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  1. Home
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  3. The Counterinsurgent Imagination
  • Cited by 5
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
January 2023
Print publication year:
2023
Online ISBN:
9781009225847
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009225847
Series:
LSE International Studies
Subjects:
History, Politics and International Relations, International Relations and International Organisations, History of Ideas and Intellectual History
Information

Book description

Counterinsurgency, the violent suppression of armed insurrection, is among the dominant kinds of war in contemporary world politics. Often linked to protecting populations and reconstructing legitimate political orders, it has appeared in other times and places in very different forms – and has taken on a range of politics in doing so. How did it arrive at its present form, and what generated these others, along the way? Spanning several centuries and four detailed case studies, The Counterinsurgent Imagination unpacks and explores this intellectual history through counterinsurgency manuals. These military theoretical and instructional texts, and the practitioners who produced them, made counterinsurgency possible in practice. By interrogating these processes, this book explains how counter-insurrectionary war eventually took on its late twentieth and early twenty-first century forms. It shows how and why counterinsurgent ideas persist, despite recurring failures.

Awards

Winner, 2023 Oceania Book Prize for International Studies, Oceanic Conference on International Studies

Reviews

‘This is a fascinating re-reading of counterinsurgency field manuals as a form of conservative, high modern utopianism. Often reactionary, always violent, these documents and the wars they authorise are conservative and world-making projects of empire. This is an important addition to the critical literature on counterrevolutionary war.'

Patricia Owen - Professor of International Relations, University of Oxford

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