Suppressing insurgencies in comparison: the Germans in the Ukraine, 1918, and the British in Mesopotamia, 1920

Theorizing the advent of weaponized drones as techniques of domestic paramilitary policing

“…For Neocleous, the British colonial ‘air police’ of the 1920s was bound up with a package of governing practices that blended the administrative, the coercive and the psychotechnical. Air power was a way of communicating to the colonized insofar as its bombing and strafing of civilians were useful not only for the damage they could directly inflict on rebels and the material substrate of the precolonial subsistence economy but also for their indirect psychotechnical effects on the wider population; moreover, Royal Air Force planes sometimes directly communicated with populations by dropping leaflets warning of impending attacks and allowing friendly tribes to display agreed signals to escape the bombing (Lieb, 2012: 638). The use of force in the form of air power was part and parcel of a system of administration geared for wealth extraction.…”

“…Conversely, techniques of colonial government such as the imposition of taxes, which may appear to be primarily administrative, were intended to have the coercive effect of destroying the subsistence economy and largely succeeded in this purpose; the authorities’ response to rebels’ refusals to pay new taxes was, in turn, bombing (Neocleous, 2014: 146–147). Peter Lieb (2012: 634–635) adds that British counterinsurgency operations in Mesopotamia were ‘heavily influenced by racist stereotypes of a populace that would only react to the language of force, coercion, and suppression’, a condescending yet curiously mixed empathic–punitive–pastoral view of Arabs and Kurds as ‘semi-civilized’ peoples who had been schooled into savagery by long years under the Ottoman yoke, but who could yet be civilized by more civilized colonial rulers. A latter-day variant of this empathic–punitive–pastoral understanding can be discerned in the intensive domestic policing of largely racialized ‘surplus populations’ (Shaw, 2016a) in the global North today, which registers the historic collective trauma of slavery and discrimination but only to infer that in its angry aftermath the language of coercion is best suited to conducting the conduct of these particular populations.…”

“…However, air power was not used in isolation by the British in Mesopotamia – at the height of the insurgency around 100,000 ground troops were also deployed (Lieb, 2012: 641n13) – and it was in conjunction that missions to raze hundreds of rebel villages to the ground were conducted, with ground troops taking care of other somewhat more precise punitive actions such as cutting off water, confiscating cattle, destroying crops and in all likelihood shooting armed rebel prisoners on the spot. In other words, the British ‘air police’ of the 1920s worked alongside large numbers of land-based ‘drones’ as parallel extrusions of a system of colonial rule.…”

Violence in Defence of Empire: The British Armyand the 1919 Egyptian Revolution

“…Egypt fitted into a pattern of how the British Army dealt with anti-colonial nationalist unrest, from Ireland through the Middle East and on to India, which, as Peter Lieb has argued from his comparison of the post-war campaign in Mesopotamia with that of the Germans in the Ukraine, cannot be described in terms of its moderate approach to the use of violence. 52 In each case the British Armyʼs default position was to resort to a repressive pacification campaign. Although this reflected a tendency to draw on a deeper «colonial archive», this also demonstrated the extent…”

“…R. Mockaitis, British Counterinsurgency, 1919-60, London 1990D. Sayer, «British Reaction to the Amritsar Massacre 1919-1920», in: Past and Present 131 (1991 has argued, creates an artificial divide between doctrine and practice; whereas the former saw the British setting strict requirements over how force should be deployed, in reality soldiers on the ground often ignored such constraints, soon adopting excessively coercive measures. 6 The response to the 1919 Egyptian revolution suggests much greater complexity in the manner in which military force met nationalist challenges.…”