Counterinsurgency [?!]

Population-centric counterinsurgency has been a particularly capacious vessel for transmission of a new kind of rule from a distance: ostensibly humanitarian, much more reliant on pliant proxies (whether in political or security positions) than on gung-ho occupying forces, dependent on a scientific or ethnographic knowledge of the natives, and ultimately dismissing the political sentiments among the ruled. The effect of the hegemony of the counterinsurgency narratives is that the civilian populations are seen as malleable and calculating masses, subject to manipulation by the “terrorists” and the counterinsurgents alike, their acquiescence necessary for obtaining intelligence and tactical support in the first instance and maintaining “stability” in the last. Counterinsurgency is self-avowedly an update of “dual mandate” methods for our time or, in other words, a new managerial handbook of imperial rule.

Laleh Khalili, Merip