Guerrilla Marketing: Counterinsurgency and Capitalism in Colombia, Critical Book Review

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Abstract

What happens when the affective regimes of militarism and consumer culture collide? In the recently published book, Guerrilla Marketing: Counterinsurgency and Capitalism in Colombia (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Alexander Fattal explores this question and argues that
by outsourcing propaganda and psychological warfare operations to consumer marketers the Colombian Ministry of Defense has modeled a new form of conflict: brand warfare. Through an ethnography of the Colombian government’s efforts to persuade guerrilla fighters to abandon the armed struggle through campaigns crafted by the same advertising firm that manages the brands of Mazda and RedBull, Fattal details the Colombian government’s efforts to transform Marxist guerrilla fighters in the FARC into entrepreneurial subjects and consumer citizens. Guerrilla Marketing examines the limits of branding’s ability to reconcile the irreconcilable — such as the notion of a humanitarian counterinsurgency. Colombia has been used as a laboratory for U.S. Empire and the strategies forged there have circulated to war-torn countries around the globe. Guerrilla Marketing is a case study of the state of war and capitalism in the early twenty-first century — when the simmering fears of the global war on terror’s everywhere war and rising aspirations of the global middle classes expand in tandem.

This roundtable will engage with the book’s main argument about emergent forms of affective governance. At the same time, the roundtable will foster debate about methodological strategies for researching a security state, consider the book’s usage of art and testimonials, and muse on the Guerrilla Marketing’s implications for Colombia’s post-peace accord future.

Sub Track

• Violence and Insecurities

Session Organizer

• Alexander L Fattal, Pennsylvania State University

Chair

• Winifred Tate, Colby College

Discussant

• Lina M Britto, Northwestern University

Presenters

• Graham Denyer Willis, University of Cambridge

• Winifred Tate, Colby College

• Juan P Vera Lugo, Universidad Javeriana

• Ulla D Berg, Rutgers University