This article argues that US counterinsurgency doctrine forms a programme of
both liberal rule and liberal war whose ultimate purpose is the pacification
of recalcitrant populations and their eventual (re)integration into the
networks of liberal governance. Designed to promote ‘safe’ forms of life while
eradicating ‘dangerous’ ones, the doctrine constitutes a response to both the
biopolitical problematization of human (in)security and the geostrategic
problematization of US national security. Counterinsurgency aims to harness
sociocultural knowledge in order to conduct a form of triage between elements
of targeted populations. It also seeks to inscribe the divisions on which such
a triage is based into space by means of practices that derive from earlier
methods of imperial policing. Ultimately, counterinsurgency’s production and
implementation of a biopolitical differentiation between ‘safe’ and
‘dangerous’ human lives is likely not only to reinforce existing societal
divisions within targeted populations but also to create new global, regional
and local divisions and to generate resistance to what many people will always
view as imperial domination. The societal divisions and resistance engendered
by counterinsurgency may reinforce Western problematizations of insecurity and
hence lead to further counterinsurgency campaigns in the future.
Counterinsurgency doctrine is thus not so much a programme of peace and
stability as one of spatially and temporally indeterminate pacification
