The New Counter-Insurgency Era in Critical Perspective.

• Author: Keister, Jennifer M.
• Position: Book review

The New Counter-Insurgency Era in Critical Perspective

Edited by Celeste Ward Gventer, David Martin Jones, and M.L.R. Smith

New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, 375 pp.

The New Counter-Insurgency Era in Critical Perspective pulls together contributions from a range of authors with academic, policy, and military perspectives. Developed in the wake of die American-led invasion of Iraq, die current counterinsurgency (COIN) narrative--commonly referred to as "population centric" or "hearts-andminds"--identifies civilians as the center of gravity in winning insurgencies. Under this rubric, counterinsurgency experts have advocated redressing popular grievances, providing public goods and services, representative governance, and limited use of force. Such actions, these experts claim, will woo civilians away from supporting insurgents and inspire loyalty to the incumbent regime. Scholars, military handbooks, and media reports have iill articulated this paradigm. The book's editors state that "it was the largely uncritical acceptance of this COIN narrative that forms the background to this edited volume."

Broadly, all chapters question the efficacy of population-centric COIN. Many chapters focus (explicitly or implicitly) on Western-led interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the approaches, assumptions, and scholarship that underpin them. The chapters are almost universally critical of the current COIN paradigm, but the volume as a whole may be summarized by Paul Schulte's contribution: Rather than lining np to spurn large-scale interventionist COIN, "a more useful task is to . . . consider the grave, but not necessarily catastrophic, implications of 12 years of campaigning." In this vein, several themes emerge from the collected chapters.

First, a recurrent theme throughout the volume is criticism of the current COIN narrative's technocratic approach, emphasizing tactics over strategy and a conflict's wider political context (the contributions by Colin Jackson, Douglas Porch, M.L.R. Smith, John Bew, Huw Bennett, and Paul Staniland). Indeed, Porch argues that David Galula's account of French counterinsurgency in Algeria has been popular with American academics and practitioners who have worked to revive Galula's work in part because he views COIN with a tactical focus, ignoring the fight's strategic context. Galula's account emphasizes the imperative of separating insurgents from the population, and the concomitant importance of not alienating the population from the incumbent while doing so. Delinking COIN from politics, the current narrative "exceptionalizes"...