The Art of Creating Power explores the intellectual thought and wider impact — on military affairs, politics and the universities — of Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman, one of the world’s leading authorities on strategy, conflict and international politics. Freedman’s oeuvre is vast and his legacy, from nuclear strategy to US foreign policy via humanitarian intervention, terrorism, the Falklands and Iraq, has already been recognized around the world. Some of that work is considered in the present volume, although by no means all of it. The contributions to this volume address some of the highlights in the Freedman canon, as well as casting light into some of the less well-known corners of his thought and work. In this volume, senior scholars who have crossed the academic-practitioner boundary, and former students and colleagues in international and strategic studies who have been influenced by, and who have influenced, Freedman, trace the long trajectory of his career, examining his scholarly contribution to a whole host of areas - the book has five sections, reflecting Freedman’s different realms of scholarship: strategy, policy and history, ethics and intervention, theory and, lastly, practice. Recognizing that the importance of social context and constitutive interaction is vital to Freedman’s approach and, in practice, to research at the frontiers of knowledge, but with deep relevance, often, to the ‘real world’, the book as a whole provides signposts to, and markers of, a distinctive approach and a elements of a nascent school of thought — all testimony to a distinguished intellectual figure.
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