This paper is written to present the state of the art of the new active and semi active approaches during the last decade. This is achieved by reviewing the active control approaches and semi-active control policies that have been proposed and validated analytically or numerically in the last ten years. All the papers reviewed in this study are within the scope of earthquake engineering. Brief information about these active control approaches and some of the resulting control policies are presented. To be able to show the effectiveness of the proposed approaches, the numerical examples of these papers are presented in this study. Because of the latest technological and computational advances, some of the most effective and complex algorithms have been studied and numerically validated during the last decade in earthquake engineering. This is the reason that this review considers the period of 2008-2018. The authors also include some of the new semi-active control policies that have been proposed numerically during the last decade. It has been concluded that, although there is an impressive research on numerically and/or analytically validating new active control approaches and new semi-active control policies of the years 2008-2018, there is not any real-building / real structure implementation of these active control approaches. Additionally there is a need of experimental validation of these active control methods that have been presented during the last decade.