Ongoing shifts from conventional wars predominated by large-scale professional armies in the service of the political interests of nation-states to a new breed of armed conflicts featuring asymmetric warfare where profound power disparities between belligerents brings to the fore a wide range of ideas, identities, discourses, norms, behaviors, relationships, organizations, and outcomes in security, violence, and politics. This course analyzes changes from traditional approaches of military and security affairs, most notably in how wars are fought, to contemporary perspectives and practices that heed new strategies, tactics, technologies, and combatants. Moreover, it situates these recastings as socio-political constructions indicative of a “warfare imaginary” that illuminate strategic position, force, violence, militarism, and civil-military relations. The class begins by problematizing the strategy-making process through a survey of classic works, and specifically spotlights the importance of technological, organizational, cultural, and political changes and challenges in military power. This is followed by a review of the historical foundations of strategic doctrine that was born out of the emergence of empires and states, and informed early interstate war and colonial war and would lead to two world wars. The course then examines modern security environments and their unfolding warfare imaginaries to position students to assess themes of asymmetric warfare and warriors: weapons of mass destruction; economic warfare; counterinsurgency; counterterrorism; fourth generation warfare; drones, robots, and artificial intelligence; cyberwarfare; information warfare; grand strategies of great powers; hybrid warfare; urban warfare; proxies, special forces, and enhanced soldiers. It concludes with a look at how warfare evolves, what that suggests about the impact of military affairs on political order, and where current evolutions are headed. Beyond utilizing concepts of change in Security Studies, such as the so-called “revolution in military affairs,” the class also draws on the fields of Critical Security Studies and Military Sociology in assessing the significance of the social-political underpinnings and implications of strategic culture and the use of force in asymmetric warfare. This course is part of the Conflict & Security concentration in the Julien J. Studley Graduate Programs in International Affairs.