The Roads to Power: The Infrastructure of Counterinsurgency

From the Napoleonic era to the present day, waging war has gone hand in hand with building roads. Laleh Khalili, politics professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, describes how both U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Israeli authorities in Palestine use road construction to impose security and economic regimes on local populations

Counterterrorism and Counterinsurgency in the Neoliberal Age

This chapter examines the colonial roots of counterinsurgency practices deployed by the US after September 11, 2011 in Iraq and Afghanistan. Drawing on a broad range of primary sources produced by the US military and its officers and soldiers, the chapter argues that the counterinsurgency practices were intended as liberal forms of warfare that through the use of law, administration, and procedure intended to facilitate the conquest and management of intransigent populations in those two countries. Given the broader failure of such practices to pacify the conquered populations and the high cost—in blood, treasure, and political credibility—of maintaining such futile warfare, the US has now changed gears to counterterrorism, which is far more about direct violence than it is about imperial management and transformation of conquered populations

Pacifying Urban Insurrections: A Review of Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla by David Kilcullen

David Kilcullen, an Australian soldier-scholar who acted as counterinsurgency advisor to both the Pentagon and the State Department in the us War on Terror, is refashioning himself as an expert on geospatial security and urban crises. His Out of the Mountains is a Malthusian account of urban disorder in the global South, in what he calls ‘crowded, complex, and coastal’ cities as a terrain of future asymmetric warfare. This review situates his work within the intellectual context of the counterinsurgency & pacification epistemic community out of which it arises, and addresses why his book may have received plaudits from the socialist urban theorist Mike Davis