Protest and Survive Book

3.5/5 Really enjoyed this book. Although it is a bit dated, the theory applied here has been accepted as paradigmatic of the literature in security studies in terms of defining strategy in a way that makes the strategic studies part of me cringe. Numerous studies before, and since, have reinforced the categories of maneuver, attrition, and punishment strategies; and it's time for a theoretical update on several grounds. First, and most importantly, the coding rules are very subjective and slippery. Generally, what Stam suggests is "doctrine" is really just a matter of who attacked who first, and this tends to make a caricature of the offense/defense literature, at least as I understand it. Specifically, there is a problem with the operationalization of different strategies, especially between punishment and attrition--that seems to deviate from their strategic purpose. The myth of blitzkrieg also features significantly as a strategy in how maneuver is coded in this study. Second, there is an area, thanks to work by scholars like Stathis Kalyvas, Nick Prime, and Lukas Milevski who look beyond a predominant logic of destruction towards characterizations and categories of control. This is an area I hope to exploit in future research, in this case relying on the strategic theory of J.C. Wylie, especially in simplifying the coding and eliminating the aforementioned slippery coding. Third, while the methodology of this effort was generally well done, there are further innovations--particularly in the duration analysis--that could be exploited in research that could deviate from and complement Stam's work. Finally, the substantive interpretations were fairly superficial, especially because the work lacked any rigorous examination of the cases where prediction failed, nor the hard cases where prediction worked. Generally, there is a tremendous convincing benefit to studies that rely on mixed methods, if even Stam had considered greater detail in analytical narratives that served as the underlying basis of the coding rules for the strategies in Win, Lose, or Draw.