A couple weeks ago I wrote a post on counterinsurgency in times of genocide. This post is a continuation of that discussion.
In Tip of the Spear, Orisanmi Burton cites the US Army’s definition of counterinsurgency, understood as the “warfare that involves ‘military, paramilitary, political, economic, psychological, and civic actions taken by a government to defeat insurgency’ (p. 4). Within the context of the US, counterinsurgency is directed by those who will materially benefit the most and who have more to lose if an insurgency becomes revolutionary force. The greatest beneficiaries is certainly the white ethnoclass. Central to counterinsurgency, however, is the dependency, submission, and complicity of those on the receiving end of domination and exploitation. One could argue that counterinsurgency is central to maintaining the coloniality of power intact, through which race functions not only as a technology of control and management and a central organizing principle constitutive of the modern/colonial capitalist order, but also as a category that creates a social hierarchy—one that seduces those positioned at the bottom who are willing to “sell their souls to the devil,” as the saying goes.
Counterinsurgency is deployed to strip away or deny insurgent communities the “material, social, cultural, and political nutrients necessary for reproducing” a militant praxis against all forms of oppression. The symbolic dimension—psychological, social, cultural as well as the material dimension—political and economic—both work in tandem to try to permanently dominate a people. One dimension should not be overemphasized at the expense of the other, which academia tends to do when sidelining the material aims of anticolonial, decolonial, and abolitionist praxes of resistance. As Quijano noted, one cannot effectively exploit a people without dominating them first in material and ideological/epistemological terms. The latter nonetheless predominates in discussions focused on decoloniality, whereby liberation becomes distorted and reduced to “decolonizing” everything besides material relations and structures of power. As long as we decolonize our fields of research and disciplines, liberation will follow.
To avoid this academic trap, the epistemological foundations of the material world and vice versa should thus always form part of one’s analysis of how institutions and social structures historically came to be the way they are. Knowledge and power cannot be so easily disentangled when framed within a broader planetary lens that gives priority to the colonial foundations of dominant systems of knowledge and capitalist production. Indeed, it makes little sense to separate the production of knowledge from the production of commodities, including weapons and technologies of violence, when both are dialectically constituted. That is to say, knowledge is material and more often than not it’s a matter of life and death. Take, for instance, the disciplinary division of knowledge in the 19th century that was intimately related to the imperial/colonial designs, which includes capitalist exploitation. Knowledge was thus used (and continues to be used) to rationalize domination and exploitation by naturalizing the superiority of Western Europe, eliding at the same time the unprecedented levels of exploitation in the so-called New World. Research on counterinsurgency in the 20th and 21st centuries also reveals the way knowledge becomes yet another weapon to understand, prevent, and/or eradicate insurgencies.
Counterinsurgent warfare aims to prevent the creation of a “people’s war” (Burton)—that is, the “war of the weak against the strong” (p. 4). A people’s war requires an insurgent praxis that entails “irregular, small-scale attacks that aim to disrupt the social order, raising the cost of business as usual to a level that is unsustainable for the ruling authoring, forcing them to relinquish control” (ibid). Insurgents carry out a myriad of methods to achieve these aims: “political education, critique, protest, organizing, cultural production, litigation, subversion, refusal, rebellion, retaliation, hostage-taking, sabotage, armed struggle, and the intimate labor of care.”
In the following post, I want to discuss counterinsurgency within the context of the Cold War and the counterrevolutionary role higher education played in regions that saw the rise of insurgencies and revolutionary movements against imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism. I’ll pay close attention to the varying ways those in power conceptualize counterinsurgency. I then draw on the most radical traditions who have inverted the colonial gaze by studying counterinsurgency to strengthen their struggles for liberation. We must study counterinsurgency not for studying’s sake but rather because of the ethico-political responsibility the insurgent intellectual has in revealing how the past lives in the present. Or, as CLR James wrote “On the Question of Power,” we must seriously study the art and historical circumstances of (counter)insurgency so that we don’t make the same mistakes others have made, particularly when considering the unforgivable betrayals that took place in past revolutionary movements. We must study the past because the present demands we dedicate our energies to what will best inform the ongoing struggles of today, even if our analyses and interpretations are modest contributions to the knowledge that’s already born in sites of struggle.