An education in counterinsurgency
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An education in counterinsurgency Jeffrey H. Michaels1
© Springer Nature Limited 2020
Keywords Counterinsurgency · Internal defense · National interdepartmental seminar In Badges Without Borders Stuart Schrader provides a broad overview of the evolution of American counterinsurgency practices during the Cold War, particularly during the period covering presidents Eisenhower through Nixon. While the book’s focus is an examination of US overseas police programs in constituting a ‘discretionary empire’1 and their ‘boomerang effect’ on domestic policing, these themes are nevertheless set against the background of the rise and decline of what was generally referred to as the ‘counterinsurgency fad’ inside the US Government. The concept of a ‘fad’ is not one that is well-explored despite being referred to by practitioners and academics alike. As used here, it simply refers to a topic and/or a term that receives a great deal of attention by policymakers and the bureaucracy, which can include being constantly referred to in the discourse of officials, policies generated or characterized by, funding and other resources associated with it, and so forth. With respect to ‘counterinsurgency,’ the concept of a ‘fad’ is not only appropriate as it qualifies on all the accounts just listed, but the term ‘fad’ was also employed by US officials to describe the phenomenon. Several aspects of ‘fads’ are important to consider when analyzing them. First, as the term ‘fad’ implies, it is a transitory phenomenon. This is not to say that the decline of a ‘fad’ equates to the end of official engagement with a topic or term, or that the beginning of a ‘fad’ reflects the first time officials expressed an interest. Instead, it merely distinguishes between the period of ‘critical mass’ or popularity versus when some other topic or term preceded or replaced it. The duration of a ‘fad’ varies and the reasons for its rise and fall are often difficult to identify. ‘Relabeling exercises’ are a common feature of bureaucracies and it is crucial not to mistake a change of label for a change of content. Related to this, and as previously noted, one must distinguish between a topic and a term. Within the US Government, 1
The term ‘discretionary empire’ is used on a number of occasions in Schrader’s, Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing(Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2019). * Jeffrey H. Michaels [email protected] 1
Department of War Studies, King’s College London, London, UK Vol.:(0123456789)
International Politics Reviews
the term ‘counterinsurgency’ became popular because it was the preferred term of President John F. Kennedy, yet many similar terms were also in common usage such as ‘internal defense’, ‘internal security’, ‘unconventional warfare’, ‘counter-guerrilla warfare’, ‘counter-subversion’, ‘pacification’, etc. Although the nuances were sometimes acknowledged and debated, often these terms were simply used by officials as a short-hand when referring to a topic
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