Gendering Counterinsurgency

Gendering Counterinsurgency
Author: Synne L. Dyvik
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 169
Release: 2016-12-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 131743840X

This book analyses the various ways counterinsurgency in Afghanistan is gendered. The book examines the US led war in Afghanistan from 2001 onwards, including the invasion, the population-centric counterinsurgency operations and the efforts to train a new Afghan military charged with securing the country when the US and NATO withdrew their combat forces in 2014. Through an analysis of key counterinsurgency texts and military memoirs, the book explores how gender and counterinsurgency are co-constitutive in numerous ways. It discusses the multiple military masculinities that counterinsurgency relies on, the discourse of ‘cultural sensitivity’, and the deployment of Female Engagement Teams (FETs). Gendering Counterinsurgency demonstrates how population-centric counterinsurgency doctrine and practice can be captured within a gendered dynamic of ‘killing and caring’ – reliant on physical violence, albeit mediated through ‘armed social work’. This simultaneously contradictory and complementary dynamic cannot be understood without recognising how the legitimation and the practice of this war relied on multiple gendered embodied performances of masculinities and femininities. Developing the concept of ‘embodied performativity’ this book shows how the clues to understanding counterinsurgency, as well as gendering war more broadly are found in war’s everyday gendered manifestations. This book will be of much interest to students of counterinsurgency warfare, gender politics, governmentality, biopolitics, critical war studies, and critical security studies in general.

Uneasy Military Encounters

Uneasy Military Encounters
Author: Ruth Streicher
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2020-10-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1501751344

Uneasy Military Encounters presents a historically and theoretically grounded political ethnography of the Thai military's counterinsurgency practices in the southern borderland, home to the greater part of the Malay-Muslim minority. Ruth Streicher argues that counterinsurgency practices mark the southern population as the racialized, religious, and gendered other of the Thai, which contributes to producing Thailand as an imperial formation: a state formation based on essentialized difference between the Thai and their others. Through a genealogical approach, Uneasy Military Encounters addresses broad conceptual questions of imperial politics in a non-Western context: How can we understand imperial policing in a country that was never colonized? How is "Islam" constructed in a state that is officially secular and promotes Buddhist tolerance? What are the (historical) dynamics of imperial patriarchy in a context internationally known for its gender pluralism? The resulting ethnography excavates the imperial politics of concrete encounters between the military and the southern population in the ongoing conflict in southern Thailand.

The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Middle Eastern and North African History

The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Middle Eastern and North African History
Author: Jens Hanssen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 672
Release: 2020-11-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 0191652792

The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Middle-Eastern and North African History critically examines the defining processes and structures of historical developments in North Africa and the Middle East over the past two centuries. The Handbook pays particular attention to countries that have leapt out of the political shadows of dominant and better-studied neighbours in the course of the unfolding uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa. These dramatic and interconnected developments have exposed the dearth of informative analysis available in surveys and textbooks, particularly on Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria.

Handbook on Gender and War

Handbook on Gender and War
Author: Simona Sharoni
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Total Pages: 615
Release: 2016-07-27
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1849808929

This interdisciplinary Handbook offers a comprehensive and detailed overview of the relationship between gender and war, exploring the conduct of war, its impact, aftermath and opposition to it. Offering sophisticated theoretical insights and empirical research from the First World War to contemporary conflicts around the world, this Handbook underscores the centrality of gender to critical examinations of war.

Unconventional Warfare from Antiquity to the Present Day

Unconventional Warfare from Antiquity to the Present Day
Author: Brian Hughes
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2017-07-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 3319495267

This volume addresses the problem of small, irregular, and unconventional war across time and around the globe. The use of non-uniformed and often civilian combatants, with tactics eschewing pitched battles, is the most common form of warfare throughout history and comes in many forms. The collection works back in time beginning with the ‘Long War’ in present day Afghanistan and concluding with warfare in classical Greece. Along the way it engages with conflicts as diverse as the American Civil War and regional rebellion in Tudor England. Each case study provides unique insights into the practices, experiences, and discourses that have shaped this ubiquitous type of conflict. Readers interested in rebellion and repression, cultural and tactical interpretations of conflict, civilian strategies in wartime, the supposed ‘western way of war’, and the ways in which participants have framed and related their actions across a variety of spheres will find much of interest in these pages.

The Counterinsurgent Imagination

The Counterinsurgent Imagination
Author: Joseph MacKay
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2023-01-05
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1009225790

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.

The Soul of Armies

The Soul of Armies
Author: Austin Long
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2016-03-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1501703900

For both the United States and United Kingdom counterinsurgency was a serious component of security policy during the Cold War and, along with counterterrorism, has been the greatest security challenge after September 11, 2001. In The Soul of Armies Austin Long compares and contrasts counterinsurgency operations during the Cold War and in recent years by three organizations: the US Army, the US Marine Corps, and the British Army.Long argues that the formative experiences of these three organizations as they professionalized in the nineteenth century has produced distinctive organizational cultures that shape operations. Combining archival research on counterinsurgency campaigns in Vietnam and Kenya with the author's personal experience as a civilian advisor to the military in Iraq and Afghanistan, The Soul of Armies demonstrates that the US Army has persistently conducted counterinsurgency operations in a very different way from either the US Marine Corps or the British Army. These differences in conduct have serious consequences, affecting the likelihood of success, the potential for civilian casualties and collateral damage, and the ability to effectively support host nation governments. Long concludes counterinsurgency operations are at best only a partial explanation for success or failure.

Critically Sovereign

Critically Sovereign
Author: Joanne Barker
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2017-03-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0822373165

Critically Sovereign traces the ways in which gender is inextricably a part of Indigenous politics and U.S. and Canadian imperialism and colonialism. The contributors show how gender, sexuality, and feminism work as co-productive forces of Native American and Indigenous sovereignty, self-determination, and epistemology. Several essays use a range of literary and legal texts to analyze the production of colonial space, the biopolitics of “Indianness,” and the collisions and collusions between queer theory and colonialism within Indigenous studies. Others address the U.S. government’s criminalization of traditional forms of Diné marriage and sexuality, the Iñupiat people's changing conceptions of masculinity as they embrace the processes of globalization, Hawai‘i’s same-sex marriage bill, and stories of Indigenous women falling in love with non-human beings such as animals, plants, and stars. Following the politics of gender, sexuality, and feminism across these diverse historical and cultural contexts, the contributors question and reframe the thinking about Indigenous knowledge, nationhood, citizenship, history, identity, belonging, and the possibilities for a decolonial future. Contributors. Jodi A. Byrd, Joanne Barker, Jennifer Nez Denetdale, Mishuana Goeman, J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Melissa K. Nelson, Jessica Bissett Perea, Mark Rifkin

Gendering Military Sacrifice

Gendering Military Sacrifice
Author: Cecilia Åse
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 317
Release: 2019-02-12
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0429826699

This book offers a feminist analysis of military sacrifice and reveals the importance of a gender perspective in understanding the idea of honourable death. In present-day security discourses, traditional masculinised obligations to die for the homeland and its women and children are challenged and renegotiated. Working from a critical feminist perspective, this book examines the political and societal justifications for sacrifice in wars motivated by human rights and an international responsibility to protect. With original empirical research from six European countries, the volume demonstrates how gendered and nationalistic representations saturate contemporary notions of sacrifice and legitimate military violence. A key argument is that a gender perspective is necessary in order to understand, and to oppose, the idea of the honourable military death. Bringing together a wide range of materials – including public debates, rituals, monuments and artwork – to analyse the justifications for soldiers’ deaths in the Afghanistan war (2002–14), the analysis challenges methodological nationalism. The authors develop a feminist comparative methodology and engage in cross-country and transdisciplinary analysis. This innovative approach generates new understandings of the ways in which both the idealisation and the political contestation of military violence depend on gendered national narratives. This book will be of much interest to students of gender studies, critical military studies, security studies and International Relations.

Gender, National Security, and Counter-Terrorism

Gender, National Security, and Counter-Terrorism
Author: Margaret L. Satterthwaite
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2013-02-15
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1136173404

In the name of fighting terrorism, countries have been invaded; wars have been waged; people have been detained, rendered and tortured; and campaigns for "hearts and minds" have been unleashed. Human rights analyses of the counter-terrorism measures implemented in the aftermath of 11 September 2001 have assumed that men suffer the most—both numerically and in terms of the nature of rights violations endured. This assumption has obscured the ways that women, men, and sexual minorities experience counter-terrorism. By integrating gender into a human rights analysis of counter-terrorism—and human rights into a gendered analysis of counter-terrorism—this volume aims to reverse this trend. Through this variegated human rights lens, the authors in this volume identify the spectrum and nature of rights violations arising in the context of gendered counter-terrorism and national security practices. Introduced with a foreword by Martin Scheinin, former UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counter-Terrorism, the volume examines a wide range of gendered impacts of counter-terrorism measures that have not been theorized in the leading texts on terrorism, counter-terrorism, national security, and human rights. Gender, National Security and Counter-Terrorism will be of particular interest to scholars and students in the disciplines of Law, Security Studies and Gender Studies.