Counterinsurgency in Times of Genocide

Insurrection must rely upon the revolutionary upsurge of the people. —Lenin

“Despite its irregular nature and generally less intense level of combat, counterinsurgency may be just as critical to U.S. vital interests as conventional warfare.” (Field Manual Marine Corps)

It’s not uncommon in academia for so-called radical scholars to say that wherever there’s domination there, too, is resistance. It’s also not rare for people in general to have a skewed perspective on insurgencies and the ways in which they should be handled through counterinsurgency or “special operations.” For the most part, the term insurgency in the US has a negative connotation, especially when an insurgency emerges from Black and brown communities. The image of the “terrorist” portrayed in Hollywood film comes to mind, usually depicted as an Arab Muslim who, before detonating a vest made of explosives, yells “Allahu Akbar”.

What’s not so common is admitting that counterinsurgency greatly depends on those who should otherwise form part of an insurrection. The greatest enemies of a revolutionary movement come from within. Those who one would expect to hold more radical positions instead offer their services to counterinsurgency. Reactionary forces in colonial and neocolonial contexts are easily activated when signatories—and aspiring signatories—of a centrally gendered racial-colonial capitalist system of domination and exploitation perceive that the privileges they’ve attained through violence will be stripped away by the insurgents who have a stronger claim of what has been denied to them for far too long—power.

The suppression of an insurrection certainly depends on external reactionary forces but its effectiveness is contingent upon infiltrators and insiders willing to betray a struggle. This historical and political fact never comes easy to admit. It’s easier to identify the way counterinsurgency depends on the military and police to physically and violently repress dissident voices and movements. What’s not always so obvious is the insidious yet subtle ways reactionary forces ideologically and physically infiltrate a revolutionary movement to fragment it. A movement risks everything if it solely resists external physical forces while not paying sufficient attention to ideological warfare. From the scientific rationalization of colonial domination and enslavement to the dehumanization of Palestinians one finds that certain forms of knowledge justify the cruelest practices.

Physical force is insufficient insofar as counterinsurgency depends on psychological warfare, which historically also takes on an internal expression within broad-based movements. One must remember that social movements are not immune to the seduction of power stemming from the liberal-progressivist rhetoric of reformism via party politics (Rodriguez, 2022). It’s not surprising that radical movements and the knowledge produced therein are often captured within the gradualist liberal framework of institutional reform. This liberal frame constitutes and limits what is politically possible, which portrays more militant anti-State action as against liberal notions of change. All that matters is small incremental gains to maintain rather than subvert and destroy a racial-colonial capitalist system that views and treats the global majority as disposable. Liberal counterinsurgency maintains the disposability of others while portraying itself as transformative, thus religitimizing liberalism’s racial-colonial possessive individualist annihilatory logics of dispossession, criminalization, anti-Black violence, and carcerality.

There’s no denying that liberalism’s reformism serves as a technology of counterinsurgency directed at co-opting radical thought and praxis by making it more palatable for liberal consumers. Decolonial, anticolonial, Indigenous, feminist, and abolitionist thought and its concomitant concepts can even be used, distorted, and repackaged by universities and academia to be sold like any other commodity. Yet the institutionalization of radical thought alone doesn’t result in material change since militant insurgent praxis doesn’t fit the liberal multicultural idea of progress and change. The non-performativity of co-opted, institutionalized radical thought is sufficient proof that a discourse, once mainstreamed in academia, tends to disassociate itself from concrete contemporary struggles of liberation while depoliticizing and commodifying radical ideas and struggles of the past. Inspired by the work of Dylan Rodriguez and many others, I will discuss in more detail throughout this chapter how academia is a counterinsurgent institution through and through, despite having small pockets of resistance.

I don’t want to get ahead of myself but I do want to say that academia’s reformist approach to change is constitutive of what Rodriguez (2022) refers to as the ensemble of counterinsurgency that centralizes knowledge production, which not only legitimates domination ideologically, but also actively participates is real violence and dispossession both domestically and abroad. I’ll elaborate on this last point later. It will suffice to say that the ideological dimension of knowledge production is of great strategic importance for “pacifying” insurgency and reproducing the coloniality of power. As Rodriguez (2022) reminds us, social and cultural institutions aim to domesticate and neutralize radical movements that go beyond liberal reformism. Reformist counterinsurgency “attempts to solicit, pacify, and discipline the gathering force so it better comports with the progressivist narrative of ‘America’ as well as the transparent, deadly normativities of Civilization. This is an old story, but one worth telling again, with urgency” (200). The historical archive of counterinsurgency evinces that the university and academia in general have always served dominant interests. Nowhere is this more apparent than with the complicity of the Western(ized) university in shielding Israel of all criticism, not to mention the criminalization of dissident faculty, staff, and students, demonstrated with universities collaborating with ICE (e.g., Johns Hopkins University) to arrest and deport international students who have spoken out and organized against the genocide in Gaza.

If considered historically, we know that since 1492 colonial powers have been mastering counterinsurgency in order to maintain the violent racial-colonial capitalist order intact. Sylvia Wynter traces the way enslaved peoples were constantly recruited to compromise an insurrection’s element of surprise. Plantation owners promised meager rewards and, given the brutal circumstances, some enslaved people succumbed, but not as many as one would expect. Wynter recounts the courage of enslaved peoples in the face of torture demonstrated the incredible strength of the insurgent political culture that was maintained against incredible odds and within a brutal system of exploitation, domination, and dehumanization. Indigenous rebellions have also seen their own fair share of counterinsurgency but have also shown incredible forms of resisting co-optation. The proletariat insurgents of France’s 1848 social revolution was also betrayed by classes that should have otherwise sided with the exploited. But this was not the case, as Marx observed in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. One can find many similar cases other struggles.

Institutions materially and ideologically linked to power are inherently counterinsurgent, despite the multicultural inclusion of historically excluded peoples. From political economic to socio-cultural institutions, schools and prisons included, one can notice the entangled way they reenforce one another. Institutions are established forms of counterinsurgency, even if they are not immediately recognized as such. The university has seductive centripetal power that enables it to maintain its institutional inertia and refusal of radical change. Prisons, on the other hand, constitute a counterinsurgent necessity to repress not only explicitly dissident voices but those who disregard the laws designed and imposed to maintain people in their rightful (subordinated) place. A prison has centrifugal force aimed at disciplining a population, even those who are not incarcerated. It is an institution from which one wishes to stay away, forcing one to obey laws that codify state-sanctioned death. Resistance is illegal and it has severe consequences. Yet universities can be understood in a similar way since they don’t only reward but also punish those who challenge liberal norms. The university, which is superficially understood as a place of academic freedom, functions in practice as a disciplining institution as well, with its own policing mechanisms, physical and ideological. It is a central pillar of material and discursive domination. The violent repression of the Gaza Solidarity Encampments, including the zionist mob that attacked students at UCLA with police watching, demonstrates that the liberal establishment and the Biden Administration created the conditions for what Trump is pursuing in his second term. Universities also directly occupy stolen Indigenous land and produce technologies of colonial violence to strengthen colonial occupation, here and abroad.

The counterinsurgency we’re seeing today can be unveiled with the hypocrisy of liberal academics suddenly worrying about rising fascism’s attack on democracy and education, disassociating once again from yet another undeniable fact: liberal silence, indifference, moral apathy, complicity, and active participation in genocide is part of the problem. This form of counterinsurgency finds expression in even the most “progressive” circles. Take for instance when I wrote a letter responding to the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Council’s refusal to meet the demands included in the Petition for the Resolution for Justice in Palestine, including writing a statement on scholasticide. I wrote the following: “The AERA Council claims to be worried about the attacks on democracy, education, and research, yet it refuses to democratically engage in dialogue with the demands of over 700 AERA members. It does not seem to be able to make connections between the current attacks on education and the repression of dissident voices who supported and participated in the Gaza Solidarity Encampments and anti-genocide protests during the Biden administration. It is thus content with the role academic organizations play in furthering this repression by ignoring the demands of its members. The AERA Council disregards the attacks on academic freedom and the right to assemble before Trump started his second term, presenting him as solely responsible for what we are seeing today. This dissociates from the sociopolitical-geopolitical context in which pro-Palestine protests were attacked and criminalized by university administrators and politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike. Now we are seeing the consequences of years of silence. Students and professors are having their visas revoked, some of whom are being hunted down by ICE agents to be arrested and deported. The silence of the past is manifesting itself in the present, and the silence and indifference of today will certainly have more serious consequences in the future.”

Referring to so-called decolonial and abolitionist scholars in the Council, I ended my letter by addressing the disconnect between “radical” scholars’ academic work and their politics: “That is the legacy you will leave behind, despite the research that appears, on paper, to care about the well-being of oppressed communities. Genocide, as many organizations have called it and what hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of protestors have chanted in the streets, is what is happening in Gaza, despite your denial of it. Your refusal to acknowledge that a genocide is taking place in Gaza will not be forgotten or forgiven. History will not be kind to you.” Going further than this, we should not wait for history to unkindly treat those who complain about democracy dying yet do everything in their power within their academic organizations to uphold authoritarian forms of governance. We’re here now and we should challenge these counterinsurgent agents who’ve betrayed everything they claim to believe and write about in their peer-reviewed articles.

In the present, we cannot become what Rabea Eghbariah (2023) referred to as the “scholars [who] tend to sharpen their pens after the smell of death has dissipated and moral clarity is no longer urgent (para. 7). To act and write with urgency, we must refuse to play the careerist and opportunist game academia loves to play as the world burns around its ivory towers. These counterinsurgent academics will one day edit special issues and publish books on the Palestinian genocide. Mohammed El-Kurd states, that they will one day lecture the world about genocide in the past tense when in fact they said and did nothing while it unfolded for their unwilling eyes to see. These vultures, as El-Kurd labels them, are in our midst. One probably can picture one or more colleagues who are unbothered by genocide today yet will likely write about it when the “dust settles.” These vultures will one day romanticize what they once condemned, what they did not defend, and what they enabled through their silence. They will not only romanticize the past but also depoliticize, mystify, and commodify it. El Kurd states that these “vultures will make sculptures out of our flesh” so that the past can be frozen in time in some museum. In academia and beyond, that’s exactly how counterinsurgency works.

To be continued…