Transformative Invasions: Western Post-9/11 Counterinsurgency and the Lessons of Colonialism
During the 1950s, European colonial powers invented new types of warfare, combining military violence, social engineering, and forced “modernization” in the so-called battles for hearts and minds. Feichtinger and Malinowski explore the rediscovery of such techniques, and the subsequent emergence of refined and partly tamed versions of counterinsurgency warfare, in Afghanistan and Iraq during the last decade. The systematic application of anthropological knowledge, a new type of “warrior intellectual” among military leaders, and the representation of war as a necessarily armed form of developmental aid and way to enforce human rights represent a remarkably open appropriation of large parts of Europe’s violent late-colonial heritage.
