Colonialism and Counterinsurgency

• In Event: 344 - Regular Session. Peace and Conflict

Abstract

Counterinsurgency is an applied theory concerned with how to establish a stable government against an enemy waging irregular warfare articulated in its contemporary form during the wars of decolonization following World War II. This paper attempts to theorize counterinsurgency by (1) reconstructing the major principles of counterinsurgency theory as understood and implemented by the military officers who created it. This is the study of doctrine and practice, hoping to illuminate the subjectivity of the practitioners and (2) developing a theory of counterinsurgency which goes beyond the reconstruction of doctrine and provides a framework to position counterinsurgency as one aspect of a complicated time. Counterinsurgency is a two phase act of social construction. In the first phase, the counterinsurgent forces must develop a knowledge, an understanding of the society they hope to change. The second phase is a project of military engineering, in which military power, not all of it highly coercive, is used to alter social structures to achieve desired strategic ends. Counterinsurgency is a warfare centered around social construction, in which the social structure and culture become direct targets for military action. In order to effect such military action, the target population was studied in ways which go beyond traditional military intelligence to include militarized social science and extensive secret policing. Colonial attitudes underlay and undermined attempts to develop the modernist science of counter insurgency; attempts to produce desired aggregate rational action were undermined by an orientalist portrayal of the occupied populations.

Author

• Tyler A Crabb, University of Maryland-College Park