Long considered the masters of counterinsurgency, the British military encountered significant problems in Iraq and Afghanistan when confronted with insurgent violence. In their effort to apply the ...principles and doctrines of past campaigns, they failed to prevent Basra and Helmand from descending into lawlessness, criminality, and violence.
By juxtaposing the deterioration of these situations against Britain's celebrated legacy of counterinsurgency, this investigation identifies both the contributions and limitations of traditional tactics in such settings, exposing a disconcerting gap between ambitions and resources, intent and commitment. Building upon this detailed account of the Basra and Helmand campaigns, this volume conducts an unprecedented assessment of British military institutional adaptation in response to operations gone awry. In calling attention to the enduring effectiveness of insurgent methods and the threat posed by undergoverned spaces, David H. Ucko and Robert Egnell underscore the need for military organizations to meet the irregular challenges of future wars in new ways.
At War with Women reveals how post-9/11 politics of gender and development have transformed US military power. In the mid-2000s, the US military used development as a weapon as it revived ...counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan. The military assembled all-female teams to reach households and wage war through development projects in the battle for "hearts and minds." Despite women technically being banned from ground combat units, the all-female teams were drawn into combat nonetheless. Based on ethnographic fieldwork observing military trainings, this book challenges liberal feminist narratives that justified the Afghanistan War in the name of women's rights and celebrated women's integration into combat as a victory for gender equality. Jennifer Greenburg critically interrogates a new imperial feminism and its central role in securing US hegemony. Women's incorporation into combat through emotional labor has reinforced gender stereotypes, with counterinsurgency framing female soldiers as global ambassadors for women's rights. This book provides an analysis of US imperialism that keeps the present in tension with the past, clarifying where colonial ideologies of race, gender, and sexuality have resurfaced and how they are changing today.
British Army counterinsurgency campaigns were supposedly waged within the bounds of international law, overcoming insurgents with the minimum force necessary. This revealing study questions what this ...meant for the civilian population during the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya in the 1950s, one of Britain's most violent decolonisation wars. For the first time Huw Bennett examines the conduct of soldiers in detail, uncovering the uneasy relationship between notions of minimum force and the colonial tradition of exemplary force where harsh repression was frequently employed as a valid means of quickly crushing rebellion. Although a range of restrained policies such as special forces methods, restrictive rules of engagement and surrender schemes prevented the campaign from degenerating into genocide, the army simultaneously coerced the population to drop their support for the rebels, imposing collective fines, mass detentions and frequent interrogations, often tolerating rape, indiscriminate killing and torture to terrorise the population into submission.
InBrutality in an Age of Human Rights, Brian Drohan demonstrates that British officials' choices concerning counterinsurgency methods have long been deeply influenced or even redirected by the work ...of human rights activists. To reveal how that influence was manifested by military policies and practices, Drohan examines three British counterinsurgency campaigns-Cyprus (1955-1959), Aden (1963-1967), and the peak of the "Troubles" in Northern Ireland (1969-1976). This book is enriched by Drohan's use of a newly available collection of 1.2 million colonial-era files, International Committee of the Red Cross files, the extensive Troubles collection at Linen Hall Library in Belfast, and many other sources.
Drohan argues that when faced with human rights activism, British officials sought to evade, discredit, and deflect public criticism of their actions to avoid drawing attention to brutal counterinsurgency practices such as the use of torture during interrogation. Some of the topics discussed in the book, such as the use of violence against civilians, the desire to uphold human rights values while simultaneously employing brutal methods, and the dynamic of wars waged in the glare of the media, are of critical interest to scholars, lawyers, and government officials dealing with the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and those to come in the future.
In Empire's Violent End, Thijs Brocades Zaalberg and Bart Luttikhuis, along with expert contributors, present comparative research focused specifically on excessive violence in Indonesia, Algeria, ...Vietnam, Malaysia, Kenya, and other areas during the wars of decolonization. In the last two decades, there have been heated public and scholarly debates in France, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands on the violent end of empire. Nevertheless, the broader comparative investigations into colonial counterinsurgency tend to leave atrocities such as torture, execution, and rape in the margins. The editors describe how such comparisons mostly focus on the differences by engaging in "guilt ranking." Moreover, the dramas that have unfolded in Algeria and Kenya tend to overshadow similar violent events in Indonesia, the very first nation to declare independence directly after World War II. Empire's Violent End is the first book to place the Dutch-Indonesian case at the heart of a comparison with focused, thematic analysis on a diverse range of topics to demonstrate that despite variation in scale, combat intensity, and international dynamics, there were more similarities than differences in the ways colonial powers used extreme forms of violence. By delving into the causes and nature of the abuse, Brocades Zaalberg and Luttikhuis conclude that all cases involved some form of institutionalized impunity, which enabled the type of situation in which the forces in the service of the colonial rulers were able to use extreme violence.
Economy of Force Owens, Patricia
08/2015, Letnik:
v.Series Number 139
eBook
Retrieving the older but surprisingly neglected language of household governance, Economy of Force offers a radical new account of the historical rise of the social realm and distinctly social theory ...as modern forms of oikonomikos - the art and science of household rule. The techniques and domestic ideologies of household administration are highly portable and play a remarkably central role in international and imperial relations. In two late-colonial British 'emergencies' in Malaya and Kenya, and US counterinsurgencies in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, armed social work was the continuation of oikonomia - not politics - by other means. This is a provocative new history of counterinsurgency with major implications for social, political and international theory. Historically rich and theoretically innovative, this book will interest scholars and students across the humanities and social sciences, especially politics and international relations, history of social and political thought, history of war, social theory and sociology.
Uneasy Military Encounters presents a historically and theoretically grounded political ethnography of the Thai military's counterinsurgency practices in the southern borderland, home to the greater ...part of the Malay-Muslim minority. Ruth Streicher argues that counterinsurgency practices mark the southern population as the racialized, religious, and gendered other of the Thai, which contributes to producing Thailand as an imperial formation: a state formation based on essentialized difference between the Thai and their others. Through a genealogical approach, Uneasy Military Encounters addresses broad conceptual questions of imperial politics in a non-Western context: How can we understand imperial policing in a country that was never colonized? How is "Islam" constructed in a state that is officially secular and promotes Buddhist tolerance? What are the (historical) dynamics of imperial patriarchy in a context internationally known for its gender pluralism? The resulting ethnography excavates the imperial politics of concrete encounters between the military and the southern population in the ongoing conflict in southern Thailand.
Resisting Rebellion Joes, Anthony James; Joes, Anthony James James
08/2006
eBook
In Resisting Rebellion, Anthony James Joes's discussion of insurgencies ranges across five continents and spans more than two centuries. Analyzing examples from North and South America, Europe, ...Africa, and the Middle East, he identifies recurrent patterns and offers useful lessons for future policymakers. Insurgencies arise from many sources of discontent, including foreign occupation, fraudulent elections, and religious persecution, but they also stem from ethnic hostilities, the aspirations of would-be elites, and traditions of political violence. Because insurgency is as much a political phenomenon as a military one, effective counterinsurgency requires a thorough understanding of the insurgents' motives and sources of support. Clear political aims must guide military action if a counterinsurgency is to be successful and establish a lasting reconciliation within a deeply fragmented society.
The Soviet Counterinsurgency in the Western Borderlands investigates the Soviet response to nationalist insurgencies that occurred between 1944 and 1953 in the regions the Soviet Union annexed after ...the Nazi-Soviet pact: Eastern Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. Based on new archival data, Alexander Statiev presents the first comprehensive study of Soviet counterinsurgency that ties together the security tools and populist policies intended to attract the local populations. The book traces the origins of the Soviet pacification doctrine and then presents a comparative analysis of the rural societies in Eastern Poland and the Baltic States on the eve of the Soviet invasion. This analysis is followed by a description of the anti-communist resistance movements. Subsequently, the author shows how ideology affected the Soviet pacification doctrine and examines the major means to enforce the doctrine: agrarian reforms, deportations, amnesties, informant networks, covert operations, and local militias.
