File(s) not publicly available
Economy of force: counterinsurgency and the historical rise of the social
book
posted on 2023-06-08, 17:48 authored by Patricia OwensThis radical new history and theory of counterinsurgency has major implications for social, political and international thought. Retrieving the older but surprisingly neglected language of household governance, Economy of Force shows how the techniques and domestic ideologies of household administration are highly portable and play a remarkably central role in international and imperial relations. In two late-colonial British emergencies in Malaya and Kenya, US counterinsurgency in Vietnam, and US-led campaigns in Afghanistan, and Iraq, armed social work was the continuation of oikonomia - not politics -by other means. Though never wholly succeeding, counterinsurgents drew on and innovated forms of household governance to create units of rule in which local populations were domesticated: through the selective delivery and withholding of humanitarian supplies and inside and through small-scale family homes, detention and concentration camps, depopulation and re-concentration in new villages and strategic hamlets, the creation or shaping of tribes and sectarian militias, and at the largest scale inside newly formed or reformed post-colonial and/or post-war national-states. Military strategists conceived population control as sociological warfare because the social realm itself and distinctly social thought are modern forms of oikonomikos, the art and science of household rule. There is an important story to be told of when and why the social realm first emerged as the domain through which human life could be intervened in and transformed. Economy of Force tells this story in terms of modern transformations in and violent crises of household forms of rule.
History
Publication status
- Published
Publisher
Cambridge University PressExternal DOI
Pages
357.0Place of publication
CambridgeISBN
9781107121942Series
Cambridge Studies in International RelationsDepartment affiliated with
- International Relations Publications
Full text available
- No
Peer reviewed?
- Yes
Legacy Posted Date
2015-01-15Usage metrics
Categories
No categories selectedKeywords
Licence
Exports
RefWorks
BibTeX
Ref. manager
Endnote
DataCite
NLM
DC