Gérard Chaliand, an acclaimed writer on geopolitics, revolutions in the developing world and terrorism, whose dozens of books were informed by on-the-ground experience in conflict zones, died on Aug. 20 in Paris. He was 91.
His death, in a hospital, was announced by the Kurdish Institute of Paris, a Kurdish-rights advocacy group to which he belonged. His son, Roc, said the cause was kidney failure.
Mr. Chaliand (pronounced “SHA-lee-ahn”), who spent much of his life in France, taught at some of the country’s most prestigious schools — the École Nationale d’Administration and the École de Guerre — and at the University of California, Berkeley, and Harvard. His lectures on geopolitics drew top-level diplomats and officers. But his influence in the French-speaking world was based on an unusual attribute: He had actually been to the revolutions he wrote about.
Over nearly four decades, he spent time with guerrillas in Guinea-Bissau, Angola, Jordan, Lebanon, the Philippines, Afghanistan, North Vietnam, the Kurdistan region, Sri Lanka, Eritrea and elsewhere. He witnessed the beginnings of the Algerian revolt against France in the early 1950s. And he frequented revolutionary leaders like Che Guevara, Ahmed Ben Bella, Julius Nyerere and Sékou Touré as well as Amílcar Cabral of Guinea-Bissau, whom he particularly admired.
Mr. Chaliand acknowledged being attracted to insurrection, but he was there to observe, report and write. “Felt knowledge is irreplaceable,” he told France Culture radio in 2008.
That hands-on experience, particularly in the 1960s, led him to an early insight into the revolutions taking place in what was then called the third world: They had largely failed. They had not brought greater security, freedom or prosperity to the people they claimed to liberate. In the early 1970s, a time when optimism over the promise of liberation struggles still prevailed, particularly on the left, Mr. Chaliand’s report from reality was a cold shower.
“Most of the regimes which used to be considered somewhat revolutionary have been eliminated by coup d’état,” he wrote coolly about Africa in his breakthrough book, “Mythes Révolutionnaires du Tiers Monde,” published in 1976 (and in English, as “Revolution in the Third World,” in 1977). “Compared to what generally prevails on the continent, Tanzania, with Somalia, stands out as the only country were corruption is not the main characteristic of the regime.”
Rent-seeking administrators, what Mr. Chaliand called in his book “the administrative bourgeoisie,” had gobbled up what meager resources and small dollops of aid were available in newly liberated countries across the continent.
Because he was known as someone whose sympathies were on the left, his skepticism about developing-world insurrection carried weight — and accounts for the ecumenical praise he received after his death from both right and left in the ideologically divided French press.
Mr. Chaliand helped change the terms of the discussion in the United States as well. “Having strongly sympathized with aspirations of the third world insurrectionary movements, he feels angry and betrayed,” the historian Ronald Steel wrote in The New York Review of Books in 1977.
“The utility of Chaliand’s book lies not in its prescription for the true, if infinitely distant and forever ephemeral, social revolution,” Mr. Steel wrote, “but in his demystification of the ‘people’s wars’ that have so attracted Western intellectuals over the past two decades.”
Mr. Chaliand’s insights, French commentators in Le Monde and Le Figaro observed, were valuable across some 40 books not because he was disillusioned, but because he was without illusions.
“The world is no doubt always changing,” he wrote in “Revolution in the Third World,” adding, “But there is nothing to indicate that the course of a history founded on power relationships, where the well-being of the conquerors is nourished on the blind servitude of the victims and the pain of the vanquished, can be changed.”
Mr. Chaliand was well aware of the uniqueness of his method, which combined the initiative of a journalist with the tenacity of an academic.
“I am not an expert on counterinsurrection but on insurrection,” he wrote in “Revolution in the Third World.” “I have always experienced guerrilla warfare not from the side of the forces of law and order but from the side of those who are fighting against the state, seeking, usually, to replace it.”
He acknowledged that he was addicted to risk, and he experienced frequent near misses. He recalled the guerrilla fighters who were killed at his side, in Guinea-Bissau and North Vietnam, and the land mine that nearly killed him in Afghanistan, in a series of 2008 interviews on France Culture.
“In the ditch next to mine the guy next to me was killed during a bombing raid,” he said, referring to his experience in North Vietnam. “I didn’t see it,” he said of the mine in Afghanistan. “It was a young Afghan who alerted me to it.”
Successful revolution must have deep roots in the soil, Mr. Chaliand wrote in his seminal book. Mr. Cabral, whose insurrection in Guinea-Bissau drove out the Portuguese colonizers in 1973, was a model.
“Far from overestimating peasant spontaneity in the manner of Fanon or Guevara, Cabral patiently built up a political support structure within the population,” he wrote in “Revolution in the Third World,” referring to Franz Fanon, the psychiatrist and revolutionary theorist. Of course, all bets were off after Mr. Cabral’s assassination in 1973; the country quickly devolved into the chaos that still envelopes it.
The months Mr. Chaliand spent with Mr. Cabral in 1966 were some of his happiest. “I loved action, the unknown, discoveries historical and personal, and participating as observer and sometimes as actor in irregular conflicts on three continents,” he wrote in one of his memoirs, “Le Savoir de la Peau” (2022).
Gérard Tchalian — the progeny of Armenian immigrants, he would later Frenchify his surname — was born in Etterbeek, Belgium, on Feb. 15, 1934, to Bercusar (Tchekmeian) and Simon Tchalian. His father was a pharmacist.
He grew up in Paris and attended the Lycée Henri-IV but never received his baccalauréat. When he was 10, he recalled on France Culture, his father took him to see French Resistance fighters force lingering German soldiers out of the Palais du Luxembourg as Paris was being liberated in the summer of 1944 — an experience that he said seeded his interest in revolutionary change.
At 18, he left the family apartment to explore an Algeria seething with nascent revolution. Returning six months later with a newfound hatred of colonialism, he enrolled at the École des Langues et Civilisations Orientales in Paris, although his son said he did not graduate.
“Between the ages of 18 and 35, while traveling on four continents, I engaged in 20 different professions,” he wrote in “Le Savoir de la Peau,” among them “window-washer, waiter, plumber, photographer’s assistant, road worker, cook, docker,” he wrote in his memoirs. He did these odd jobs to help support his early journalism and book writing.
In 1975, he submitted his doctoral thesis, which would become “Revolutions in the Third World,” to the Sorbonne, under the tutelage of the Orientalist Maxime Rodinson.
Mr. Chaliand taught at the École Nationale d’Administration from 1980 to 1987 and at France’s War College from 1990 to 1995. He was also a visiting lecturer at the RAND Corporation and the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif.
Among his many books translated into English are “A Global History of War” (2014); “The History of Terrorism: From Antiquity to Al Qaeda” (with Arnaud Blin, 2007); “Mirrors of a Disaster: The Spanish Military Conquest of America” (2005); “Nomadic Empires, From Mongolia to the Danube” (2004); “The Kurdish Tragedy” (1994); and “Armed Struggle in Africa: With the Guerrillas in Portuguese Guinea” (1969).
His later books reflected a pessimism about the West’s military prospects after defeats in Indochina and the Middle East. About “Pourquoi Perd-On La Guerre? Un Nouvel Art Occidental” (2016), published in English as “Why We’ve Stopped Winning Wars.” Le Monde wrote:
“His outlook on 200 years of conflicts is cold and without pathos, his writing is sharp as a sword, and his irritation total. With their blindness and their hesitations, the West refuses to give itself the means, beyond rhetoric, to win its wars, drawing no lessons from its failures.”
Mr. Chaliand’s son is his only immediate survivor. His wife, the sociologist Juliette Minces, died in 2021.
“Over the decades,” Mr. Chaliand wrote in “Le Savoir de la Peau,” “I’ve seen large chunks of contemporary reality which have opened my eyes in regard to ideological illusions.” He added, “I’ve participated, within the limits of my means and in the manner which best suited me, in the history of my time.”
Adam Nossiter has been bureau chief in Kabul, Paris, West Africa and New Orleans, and is now a Domestic Correspondent on the Obituaries desk.
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