Transformative Invasions: Western Post-9/11 Counterinsurgency and the Lessons of Colonialism

Feichtinger, Moritz Johannes; Malinowski, Stephan

doi:10.1353/hum.2012.0000

Cited by 13 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 112 publications

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“…The rhetorical use of fascism here was open to critique as divorced from a precise historical referent, and certainly did not correspond to the vaunted image of the modernisation plan as an innovative, cutting-edge aspect of counter-insurgency, to which he here alluded (Feichtinger and Malinowski, 2012; Peterson, 2015). For all that, it is an illuminating example of the perceived stakes and the passion generated by the drearily decreasing imaginative powers of a Resistance generation that should have known far better.…”

Section: Soldiers’ Testimoniesmentioning

confidence: 95%

Complicity and memory in soldiers’ testimonies of the Algerian war of decolonisation in Esprit and Les Temps modernes

McDonnell

2018

Memory Studies

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In the closing phase of the Algerian War in March 1962, Jean-Marie Domenach, director of the journal Esprit, upbraided his counterpart at Les Temps modernes, Jean-Paul Sartre, for failing to understand the greyness of most human actions and the pervasiveness of knots of complicity. Concern for the complexity of complicity was also apparent in Les Temps modernes circles, however, and it was precisely complicity, both in the form of violence of French troops and of the habituation or indifference of the broader French public, that editor Simone de Beauvoir termed a ‘tetanus of the imagination’. Strikingly, she suggested that a means of countering this affliction of getting used to the unconscionable were testimonies of soldiers returning from Algeria in both Les Temps modernes and Esprit. This article examines this mutual concern for the complexities of complicity and investigates its relationship to memory through the curious importance de Beauvoir placed on such testimonies in these two journals. The discussion looks at the mobilisation of the memory of the Second World War in these testimonies, including analogies with fascism and Nazism, and argues that, rather than merely fashionable hyperbole, they powerfully depicted a multifaceted crisis: in Algeria, of French youth, and of France itself. The second part of the article investigates the testimonies’ representation of military institutionalisation – including its detrimental effects on imagination and the facilitation of violence. These representations of systemic or institutional complicity are contextualised alongside scholarly claims that the Algerian war involved a renegotiation of the memory of Vichy France. I argue that the example of these testimonies calls for a qualification of such claims; though they prefigured later conceptions of a complicity memory trope, or ‘the grey zone’ of Vichy France, they did not override the dominant Second World War memory characterised by heroes and victims.

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Section: Soldiers’ Testimoniesmentioning

confidence: 95%

Complicity and memory in soldiers’ testimonies of the Algerian war of decolonisation in Esprit and Les Temps modernes

McDonnell

2018

Memory Studies

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“…The focus on humanitarian aid runs hand in hand with military attention to ‘women as a “tactical idea”’ (Kinsella, 2019: 40), drawing on counterinsurgency doctrine authored by French military officer and scholar David Galula (2006) best known for his development of counterinsurgency theory and practice during the Algerian war of independence. European colonial powers consistently paid attention to the development of women and children, focusing not just on education and basic welfare, but also seeking to transmit ‘modern values’ and deploying colonial women to carry out such activities (Feichtinger et al, 2012: 41). Between January 1957 and late 1959 the ‘emancipation’ strategy instituted by the joint military–civilian regime in Algiers sought to ‘liberate’ Muslim women ‘from ignorance and the crushing weight of patriarchal domination, measures that included unveiling campaigns, improved access to schooling, youth training, joint European-Muslim women’s circles, extension of the vote, and a new family law’ (MacMaster, 2007: 94, 2009; Seferdjeli, 2005).…”

Section: Gender and Population-centric Counterinsurgencymentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Women helping women’: Deploying gender in US counterinsurgency wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

Head

2023

Security Dialogue

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Central to the goal of ‘hearts and minds’ counterinsurgency is the need for knowledge, understanding and influence in relation to local populations. Building on feminist scholarship on counterinsurgency, the article focuses on the ‘female engagement’ work undertaken by four programmes developed by the US military between 2003 and 2014. The article offers three key arguments. First, it maintains that the gendered subjectivities of Iraqi and Afghan women and US female counterinsurgents are constructed as strategic assets and as vulnerable subjects. Second, these programmes reveal the extent to which gendered counterinsurgency is constituted and regulated by emotional and embodied norms and rules for both female soldiers and civilians. Third, it suggests that the discursive construction of ‘winning hearts and minds’ works to render less visible the violence of gendered counterinsurgency practices. Although gendered counterinsurgency mobilizes a relational ontology predicated on the emotional labour required for developing knowledge of the Iraqi and Afghan ‘other’, female engagement activities cannot escape the logic of instrumental reasoning within which they are located. Ultimately, recognizing the policy of female engagement as central to forms of knowledge production reveals the extent to which the violences of war rely on a complex set of gendered and affective relations.

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“…7 This article develops Khalili and Kilcullen's insights and applies them to the study of colonial counterinsurgency, engaging also with recent historical writing that highlights the colonial roots of contemporary counterinsurgency. 8 Patricia Owens argues that colonial counterinsurgency fostered a 'form of household governance' that focused on (re-)creating households and families into acquiescent, 'modernised', colonial social units through tactics that were intrinsically -and sometimes explicitly -gendered, such as mass detention, forced resettlement, education and welfare interventions, and the 'rehabilitation' of recalcitrant subjects. 9 If, however, colonial counterinsurgency was a form of household governance, what it failed to properly recognise was that colonial households, and societies, were intrinsically ordered by age as well as by gender.…”

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confidence: 99%

‘Uncircumcised boys’ and ‘girl Spartans’: Youth, Gender and Generation in Colonial Insurgencies and Counterinsurgency, c. 1954–59

Hynd¹

2021

Gender & History

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Both male and female youth were significant actors in anti‐colonial insurgencies, but their involvement has been neglected in existing historiographies due to the marginalisation of youth voices in colonial archives. This article analyses the causes of youth insurgency and colonial counterinsurgency responses in two British colonies, Kenya and Cyprus, in 1954‐59, providing a gendered and relational study of youth as cohort, as liberation generation, as life stage and as kinship position. It argues that a ‘gen[d]erational’ lens is necessary to properly understand how age and gender intersected to shape boys' and girls’ experiences of youth insurgency, and how colonial states punished and tried to ‘rehabilitate’ such rebellious youths. This article argues that colonial responses to youth in insurgency were implicitly shaped by colonial understandings of gender and generation as well as by race and ethnicity, but that counterinsurgency policies failed to effectively integrate gendered and generational perspectives sufficiently into either their security, peno‐legal or welfare and developmental responses. The only successful ‘rehabilitation’ programmes focused on male youth, and combined colonial and local understandings of age and gender to provided pathways towards the forms of adulthood desired by youth, rather than just treating them as unthinking, impressionable or irrecoverable children.

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Transformative Invasions: Western Post-9/11 Counterinsurgency and the Lessons of Colonialism

Cited by 13 publications

References 112 publications

Complicity and memory in soldiers’ testimonies of the Algerian war of decolonisation in Esprit and Les Temps modernes

Complicity and memory in soldiers’ testimonies of the Algerian war of decolonisation in Esprit and Les Temps modernes

‘Women helping women’: Deploying gender in US counterinsurgency wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

‘Uncircumcised boys’ and ‘girl Spartans’: Youth, Gender and Generation in Colonial Insurgencies and Counterinsurgency, c. 1954–59

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