silove, Nina. “Beyond the Buzzword: The Three Meanings of ‘Grand Strategy.’” Security Studies 27, no. 1 (2018): 27–57.

• Sondarjee, Maïka, and Nathan Andrews. “Decolonizing International Relations and Development Studies: What’s in a Buzzword?” International Journal 77, no. 4 (2022): 551–71.

• Wither, James K. “Hybrid Warfare Revisited: A Battle of ‘Buzzwords.’” Connections: The Quarterly Journal 22, no. 1 (2023): 7–27.