What makes a good strategic concept?

Comparative Strategy, vol. 42, pp. 718–728

Abstract

Strategic concepts are more than simply academic concepts but must also relate to strategic practice, which affects how we should gauge concept quality. Rather than purely academic measures, strategic concepts must also be judged according to their usefulness for practice. Yet the relationship between general theory and specific practice has hardly been explored, a task this article undertakes. Academic theory generates ad hoc concepts, which are used to build specific theories of victory, which are used to generate orders. The measures by which to judge a concept’s quality depends on where in this multi-phase transference process any concept is located.

Authors 1

1. Lukas Milevski corresponding Aachen Institute for History, Leiden University

   Leiden University

   Affiliation as printed

   Institute for History, Leiden University, Leiden, Netherlands