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Military Orientalism: Eastern War Through Western Eyes. By Patrick Porter. London: Hurst, 2009. ISBN 978-1-850650-959-4. Notes. Index. Pp. x, 263. £14.99.
Patrick Porter, a lecturer in defence studies at King's College London currently working at the Defence Academy, is well-placed to write this book. Delivered with verve and not a little criticism of his academic colleagues, Porter argues that Western scholarship has created a stereotypical view of the Orient in military studies. He challenges the assumptions that culture is fixed, that the East is somehow unknown and exotic, and argues that culture in the Eastern hemisphere is a reflection of Western anxieties - or rather what we in the West fear is what we are not. Tracing Western assumptions through a series of case studies, Porter seeks to show that we have invested Eastern armies with values that make them our opposite, even our nemesis, and that we have attempted to construct an 'Eastern Way of War' as a binary counterfoil to an equally fictitious 'Western Way of War'.
Porter usefully sets out his own arguments and the caveats, elaborating on his central ideas in chapters on...