This review is available in full in Canadian Military History.
Despite the immense tension between the Soviet Union and the United States during the Cold War, the period was ultimately defined as a delicate balancing act between major powers. Cold War conflicts were proxy wars that served as a balancing measure between the two major powers. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 created a power vacuum that the United States alone was not able to fill. The 1990s thus represent a period of major transition and reassessment for major military forces, and of conflicts that took advantage of the newly-formed vacuum.
In the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, a tremendous body of literature on the Cold War period has been written. Of particular emphasis in this literature is the United Nation’s shift towards peacekeeping operations and different military alliances, such as NATO focus on anti-insurgency measures. British military historian Jeremy Black’s War in the Modern World, 1990-2014 offers unique insight into the differing conflicts that have emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Black’s work relies upon the central premise that war in a post-Soviet environment is an inevitable byproduct of a collapsing power. He strongly emphasizes that war is a fundamental part of modernity, and that different conflicts arise as a response to the power vacuum left by the Soviet collapse. The conflicts that arose in the 1990s and 2000s were products of continuing advancements among different nations; advancements, which, in part, were responses to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Black also examines how the actions of individual groups such as Boko Haram and Jabhat Al Nusra, which are Islamic extremists groups that operate in Nigeria and Syria respectively, are responses to localised conditions, and the greater implications of these groups’ actions. Such groups appear in response to new instabilities, and play a role in defining modern stability.
