Revolutionary Warfare: How the Algerian War Made Modern Counterinsurgency
Available at Cornell University Press, Amazon, And Bookshop.org
Honorable Mention, 2025 Alf Andrew Heggoy Book Prize, French Colonial Historical Society.
“Revolutionary Warfare is a groundbreaking work on an overlooked aspect of the Algerian War: the extent to which the French military used novel strategies and tactics to fight a '"revolutionary'" war. Peterson combines wide-ranging and meticulous research with crisp, vivid prose to provide a compelling account of modern counterinsurgent warfare.”
—Mary Lewis, author of Divided Rule
“Peterson’s argument in Revolutionary Warfare is boldly counter-intuitive: the violence unleashed in response to the insurgency of the Algerian National Liberation Front in November 1954—which quickly expanded into a full-fledged revolution—was not merely a reactionary spasm from a threatened colonial authority, but rather itself a revolutionary act.”
—John Boonstra, George L. Mosse Program Blog
Revolutionary Warfare investigates how efforts to counter a revolution could also be revolutionary. The Algerian War fractured the French Empire, destroyed the legitimacy of colonial rule, and helped launch the Third Worldist movement for the liberation of the Global South. By tracing how French generals, officers, and civil officials sought to counter Algerian independence with their own project of radical social transformation, Terrence G. Peterson reveals that the conflict also helped to transform the nature of modern warfare.
The French war effort was never defined solely by repression. As Peterson details, it also sought to fashion new forms of surveillance and social control that could capture the loyalty of Algerians and transform Algerian society. Hygiene and medical aid efforts, youth sports and education programs, and psychological warfare campaigns all attempted to remake Algerian social structures and bind them more closely to the French state. In tracing the emergence of such programs, Peterson reframes the French war effort as a project of armed social reform that sought not to preserve colonial rule unchanged, but to revolutionize it in order to preserve it against the global challenges of decolonization.
Revolutionary Warfare demonstrates how French officers' efforts to transform warfare into an exercise in social engineering not only shaped how the Algerian War unfolded from its earliest months, but also helped to forge a paradigm of warfare that dominated strategic thinking during the Cold War and after: counterinsurgency.
“With Revolutionary Warfare, Terrence Peterson shows how the French pacification model placed a 'modernizing mission' at the heart of military doctrine. This significant and original historical analysis is a 'must-read' for scholars, military officers, and students of empire, military history, and the Cold War.”
—Brian Drohan, author of Brutality in an Age of Human Rights
“Drawing on extensive archival work in colonial and military archives, Peterson deftly weaves together the often-opposing perspectives of military thinkers in Paris, commanding officers and army personnel on the ground in Algeria and (albeit less centrally) the Algerian civilians at the core of their concerns. In doing so, Peterson reveals that pacification was profoundly contested, even in army circles.”
— Anaïs Faurt, Contemporary European History
“At the heart of Peterson’s book is a counterargument to traditional narratives of postwar social reform. The very same rhetoric that justified the construction of a supposed top-down progressive modernity after 1945 was simultaneously used to justify the entrenchment of colonial rule in North Africa. As Peterson reminds us, ‘the modernizing project at the heart of postwar reconstruction offered a compelling framework to understand and counter the collapse of colonial order.’”
—Charlie Taylor, Jacobin magazine
“Peterson’s engaging prose, careful research, and probing questions make Revolutionary Warfare important reading for scholars and students of French history, Algerian history, the history of decolonisation and empire, and military history.”
—Jennifer Johnson, The Journal of North African Studies