Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
  1. Home
  2. Books
  3. The Counterinsurgent Imagination
  • Cited by 13
      • Show more authors
      • You may already have access via personal or institutional login
    • Select format
    • Publisher:
      Cambridge University Press
      Publication date:
      18 January 2023
      05 January 2023
      ISBN:
      9781009225847
      9781009225816
      9781009225823
      DOI:
      https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009225847
      Dimensions:
      (229 x 152 mm)
      Weight & Pages:
      0.62kg, 322 Pages
      Dimensions:
      (229 x 152 mm)
      Weight & Pages:
      0.47kg, 322 Pages
      • Series:
      LSE International Studies
      Subjects:
      History, Politics and International Relations, International Relations and International Organisations, History of Ideas and Intellectual History
    You may already have access via personal or institutional login
    • Selected: Digital
    Add to cart View cart Buy from Cambridge.org
    Series:
    LSE International Studies
    Subjects:
    History, Politics and International Relations, International Relations and International Organisations, History of Ideas and Intellectual History
    Information

    Book description

    Counterinsurgency, the violent suppression of armed insurrection, is among the dominant kinds of war in contemporary world politics. Often linked to protecting populations and reconstructing legitimate political orders, it has appeared in other times and places in very different forms – and has taken on a range of politics in doing so. How did it arrive at its present form, and what generated these others, along the way? Spanning several centuries and four detailed case studies, The Counterinsurgent Imagination unpacks and explores this intellectual history through counterinsurgency manuals. These military theoretical and instructional texts, and the practitioners who produced them, made counterinsurgency possible in practice. By interrogating these processes, this book explains how counter-insurrectionary war eventually took on its late twentieth and early twenty-first century forms. It shows how and why counterinsurgent ideas persist, despite recurring failures.

    Awards

    Winner, 2023 Oceania Book Prize for International Studies, Oceanic Conference on International Studies

    Reviews

    ‘This is a fascinating re-reading of counterinsurgency field manuals as a form of conservative, high modern utopianism. Often reactionary, always violent, these documents and the wars they authorise are conservative and world-making projects of empire. This is an important addition to the critical literature on counterrevolutionary war.'

    Patricia Owen - Professor of International Relations, University of Oxford

    Refine List

    Actions for selected content:

    Select all | Deselect all
    • View selected items
    • Export citations
    • Download PDF (zip)
    • Save to Kindle
    • Save to Dropbox
    • Save to Google Drive

    Save Search

    You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

    Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
    Cancel
    ×

    Contents

    Contents

    Metrics

    Altmetric attention score

    Full text views

    Total number of HTML views: 0
    Total number of PDF views: 0 *
    Loading metrics...

    Book summary page views

    Total views: 0 *
    Loading metrics...

    * Views captured on Cambridge Core between #date#. This data will be updated every 24 hours.

    Usage data cannot currently be displayed.

    Accessibility standard: Unknown

    Why this information is here

    This section outlines the accessibility features of this content - including support for screen readers, full keyboard navigation and high-contrast display options. This may not be relevant for you.

    Accessibility Information

    Accessibility compliance for the PDF of this book is currently unknown and may be updated in the future.