In Networks of Domination Paul K. MacDonald makes a compelling argument that should capture the attention of international relations scholars and Western foreign policymakers alike. He asserts that foreign conquerors will succeed or fail not merely as a function of military might but, rather, as a function of their relationship to the sociopolitical landscape they seek to vanquish. Conquerors will be more likely to succeed if they have already done the work of cultivating meaningful bonds with local elites. Moreover, if said elites are fragmented, the formidable challenges they face in generating meaningful resistance will make the job of an occupying force that much easier. To substantiate his argument, MacDonald takes the reader on a vivid tour through the British Empire, from the Indian subcontinent to southern and western Africa, and concludes with a consideration of the second American war in Iraq.

The author’s first three case studies reveal the great variation in experience that a single imperial power faced in wresting control from one native population versus another. In parts of India, the East India Company had grown truly intermingled with the social, political, and economic networks of the time. The British developed a number of local partners, many of whom were estranged from or in competition with one another and willing to work with a foreign patron. When the time came to assert greater territorial control, the Crown could do so without too fierce a fight. In parts of South Africa, on the other hand, elites were more unified in their opposition to British advances. The British had a harder time but were able to leverage their relationships among these elites to chip away at this more formidable barrier to conquest. In parts of Nigeria, local elites were less unified than their South African counterparts, but the British lacked a firm foothold on account of their minimal political presence. Despite a dearth of valuable local confederates, the imperial power could still manipulate splintered elites to achieve local subjugation.

This book is a refreshing piece of scholarship because it takes on a formidable question (Why are some states able to dominate other territories and peoples?) that really matters. This work not only deepens our historical understanding of nineteenth-century international relations but also has important lessons for today’s geopolitics. MacDonald consistently underscores the point that “military superiority,” while valuable on the battlefield, does not have adequate explanatory power when one state’s capacity to conquer another is assessed. Foreign interveners must learn about the place and people they seek to control and, ultimately, interweave themselves within those influential networks that can yield essential collaborators when the need arises. Moreover, strategies that work to shape political and military outcomes in one context may not work in another. The author’s concern with local social networks and patterns of resistance shifts our focus from Western militaries and their capabilities to their interactions with the highly complex but investigable societies in which they intervene. His choice not to treat “peripheral” peoples as “inert objects upon which European military supremacy was imposed” (p. 33) is also a welcome one. The case studies reveal how local elites have consistently exploited, empowered, and deterred their Western counterparts. In other words, the best laid plans of great powers can be contingent on meaningful, symbiotic ties with local actors.

For scholars preoccupied with unconventional conflict and intervention, this argument is a familiar and convincing one. In the study of counterinsurgency, for example, one of the much-heralded lessons learned by French military officer David Galula in mid-twentieth-century Algeria was the imperative to secure local support for one’s campaign. In his words, “in order to pacify, therefore, we had to identify those Moslems who were for us, to rely on them to rally the majority of the population, and together to eliminate the rebels and their militant supporters” (Galula, Pacification in Algeria, 1963). Nearly five decades later, Jason Lyall and Isaiah Wilson III argued that the greater mechanization of modern military forces had made them less effective counterinsurgents because of “force structures that inhibit information collection among local populations,” thereby precluding more sophisticated political maneuvering amidst the local population (“Rage against the Machines: Explaining Outcomes in Counterinsurgency Wars,” International Organization 63 [no. 1, 2009]:67–106). In an age of “light footprints,” surgical air campaigns, and drone warfare, MacDonald’s abundant archival evidence advances our understanding about the kind of time, knowledge, and relationships necessary for an intervening power to assert influence, let alone control, in a foreign land.

MacDonald’s approach can also be read as an invitation to political scientists to embrace the messiness of the politics we study rather than force ourselves into the straitjackets that typological analysis can sometimes impose. The author’s case selection mirrors his theoretical concern with “the local.” His richly detailed exposition of multiple localized caselets within the larger Indian, South African, and Nigerian cases reflects the importance of recognizing “the periphery” as a highly variegated space. Unafraid to embrace localized variation on its own terms, MacDonald defies the impulse to simply categorize an entire country or conquest monolithically. He walks the reader through a number of caselets that demonstrate the variation within each case but also underscore the similarities between cases that emerge most vividly in creative comparative work of this kind. (For more on the merits of subnational comparisons, see Richard Snyder, “Scaling Down: Subnational Comparative Method,” Studies in Comparative International Development 36 [no. 1, 2001]: 93–110).

While MacDonald’s decision to theorize about conquest is an innovative one, this is not a simple conceptual space within which to operate. Conquest resides at the intersection of violence, politics, and governance, and the slipperiness of the concept comes through in some of his analysis. To start, the author could have offered a clearer sense of the boundary between a challenging conquest and a failed one. One might wonder, for example, how many bloody miniconquests could the British have absorbed in South Africa before the Crown (and the author) would have considered the expedition a failure? The greatest strength of MacDonald’s approach—the focus on highly localized social and political interactions—also exposes this limitation. Ultimately, it is difficult for the reader to conclude how localized episodes, each of which unfolds in distinct terms, come to constitute the conqueror’s larger experience, something which the author also makes his concern.

As he concedes, MacDonald has chosen to investigate three cases of successful conquest, and so there are limits to what his comparative analysis can tell us about failure. One definition of failure he offers is when “local societies succeed in expelling the British from their particular region” (p. 72). By this definition, would one categorize the modern case of Afghanistan as a failure? The future status of American forces certainly created significant diplomatic turbulence, but the Afghan government and its people have maintained very substantial, ongoing ties with the United States and will likely do so for years to come. If we broaden the definition of failure to include an overwhelming set of costs in blood and treasure, again, where is the threshold beyond which a hard-earned success turns into a failure? And how long does a success need to hold before it is considered immune from failure at a later date?

Another conceptual challenge with conquest involves its relationship to the associated but distinct concept of state building. This becomes clear once we arrive at the fourth case study on the twenty-first-century war in Iraq. As MacDonald explains, conquest is “both an act of coercion and governance” (p. 20), but what happens when the goal of said coercive act is actually to introduce self-governance? The ostensible purpose of foreign-led state-building efforts in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has not been for foreign powers to establish sovereign control over other countries but, rather, to facilitate the emergence of independent and capable regimes in those countries (Francis Fukuyama, “The Imperative of State-Building,” Journal of Democracy 15[no. 2, 2004]: 17–31; Roland Paris, At War’s End, 2004). If the aim of an intervention like the one in Iraq (or Afghanistan) is not actually to maintain an occupying force but, instead, to enable the rise of an indigenous government that assumes power over its own politics, then have we not moved beyond the realm of conquest into a categorically different project?

Given the sharp difference, if not dichotomy, between the goals of indigenous governance and foreign control, I am not entirely convinced by MacDonald’s comparison of the modern Iraqi case with those of historical British conquest in South Asia and Africa. There are striking parallels between the challenges of imperial conquest and occupation, but the author’s variables of interest work in quite different ways once one enters the arena of foreign-led state building. To start, elite fragmentation may be a boon in the project of territorial conquest, but it can be a real curse in the context of state building. As the author convincingly demonstrates, societal fractures present opportunities for an outsider to divide and rule more effectively. On the other hand, a highly fragmented society presents real, if not insurmountable, obstacles to a fledgling indigenous government struggling to establish authoritative rule after conflict. Some have even argued that these divisions can be addressed effectively only through partition (Chaim Kaufmann, “Possible and Impossible Solutions to Ethnic Civil Wars,” International Security 20[no. 4, 1996]:136–175). Moreover, blame for “the failure to produce viable and credible local institutions” cannot be placed exclusively (or even mostly) at the feet of inadequately “dense social ties” between Americans and Iraqi elites (p. 200). The challenges involved in the cultivation of subnational governance are only partially related to an intervener’s limited knowledge or connections. Violent competition, radical ideologies, primitive accumulation, institutional legacies, and regional geopolitics are all serious challenges to state consolidation that would likely exist even absent an intervening power’s deficits.

Had MacDonald drawn a brighter line in his analysis between foreign conquest (or occupation) and foreign-supported state-building, he might have better illuminated key points of contrast and, in fact, contradiction between these projects that further underscore how terribly stark the governing challenges have been in a case like post-2003 Iraq. Doing so would also invite other scholars to consider the degree to which foreign conquerors’ strategies are (or are not) shared by indigenous state builders seeking to tame their own local peripheries. Upon closer inspection, we would likely find that leaders like Nouri al-Maliki and Hamid Karzai have utilized, for example, selective repression, elite outbidding, punishment, and divide and rule in more or less effective ways than their foreign counterparts, depending on the circumstance. In other words, might MacDonald’s strategies for core–periphery international relations have resonance with the domestic management of center–periphery relations in the developing world?

Ultimately, what is perhaps most striking about MacDonald’s comparison between Great Britain’s experience as an imperial power and the modern American effort in Iraq is the degree to which it focuses our attention on the relationship between conquest and time. He writes: “Strong ties are forged through repeated interactions over long periods of time. Ties that begin as intermittent or limited exchanges often deepen as mutual trust and familiarity increases. Interactions in one domain can spill over into other areas. Connections forged out of mutual interests can acquire symbolic meanings or emotional content” (p. 74). At the end of this book, one cannot help but wonder if “dense social ties” are necessarily a by-product of sustained engagement by an outside power over time. One might even conjecture that, over time, an intervening state can encourage, even generate, social fractures that it can subsequently exploit to its own ends. If we accept these two assertions, might time be a necessary condition for a conqueror’s success?

MacDonald’s empirical analysis demonstrates vividly the degree to which time affords intervening agents opportunities to learn about and, in turn, influence and manipulate local politics to their own ends. Western governments and their citizenries today demonstrate little of the patience that imperial powers possessed hundreds of years ago. Instead, they seek transformative change in societies about which they know very little. They seek this change at the expense of as few of their own dollars and casualties as possible. And they seek it in a matter of months or years, not decades. (On the overambition of foreign intervention in Afghanistan, for example, see Astri Suhrke, “Reconstruction as Modernisation: The ‘Post-Conflict’ Project in Afghanistan,” Third World Quarterly 28[no.7, 2007]:1291–1308).

Networks of Domination should be read as a stern caution to today’s champions of ambitious intervention: Military might and technological know-how can bolster a state’s quest to grow its global footprint. But if a state seeks to influence and control foreign lands, those tools will be no substitute for the investment required to truly understand and engage with a far-off place and its people on their own terms.