Gérard Chaliand

Gérard Chaliand (born 1934) is a French expert in geopolitics who has published widely on irregular warfare and military strategy. Chaliand analyses of insurgencies in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, mostly based on his field experience with insurgent forces, have appeared in more than 20 books and in numerous newspaper articles. He has worked autonomously throughout his career, unconstrained by the perspectives of national governments and policy institutes. As a result, his work provides an independent perspective on many of the major conflicts characterized the 20th and 21st centuries. He is also a published poet.

Early life and Education

Born in Brussels of Armenian parents and raised in Paris, Chaliand attended the lycée Henri IV in the Latin Quarter and spent nearly a year in London and the UK. He travelled in North Africa before entering the School of Oriental Languages and Civilisations (Paris) were his studies focused on the history and culture of non-western societies. During his youth he hitchhiked across North Africa, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan and India. He published his first book of poetry (La Marche Têtue, Galimard) in 1959. In 1960 he joined the clandestine struggle for Algerian Independence. After Algerian independence, he worked in 1963-64 as an editor at Revolution Africaine, a weekly in Alger where he met many of the leaders of national liberation movements of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East.

He received his PhD from Sorbonne (Paris), in 1975. His dissertation Mythes révolutionnaires du tiers monde, was published in 1976 and quickly translated into English: Revolution in the Third World, Myths and Propects, Viking Press, Penguin, New York, 1977.

Chaliand has been a participant-observer in various guerrilla conflicts:


He has conducted field studies for over four decades in:

Teaching

He taught in Paris, France, at the École Nationale d’Administration (1980-1987) and at Ecole de Guerre (War College) from 1990 to 1995.

Chaliand has spent more than five years as a visiting professor in the United States at Harvard, U.C.L.A. and U.C. Berkeley.

He delivered over five hundred lectures in major Universities and research centers, including the Rand Corporation and the US Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California. (1969-2009).

He was also a visiting professor at the military academy, Bogota (Colombia), and Universities of Cape Town (South Africa), Montreal (Canada), Salamanca (Spain), Sussex and Manchester (United Kingdom), Vladikavkaz (Northern Ossetia), Sulaymaniyah (Iraq), and Ilia Chavchavadze (Georgia). He was senior visiting fellow at the centre for Conflicts and Peace Studies, Kabul (Afghanistan) from 2005 to 2011. He taught a summer course at Nanyang University (Singapore) from 2004 to 2014 and Hawler University (Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan, since 2012).

He has also lectured at Strategic Institutes in Washington D.C., London, Canberra, Beijing, Madrid, and Tokyo.

Miscellaneous

He was Director of the European Centre for the Studies of Conflicts (Foundation for Strategic Research), Paris from 1997 to 2000.

He was an independent adviser to the Centre for Analysis and Planning of the French Foreign Ministry from 1983 to 1994.

He founded and was the Director of Minority Rights Group (France), from 1978 to 1987.

He was the initiator of the cession of the Permanent People’s Tribunal that was dedicated to the genocide of the Armenian people whose jury comprised three Nobel Prize winners, including Mr. Sean Mc Bride, Founder of Amnesty International, and which took place at Sorbonne and saw the sentence towards the Turkish state delivered to the National Assembly.

In addition, Chaliand has undertaken several maritime expeditions aboard La Boudeuse, a three mast.

Selected bibliography

Chaliand is the author, the co-author or the editor of more than 50 books, over 20 of which have been translated into English.

Books in English


Chaliand has also written a cookbook, Food without Frontiers, Pluto Press, London 1981 and two books of poems The Stubborn March, Crane Books, Watercrown, MA. 1990, and Lone Rider, bilingual edition, translated by André Demir, Paris, 2015.

Many of his books have been translated in more than twelve languages.

Books in French

Political Analysis

Military strategy

Geopolitical and Historical Atlases

History

Memoirs

Travel


Gerard Chaliand has also published three plays, four books for children and translations of Kautiliya’s Arthashastra (book seven), Guevara's La guerra de Guerillas, and a book of popular Turkish poetry (bilingual).

References

    External links

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