Archipelagos of death: the assemblage of population-centric war in Afghanistan

Afghanistan; Assemblage; critical War Studies; military memoirs; population-centric counterinsurgency (COIN); History; Political Science and International Relations

Abstract :

[en] How is the notion of success rearticulated in the contemporary context of endless counterinsurgencies (COIN)? To answer, the paper engages the thesis that the recent COIN campaigns were founded on a dysfunctional disconnect between the “hearts and minds” principles and the reality of the indefinite use of force. I show that this tension (called the “tactical trap”) is not a pathology of COIN, but one of its productive sites. The tactical trap is an assemblage of violence that brings together the endless use of force and the population-centric narrative through the principle of futurity, i.e. an indeterminate horizon of “progress.” Taking inspiration from the Critical War Studies and the Afghan warfare as a case study, I highlight the paradoxical nature of population-centric war: it is founded on a violence that makes COIN both a permanent state of failure and a probable success. The indeterminacy of violence is then analyzed as a new ordering of risk-management warfare, based on the everyday (re)invention of the potentiality of “progress.”.

Disciplines :

Political science, public administration & international relations

Author, co-author :

Pomarède, Julien ; Université de Liège - ULiège > Département de science politique > Politique internationale : International Politics In a Comparative Perspective ; Recherche Et Etudes En Politique Internationale (REPI), Université Libre De Bruxelles (ULB), Brussels, Belgium

Language :

English

Title :

Archipelagos of death: the assemblage of population-centric war in Afghanistan

Publication date :

02 July 2020

Journal title :

Defence Studies

ISSN :

1470-2436

eISSN :

1743-9698

Publisher :

Routledge

Volume :

Issue :

Pages :

202 - 223

Peer reviewed :

Peer Reviewed verified by ORBi

Additional URL :

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/14702436.2020.1776614

Available on ORBi :

since 24 October 2023

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