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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.

Summary

David Galula’s (1964) Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice likely shaped current American counterinsurgency doctrine more than any other historical text. A French national of North African birth, he wrote his core works in English, for American military readers. While sharing many strategies and tactics with Anglophone theorists from the period, his manual adopted a strikingly unified process narrative for the step-by-step defeat of insurgency. His work was informed by decolonization in East Asia and North Africa as well as a deep anticommunism. More than anything else—and largely to the exclusion of past French doctrine—he was informed by reading Mao and by field observation of Maoist guerrillas in China. Galula’s strategy was to run Maoist guerrilla warfare backward. In adopting this process story, he tacitly internalized the logic of Mao’s politics as such. He produced an apparently hyper-coherent doctrine that was in practice divided against itself in multiple ways. This account acquired enormous influence, intermittently shaping Anglo-American counterinsurgency for decades.

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The Counterinsurgent Imagination

5 - David Galula in Algeria

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The Counterinsurgent Imagination

5 - David Galula in Algeria

Summary