Professor Beatrice Heuser

Beatrice Heuser is Distinguished Professor at the Brussels School of Governance, Free University of Brussels (VUB).  She heads the Strategy teaching section at the German General Staff College (Führungsakademie) of the Bundeswehr in Hamburg.  Until the end of 2024, she held the Chair in International Relations at the University of Glasgow, and before that she held professorships at King’s College London, Department of War Studies and at the University of Reading.  She has had visiting professorships at the Sorbonne, at Sciences Po’ Paris and other Parisian universities.  She has degrees from the Universities of London (BA, MA) and Oxford (DPhil), and a Habilitation from the Philipps-University of Marburg.

Heuser’s publications include work on nuclear strategy - NATO, Britain, France and the FRG: Nuclear Strategies and Forces for Europe (1997); Nuclear Mentalities? (1998); and The Bomb: Nuclear Weapons in their Historical, Strategic and Ethical Context (1999).  She has also worked more generally on the history of strategy, with major works on Reading Clausewitz (2002); and The Evolution of Strategy (2010), War: A Genealogy of Western Ideas and Practices (2022), both covering the period from Antiquity to the Present. She has researched and edited volumes on insurgencies and counter-insurgency (including special issues of Small Wars and Insurgencies (2014) and Civil Wars (2013), and on the political dimensions of military exercises.  Her latest book is Flawed Strategy: why smart leaders make bad decisions (2025).