The Counterinsurgent Imagination

The Counterinsurgent Imagination
Author: Joseph MacKay
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2022-12-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 1009225812

A critical intellectual history of counterinsurgency, from early modernity to the present, analyzing military manuals, their authors, and their use.

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.

Ignorance, Power and Harm

Ignorance, Power and Harm
Author: Alana Barton
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2018-10-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3319973436

This book discusses the concept of 'agnosis' and its significance for criminology through a series of case studies, contributing to the expansion of the criminological imagination. Agnotology – the study of the cultural production of ignorance, has primarily been proposed as an analytical tool in the fields of science and medicine. However, this book argues that it has significant resonance for criminology and the social sciences given that ignorance is a crucial means through which public acceptance of serious and sometimes mass harms is achieved. The editors argue that this phenomenon requires a systematic inquiry into ignorance as an area of criminological study in its own right. Through case studies on topics such as migrant detention, historical institutionalised child abuse, imprisonment, environmental harm and financial collapse, this book examines the construction of ignorance, and the power dynamics that facilitate and shape that construction in a range of different contexts. Furthermore, this book addresses the relationship between ignorance and the achievement of ‘manufactured consent’ to political and cultural hegemony, acquiescence in its harmful consequences and the deflection of responsibility for them.

A Concise Course of Mathematics with Applications

A Concise Course of Mathematics with Applications
Author: Nicolas Laos
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 455
Release: 2024-09-19
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 1036409791

This book covers the following topics: Mathematical Philosophy; Mathematical Logic; the Structure of Number Sets and the Theory of Real Numbers, Arithmetic and Axiomatic Number Theory, and Algebra (including the study of Sequences and Series); Matrices and Applications in Input-Output Analysis and Linear Programming; Probability and Statistics; Classical Euclidean Geometry, Analytic Geometry, and Trigonometry; Vectors, Vector Spaces, Normed Vector Spaces, and Metric Spaces; basic principles of non-Euclidean Geometries and Metric Geometry; Infinitesimal Calculus and basic Topology (Functions, Limits, Continuity, Topological Structures, Homeomorphisms, Differentiation, and Integration, including Multivariable Calculus and Vector Calculus); Complex Numbers and Complex Analysis; basic principles of Ordinary Differential Equations; as well as mathematical methods and mathematical modeling in the natural sciences (including physics, engineering, biology, and neuroscience) and in the social sciences (including economics, management, strategic studies, and warfare problems).

Bullets Not Ballots

Bullets Not Ballots
Author: Jacqueline L. Hazelton
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 221
Release: 2021-05-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1501754807

In Bullets Not Ballots, Jacqueline L. Hazelton challenges the claim that winning "hearts and minds" is critical to successful counterinsurgency campaigns. Good governance, this conventional wisdom holds, gains the besieged government popular support, denies support to the insurgency, and makes military victory possible. Hazelton argues that major counterinsurgent successes since World War II have resulted not through democratic reforms but rather through the use of military force against civilians and the co-optation of rival elites. Hazelton offers new analyses of five historical cases frequently held up as examples of the effectiveness of good governance in ending rebellions—the Malayan Emergency, the Greek Civil War, the Huk Rebellion in the Philippines, the Dhofar rebellion in Oman, and the Salvadoran Civil War—to show that, although unpalatable, it was really brutal repression and bribery that brought each conflict to an end. By showing how compellence works in intrastate conflicts, Bullets Not Ballots makes clear that whether or not the international community decides these human, moral, and material costs are acceptable, responsible policymaking requires recognizing the actual components of counterinsurgent success—and the limited influence that external powers have over the tactics of counterinsurgent elites.

Targeting in International Law

Targeting in International Law
Author: Amin Parsa
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 189
Release: 2023-12-05
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1003819036

This book is about how distinctions are drawn between civilians and combatants in modern warfare and how the legal principle of distinction depends on the technical means through which combatants make themselves visibly distinguishable from civilians. The author demonstrates that technologies of visualisation have always been part of the operation of the principle of distinction, arguing that the military uniform sustained the legal categories of civilian and combatant and actively set the boundaries of permissible and prohibited targeting, and so legal and illegal killing. Drawing upon insights from the theory of legal materiality, visual studies, critical fashion studies, and a dozen of military manuals he shows that far from being passive objects of regulation, these technologies help to draw the boundaries of the legitimate target. With its attention to the co-productive relationship between law, technologies of visualisation and legitimation of violence, this book will be relevant to a large community of researchers in international law, international relations, critical military studies, contemporary counterinsurgency operations and the sociology of law

Pacification in Algeria, 1956-1958

Pacification in Algeria, 1956-1958
Author: David Galula
Publisher: Rand Corporation
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2002-07-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 0833041088

When Algerian nationalists launched a rebellion against French rule in November 1954, France was forced to cope with a varied and adaptable Algerian strategy. In this volume, originally published in 1963, David Galula reconstructs the story of his highly successful command at the height of the rebellion. This groundbreaking work, with a new foreword by Bruce Hoffman, remains relevant to present-day counterinsurgency operations.

A Century of Revolution

A Century of Revolution
Author: Gilbert M. Joseph
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 456
Release: 2010-10-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822392852

Latin America experienced an epochal cycle of revolutionary upheavals and insurgencies during the twentieth century, from the Mexican Revolution of 1910 through the mobilizations and terror in Central America, the Southern Cone, and the Andes during the 1970s and 1980s. In his introduction to A Century of Revolution, Greg Grandin argues that the dynamics of political violence and terror in Latin America are so recognizable in their enforcement of domination, their generation and maintenance of social exclusion, and their propulsion of historical change, that historians have tended to take them for granted, leaving unexamined important questions regarding their form and meaning. The essays in this groundbreaking collection take up these questions, providing a sociologically and historically nuanced view of the ideological hardening and accelerated polarization that marked Latin America’s twentieth century. Attentive to the interplay among overlapping local, regional, national, and international fields of power, the contributors focus on the dialectical relations between revolutionary and counterrevolutionary processes and their unfolding in the context of U.S. hemispheric and global hegemony. Through their fine-grained analyses of events in Chile, Colombia, Cuba, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Peru, they suggest a framework for interpreting the experiential nature of political violence while also analyzing its historical causes and consequences. In so doing, they set a new agenda for the study of revolutionary change and political violence in twentieth-century Latin America. Contributors Michelle Chase Jeffrey L. Gould Greg Grandin Lillian Guerra Forrest Hylton Gilbert M. Joseph Friedrich Katz Thomas Miller Klubock Neil Larsen Arno J. Mayer Carlota McAllister Jocelyn Olcott Gerardo Rénique Corey Robin Peter Winn

The U. S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual

The U. S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual
Author: David H. Petraeus
Publisher: Silver Rock Publishing
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2015-12-31
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 9781626544567

This field manual establishes doctrine for military operations in a counterinsurgency (COIN) environment. It is based on lessons learned from previous counterinsurgencies and contemporary operations. It is also based on existing interim doctrine and doctrine recently developed. Counterinsurgency operations generally have been neglected in broader American military doctrine and national security policies since the end of the Vietnam War over 40 years ago. This manual is designed to reverse that trend. It is also designed to merge traditional approaches to COIN with the realities of a new international arena shaped by technological advances, globalization, and the spread of extremist ideologies--some of them claiming the authority of a religious faith. This is a comprehensive manual that details every aspect of a successful COIN operation from intelligence to leadership to diplomacy. It also includes several useful appendices that provide important supplementary material.