A Violent Peace

A Global Military History of the Interwar Period

Ian Johnson, Robert Clemm

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9780700638734
• eBook ISBN: 9780700638741
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

A cutting-edge analysis of the interwar period as one fundamentally international in scope and deeply violent in nature.

World War I destroyed the world that had come before. It shattered three empires and fueled new nationalisms and ideologies that threatened to destroy those that remained. It left millions in its wake with military training and access to weaponry, creating networks of violence that would spread across much of the globe. This violence in the interwar period resulted in more deaths than during the Great War, most of them outside of Europe.

While studies of the First and Second World Wars have become more international and interconnected, our understanding of the interwar period remains dominated by national narratives. A Violent Peace offers a new perspective, stretching across four continents and drawing together a multitude of conflicts, large and small: from the Spanish Civil War to the Wewel Incident in Ethiopia; from the small RAF force involved in Somaliland to the hundreds of thousands in the Chinese Nationalist Encirclement Campaigns; from the conflicts surrounding newly formed states in the Polish-Soviet War to a settling of much older accounts in South America. The themes and patterns from this global era are drawn together in a cohesive analysis, including key studies on the utilization of technology, the growing importance of ideology, and how the Great War shaped the nature of these conflicts.

A Violent Peace provides a fresh angle on a tumultuous era and challenges readers to reconsider their preconceived ideas about the interwar period.

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Interwar Militarization of the Indo-Afghan Frontier
• 2. Ephemeral Victory: The Polish-Soviet War, 1919–1921
• 3. The Arabian Peninsula Wars, 1919–1934
• 4. Interwar Conflict in Africa, 1919–1939
• 5. Airpower and Empire: Somaliland, Iraq, and the Development of the Royal Air Force
• 6. Against the Untamed Mountains: The Rif War, 1921–1926
• 7. The Welwel Incident: Territorial Conflicts Preceding the Second Italo-Ethiopian War
• 8. The Nanjing Decade in China, 1928–1937
• 9. The Soviet Intervention in Xinjiang during the 1930s
• 10. The Manchukuo Army: Japanese Native Counterinsurgency and War in Northeast Asia, 1905–1937
• 11. The Chaco War, 1932–1935
• 12. The Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939
• Conclusion
• List of Contributors
• Index
• Back Cover