Abstract
In national security affairs, as in other policy spheres, boundaries between ‘foreign’ and ‘domestic’ often become blurred and unstable. The ‘Global War on Terror’ (GWOT), with its intelligence gathering on US citizens and the relentless hunt for the ‘enemy within’, illustrates the erosion of any fixed distinction between external and indigenous threats and responses. Within US policy and academic circles, the American conduct of counter-insurgency typically is framed in ‘expeditionary’ terms. Under this conception, counter-insurgency is a tool of US international security policy — it is something the US armed forces and civilian agencies do abroad, ideally in cooperation with international partners and ‘by, with, and through’ the embattled ‘host nation’ facing insurgent threats. And at its most baroque, counter-insurgency demands nothing less than political, social, and economic revolution, with the United States serving as the midwife that will bring the besieged polity into the modern world.
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Notes
Alfred W. McCoy, Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), p. 16.
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Quoted in Karl Vick, ‘Iraq’s Lessons, On the Home Front’, Washington Post, http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2009-11-15/news/36845011_1_mayor-dennis-donohue-salinas-gang-warfare (accessed 20 March 2013). For more on this collaboration, see Michael Freeman and Hy Rothstein, eds, Gangs and Guerrillas: Ideas from Counterinsurgency and Counterterrorism (Monterey, CA: Naval Postgraduate School, April 2011), p. 1.
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Rosenau, W. (2014). ‘Our Ghettos, Too, Need a Lansdale’: American Counter-insurgency Abroad and at Home in the Vietnam Era. In: Gventer, C.W., Jones, D.M., Smith, M.L.R. (eds) The New Counter-insurgency Era in Critical Perspective. Rethinking Political Violence series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137336941_6
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