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Yeah. Let's start straightaway with today's call on contemporary counter-insurgency by Dr. Ali Khalili,

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obtained officially from Columbia University with the thesis that she later turned into a book that is called Heroes

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and Martyrs of Palestine The Politics of National Commemoration with published by Cambridge University Press in 2007,

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a work that included a very thorough field fieldwork of one year of research in the Palestinian refugee camp.

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She is now senior lecturer in politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies in

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London and is also co-editor of the book on Policing and Prisons in the Modern Middle East.

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The lecture she is giving today is part of a larger work, the working time for the manuscript,

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his time in the shadows, incarceration in counter insurgency.

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So this lecture today is focusing on the agenda of counter-insurgency.

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Thank you very much. And it's been a pleasure to meet you. And thank you all very much for having me here.

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I do apologise. I'm a bit cold here today. I've got a couple of young kids at home and this time of the year there are a little germ factories.

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And so if I'm if I'm sucking on stuff, it's not I'm not chewing gum through them having cold medicine to let me breathe while I read.

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Okay. Gender in counterinsurgency,

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counterinsurgency defined as asymmetrical warfare by a powerful military against irregular combatants supported by a civilian population,

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is as old as warfare itself. Although the term itself was coined by John F Kennedy in 1960,

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this particular method of war fighting has been a mainstay of colonial war fighting and imperial policing, particularly since the 19th century.

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Despite the long history of small wars and colonial counterinsurgencies,

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today's advocates of popular population centric counterinsurgency in which

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the civilian population is persuaded to defect to the counterinsurgency side.

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And this is often counter opposed to enemy centric counterinsurgency in which instead of persuasion,

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you get intimidation into getting the civilians on your side.

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The advocates of population centric counterinsurgency presented as a soft option, especially as compared with scorched earth military tactics,

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where the annihilation of the enemies is the end point and the population centric doctrine advanced in the

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U.S. Army and Marine counterinsurgency manual FM 324 and other current classics of counterinsurgency,

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including John Nagl Eating Soup with a Knife, and David Kilcullen, The Accidental Guerrilla.

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And also counterinsurgency kinetic force, which is the killing capacity of the military,

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is to take backstage foregrounding developmental language and agendas and practice, such as, for example, and I quote,

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a vibrant economy, political participation, restored hope, psychological information operations,

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the use of local proxies, and the integration of civilian military efforts, including aid and governance.

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Because ultimately the ultimate goal of counterinsurgency is to win over a largely uncommitted civilian population.

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This coding of counterinsurgency has the civilian ized option,

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which aims at winning the hearts and minds of civilian populations and persuading

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them to support the counterinsurgent has a particularly gendered character.

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What I mean by gendering is a set of practices and discourses that constitute men and women,

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and the masculinities and femininity is in particular ways as diametrically opposed things.

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Gendering is not about women alone.

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You often see gender equated to women, nor is it about a pure and autonomous autonomous dichotomy between men and women.

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Rather, masculinities and femininity, especially in imperial contexts,

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are always already crosshatch with other kinds of difference, including racial and class designations.

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At one level, counterinsurgency itself is presented as the opposite of a more mechanised,

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technologically advanced, higher kinetic, more kinetic form of warfare.

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Given that the latter is often coded as hyper masculine populations, the population centric counterinsurgency is considered feminine.

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Second, the very object of population centric counterinsurgency is often perceived and represented as feminine,

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since the focus of counterinsurgency is seen to be the transformation of civilian allegiances and remaking of their social world.

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On the other hand, in the binary categorisation, which forms the basis of mainstream discourses about war,

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civilian, which is feminine, is often posed as the opposite of combat, which is often portrayed as masculine.

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That's on one hand. On the other hand. Spaces and subjectivities, which regular warfare destroys as a matter of side effect rather than intent,

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or which are considered to be collateral to the main job of warfighting in conventional warfare or de marginalising counterinsurgency.

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That brought into focus and in some senses made central to the work of military and civilian counterinsurgency.

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These spaces and subjectivities are perceived by both the military and civilians as gendered in particular,

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in specific sorts of ways, which I hope to show.

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Finally, the practices of counterinsurgency itself is predicated on being able to tell combatants from civilians, hostiles,

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from friendlies, as well as invading, organising, fighting, detaining, transforming and destroying often again on the basis of gender.

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And again, I will talk about this in a minute.

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We know from a wealth of scholarship that war and violence have always been gendered class and racialized, not only in a practical way,

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therefore, but also in longer term or everyday manner that they shape social relations and are shaped by them.

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Moreover, we know that the discursive practice of surrounding war also reproduce excellent gender hierarchies

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through the constant reproduction of a dichotomous rhetoric of masculinity and femininity.

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What is new with counterinsurgency is the extent to which the sensuality of civilians

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as potential object of military operation is acknowledged in doctrine and practice,

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even perhaps especially as civilians are instrumentalized as part and process of the war.

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The complex process by which civilians are mapped to particular gender grids and men and women are read and interpolated

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according to constructed notions of civilian is one of the central forms that this counterinsurgency gendering takes.

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Further, as mentioned above,

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counterinsurgency doctrine and practices directly bring these bodies and spaces which are usually coded private or feminine households,

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markets, shops. These are usually coded feminine.

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Went into the space of battlefield.

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They transform cities and homes and persons into highly gendered segments of physical and human

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terrain and utilise detailed knowledge about the quotidian as ethnographic intelligence.

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And of course in the end everyday is often perceived and represented as feminine as well.

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Every day is supposed to be the domain of the women. This conquered and gendered space in which an indigenous population is controlled, surveilled,

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monitored and made to acquiesce is the first site which I shall analyse gendered practices of counterinsurgency.

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I will also analyse two other spaces, one in which what I consider to be a seam of encounter,

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where the the encounter between the counterinsurgent and the population is much more intense, much more routine, and much more repeated.

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And the third is actually where the policy is made. So the first is the field of the first is the actual field of practice of

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counterinsurgency because of the centrality of the civilian in counterinsurgency.

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Gender relations are also inevitably transformed on the basis of counterinsurgency action.

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This works through demographics, through targeting of women, as counterbalancing forces to male radicalisation,

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through the cooptation of gendered spaces, to counterinsurgency practice.

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And finally, the use of gender telling to distinguish those who are to be protected from those who are to be feared and destroyed.

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Gender demographics are here often invoked as both justification for targeting young men and more instrumentally for planning military action.

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Youth bulges. A demographic profusion of men between the ages of 15 and 30, especially in Muslim countries,

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is seen as a structural condition underlying extremism and is a problem to be addressed militarily in faraway places.

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Young men are seen as an automatically useful resource for radical recruitment,

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and the counterbalance to this is often posed in policy circles as being women's education and job creation programs,

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which are considered to be necessary antidotes as a response to this kind of youth bulge is often of men and often, again, of Muslim populations.

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It's argued that women are essentially less corrupt, more efficient, better for economic development and less warlike.

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And all of these things come out of a modernisation theory of the 1960s, which posited women as being essentially different kinds of characters.

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The feminised security. Discourse is deployed by all and sundry, and gender mainstreaming becomes even central to military intervention.

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Policymakers, for example, argue that by providing economic development specifically to women,

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women can be saved from alienation and thus radicalisation.

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Women are cast as wholly socioeconomic beings, divested of politics or ethics under the heading of, for example, why the military should care.

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Two U.S. officers, both of them women, suggest that. And I quote,

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By collaborating with USAID and using women in development expertise and on gender integration as part of a comprehensive counterinsurgency strategy.

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The military can more effectively address the negative socioeconomic conditions that make areas ripe for terrorist exploitation.

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In a highly influential and much circulated set of guidance notes, the counterinsurgency guru David Kilcullen similarly argues that, and I quote,

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Co-opting neutral or friendly women through targeted social and economic programs

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builds networks of enlightened self-interest that eventually undermine the insurgents.

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When the women and you owned the family unit, owned the family,

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and you take a big step forward in mobilising the population on the side of the counter insurgents and, quote,

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those advancing women's rights through modernisation is automatically seen as as meeting the national security

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interests of the U.S. A significant element of counterinsurgency thus becomes provision of social services,

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which are often allocated to women and are seen as another way in which counterinsurgency action can win them over.

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For example, a brand analyst and the wife of Zalmay Khalilzad.

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Cheryl Barnard writes that, and I quote, Health care operations have been particularly effective and winning local support in Afghanistan.

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And repeated occasions, female patients in health clinics, thankful for care,

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received and motivated to support the new order that provided it, have volunteered valuable tactical information to U.S. forces.

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In this instance, it's not even the question of development.

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It's just the kind of a short term and immediate return of intelligence for provision of social health services in the field.

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Counterinsurgency transforms the population. It is intended to pacify it into a human terrain which can be made visible, knowable and malleable.

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The human terrain system of the U.S. military, for example, couples, military officers with social scientists you guys know this already.

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And they actually are very interested in all sorts of things, including such things as kinship structures,

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the peculiarities of gender relations, the way that people live and the relations with those around them and beyond.

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These are specifically gendered structures of life, are refined, fixed in time and space,

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and mobilised as kind of useful facts about the civilian population.

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Again, gender in a very kind of a refined and reductive sort of way.

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For example, a paper produced by Human Terrain Systems Research Unit is specifically named after gender kinship structures.

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My cousin's enemy is my friend is the name of the title, argues that and I quote, Rural,

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rural Pashtuns have well developed methods to resolve conflict through jirga, mediation and exchange of property or women.

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The result of this special kind of intra family relationship is that during times when conflicts aggravate first cousin hostility,

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the signs don't necessarily break down along closest male relatives line.

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Whereas in classical middle east tribal situation as if there is such a thing,

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all the participants in a conflict pick sides based on which side represent their closest male relative.

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Pashtuns establish temporary factional groupings that are unpredictable and not necessarily based on familial relationships, end quote.

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Here Pashtun kinship ties are taken as timeless fact in the sense that they will never,

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ever do exactly the way that the Middle Easterners will always, always do.

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And so there's there's a kind of they're always considered to be timeless and contrasted to some idealised, homogenous,

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equally timeless classical Middle Eastern tribal situation,

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even as the paper again and again indicates that tribal structures can and do vary across time and space.

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In both Iraq and Afghanistan, gender familial and kinship ties are seen as the basis of military strategy,

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whereby different tribal structures can determine whether or not surges of troops can be effective.

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Just as important, the very sites of counterinsurgency are usually civilian spaces that are often walled off,

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both figuratively and literally, as a subsection of the battle, a grid square that can be more easily pacified in counterinsurgency.

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All spaces, and perhaps especially urban quarters, are seen as potential battlegrounds by the counter insurgents.

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The conventional privacy measures for homes and the peacefulness of everyday spaces are no longer guaranteed.

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Space is often not only coded as feminine, but also considered women's domains.

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For example. Homes. Hospitals. Schools and schools especially, are frequently invaded by counterinsurgency.

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These private or civilian spaces the home, the school, the hospital, the mill, the market,

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the village are increasingly targeted in modern wars and in fact were specifically

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the object of intense bombing and conventional warfare in the 20th century.

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What counterinsurgency does, however, is to transform these spaces without necessarily destroying them.

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Although destruction, especially in the wake of population resettlement, is often inevitable.

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But it co-opts these spaces into a landscape of war.

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Inevitably, these everyday landscapes are inhabited by civilians who are also made to be figures in the ongoing counterinsurgency.

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The utilisation of these spaces in counterinsurgency is directly and intimate,

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intimately tied up with the ways in which counterinsurgency practice makes men and women legible

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and assigns them to different categories of various utility for combat and pacification.

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Because counterinsurgency requires the categorisation of populations into combatants and non-combatants,

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and because the easiest way to quickly identify and categorise populations as high risk combatants or low, low risk civilians is by gender.

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The combatant non-combatant distinction becomes fully gendered,

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where the all encompassing suspicion against all men is operationalised into specific actions, which I want to discuss a little bit further down.

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While women are afforded the status of being naive objects of protection, pacification, humanitarian salvage,

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social health care, etc., we already know that this gendering produces a masculinist logic of protection.

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This is known from all kinds of warfare and the object of military intervention,

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humanitarian aid and primary focus of concern in a post-conflict environment becomes an undifferentiated women and children,

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as Cynthia and Lou originally wrote.

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What counterinsurgency does is to transform the women and children into actors considered by the counterinsurgency to be either

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complicit with the combatants or a terrain upon whom the counterinsurgency social engineering experiments can be performed,

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or increasingly as hostages and literal or symbolic message bearers for the work of counterinsurgency.

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Importantly, given the paucity of distinguishing features between civilians and combatants,

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the gendered process of telling women and children from others becomes central to targeting processes in counterinsurgencies.

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In 2004, for example, a large number of Iraqi cities were either surrounded by barbed wire, placed under constant monitoring, or both.

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House invasions were often the norm. In these circumstances, women became direct targets of violence.

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They were taken as hostages to compel the men to surrender. Their homes were destroyed,

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and they were specifically targeted because of the purportedly intuitive understanding of the

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enormity of attacking women and the ways in which such targeting would send a message to others.

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So they specifically were taken hostage to send a message. Men were targeted differently, and the cordon cities where retinal scans, thumbprints,

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identity cards and registers of residents are used to monitor the populations.

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Men between the ages of 15 and 15, 16 and 50 were considered to be primary targets of this intensive, aggressive and invasive surveillance.

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This targeting of men also conveniently served another function.

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It allowed for soldiers to specifically feminise the men of the population through both symbolic and practical emasculation.

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Such tactics included undressing of men at checkpoints and in prisons and the use of language which is intended to dishonour them.

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This partially came out of an Orientalist understanding of what is considered honourable or shameful in Muslim culture,

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and which presents this culture's notions of indignity and abuses.

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Exceptional.

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As a former US military interrogator recounts the interrogators, cultural training was based on the infamous book called The Arab Mind by Rafael Beti,

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which included such admonishments as Men should not touch Arab women.

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Female soldiers should avoid touching Arab men,

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thus casting sexualised abuse as a particularly abhorrent thing to Arabs rather than to the entirety of the population.

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So this is one of the first places where it happens and in these kinds of encounters between soldiers and the populations.

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Then there is a second location in which gendering happens in counterinsurgency.

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And this is what I call the seam of encounter.

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A more complicated set of gendering practices occurs not at the end point of application of counterinsurgency force, but at the seam of encounter,

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which is repeated routinised and intentional encounters between occupying military forces and the people subjected to counterinsurgency.

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This scene is a messy, interstitial space in which race, gender and class end up becoming much more significant here.

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Two groups in particular stand out. First, the women from the invading and occupying army.

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And second, the local men who serve as proxy enforcers of order for the invading military.

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In the first. Instance with the women that are in the army, the displacement of inequalities to a new colonial setting suddenly inverts.

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Orders of hierarchy,

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and women from very disadvantaged backgrounds can suddenly become powerful players positioned against and above the local males in the invited space.

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This inversion of hierarchies is reinforced by representing the arrested and incarcerated Iraqi men,

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for example, as rapists and the local male population as oppressors of their wives and families.

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The peculiar the peculiarity of this positioning where working class women from the least

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privileged parts of the U.S. found themselves in positions of power vis a vis Iraqi men,

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has been best personified in the narratives about Lynndie England and Sabrina Harman.

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England and Harman have become iconic figures, symbolising the torture inflicted upon Iraqi men in the Abu Ghraib prison.

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The former held a leash encircling the neck of a naked Iraqi man curled into a vulnerable foetal position.

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The latter had herself photographed, smiling,

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cherubic and giving a thumbs up sign while leaning close to the dead body of a visibly bruised and battered Iraqi general.

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The U.S. prison guards and interrogators who had inflicted pain upon Iraqi captives

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never managed to generate the same sense of disgust as England and Harman.

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This is quite interesting, but the two women generated much more outrage than the male their male counterparts had done.

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Although one of the men, one of the male abusers, ended up getting a longer sentence than everybody else in general public,

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the women were the ones who generated the outrage. Not only where England and Harman, the iconic representations of transgressive women.

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There were also certainly the embodiment of a new hierarchy of power in which white women were automatically

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placed in superior positions to men who in other circumstances would have been the expected superiors.

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For example, the Iraqi generals.

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Class position would be more privileged than that of a daughter of a police detective Harman, or a poultry factory worker.

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ENGLAND In the instances where women have been used as interrogators, their bodies and their sexuality have been deployed as technologies of power.

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And one of the most disturbing accounts of interrogations, this is both at Bagram and later at Guantanamo.

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A male interrogator writes about female interrogators using their breasts,

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their bodies and their menstrual blood as necessary tools for achieving dictated aims.

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I'm going to recount a story that is pretty gory, but I think it sort of indicates what I'm talking about.

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This is an account written by a U.S. interrogator. We returned to the interrogation book.

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This broke a female interrogator and I were both in our sanitised figures and sanitised because they had their names taped over.

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Obedience, use, battle dress uniform. To my surprise, she started to unbutton her top, slowly, teasingly almost like a stripper,

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revealing a skintight brown Army T-shirt stretching over chest forehead.

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In this instance, a Saudi prisoner wouldn't look at her. What's the matter for you?

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Don't you like women? Are you gay? Why do you keep looking at him?

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Brooke asked, referring to me. She started unbuttoning her medium pants.

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Do you know what? I'm having my period. You know what? I'm having my period.

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She said. She placed her hands in her pants as she started to circle behind a detainee.

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How do you feel about me touching you now?

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Brooke came back around the other side and he could see that she was beginning to withdraw him from her pants as it became visible.

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The Saudis saw what looked like red blood on her hands. It was actually ink.

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You [INAUDIBLE]. She tests wiping what she barely what he believed was menstrual blood on his face.

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What do you think your brothers will think of you in the morning when they see an American woman's menstrual blood on your face?

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Brooks said, standing up. By the way, we've shut off the water to your cell tonight.

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So the bell, so the blood water will be there till tomorrow.

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This uncritical self-abnegation of the white interrogator woman in the service of some nationalist understanding of national security

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is part of the peculiar gendering of counterinsurgency practices and much more banal representation of this seam of encounter.

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And perhaps in many respects, more important, because much more pervasive and much less dramatic,

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has been the ease with which women have moved into combat roles,

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serving the Empire unquestioningly with their integration into these roles being celebrated as some form of liberation as policy.

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A male lieutenant colonel in the Army, in the US Army writes On any given day in Iraq,

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an American soldier might be asked to search travellers at a roadside checkpoint

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comfort distraught mothers whose children have been killed or injured.

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Search a woman's quarters in a strictly Islamic household or assist civilians whose homes have been destroyed.

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Given the traditional role of women as peacekeepers and humanitarians in their own home.

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It is not illogical to believe that a woman could perform.

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Form each of these tasks as well, if not better, thus providing a justification for women in combat roles.

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Thus, a gendered body becomes a necessary and desired adjunct or an accessory to an asymmetrical warfare.

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Because she does softer work, traditional work, peacekeeping work,

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a second place in the scheme of encounter where genders are inflected through this mixture of race,

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class and imperial hierarchies is where U.S. military men meet the local security forces.

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Their training, training and developing indigenous police and military forces is a central tenet of counterinsurgency.

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The tasks here include developing a U.S. style training base, embedding advisers,

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initiating an intensive collective training program, and partnering American units with indigenous units.

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Yet the local men who often risk opprobrium for joining Americans, are constantly berated and feminised,

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called women or pussies and seen as inadequate and passive enforcers of good order by their trainers.

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Here, masculinity alone of the indigenous forces does not form the basis of transnational solidarity.

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And again, gender hierarchies are strongly shaded by other factors such as class,

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race or ethnicity, language and religion, subcultures, sexuality, etc.

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According to this logic, if a member of the local security force does not fight a war in which to which he does not necessarily have allegiances,

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his manhood is considered to be impaired. And in account of the U.S. assault on Fallujah,

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a commander of the First Marine Regiment considers Iraqi policemen and civil defence

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corps troops who fled the devastation of the city to be inferior and feminised.

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He said When are these people going to discover their manhood and stand and fight with us to save their city?

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In this view, working for the occupying force is what allows a man his masculinity.

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But sometimes even this acquiescence does not necessarily suffice.

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When more circumspect officers speak of a lack of maturity for an indigenous security force which does not perform as the imperial military,

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expect them. There are videos circulating online sites that show a much more overtly gendered conversation between the U.S. Marine trainer,

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for example, and Iraqi security forces. The former questions, the loyalty of the latter, and then calls them bunches of women pussies cowards.

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Too much of a [INAUDIBLE] woman to die for a country lacking a backbone.

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Killing Americans and refusing to fight insurgents. When I met, when an Iraqi standing there being berated, sneers at him,

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the Marine challenges him to going out back and having his little ass being beaten.

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In a context where a proxy force fights for an imperial one,

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the gendering of these proxy forces can usually take two different paths in imperial history.

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On the one hand,

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the colonial discourse discourse surrounding martial races envisioned fighters in the service of empire who were naturally fiercer fighters,

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for example, like the Kenyan Maasai, the Nepalese Gurkhas, the Afghan partisans, or Pashtuns,

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the Indian Sikhs, the Scottish Highlanders were all considered to be martial races.

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This, at the same time, is in such colonial war fighting.

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Nevertheless, a gendering happens as an McLintock has written with regards to Africa.

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The white race was considered the male of the species and the black race was considered the female.

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So on the one hand, you have this discourse of martial races. On the other, you have this gendering on the basis of racial difference.

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Although this may seem in the first glance contradictory, a certain set of familiar tropes actually connect the two discourses to one another,

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and notion of loyalty to the conquering empire represents a degree of masculinity.

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So the more loyal you become to the empire, the more male you become.

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You move along this gender spectrum from from the more a feminised object colonial to the more masculine, loyal fighter.

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In the context of the war on terror, the men who are located in the seam of encounter are cast in these seemingly contradictory ways.

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They can be at once courageous and manly allies and sodomising homosexual rapists.

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I want to particularly read a revealing account from an oral history of a former US military man stationed in Afghanistan,

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which has all the tropes in one story. Okay, so he says homosexuality was pervasive among the Afghans, especially Pashtuns in the south.

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This is the Pashtuns who were fighting alongside Americans even when they weren't overtly engaged in acts of sex.

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They would cling to each other, hold each other's hands, and generally cavort in ways that would astonish Westerners and repulse soldiers.

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Some of the Marines would laugh incredulously. Others would be moved to violent reaction.

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In one case, Fitzgerald watched a gigantic Marine march furiously toward.

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To couple their phones, pick them up, toss them in different directions like dogs yelling the whole time in English that fans couldn't understand.

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The female of the two scurried away. The dominant male was sort of indignant and flipped the scarf over his shoulder and walked off.

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Now the Pashtun. Just a paragraph before they got the same person has talked about how good a fighter as the Pashtuns were in these instances.

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And then this story comes up. The Pashtun are the warrior allies in this narrative or compared to dogs.

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And if feminised, not only because of the sexual acts of which the masculine US Marine disapproves,

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but also because they hold each other's hands and repulse westerners with their homosexuality.

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Even the story, as it is told, draws on certain masculine and feminine images.

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There's a gigantic Marine who stands for unspoiled American masculinity while there's an indignant Pashtun who flimsy a scarf over his shoulder,

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which is a cliched imagery of a petulant teenager flipping her hair in exasperation.

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So this is a second sets of gender, things that happen.

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The final sets of gender angle I want to look to is the counterinsurgent women and the soldier scholars of the Metropole.

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While gendering works in familiar, even predictable ways and the conquered spaces and at the same event,

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counter gendering of counterinsurgency becomes much more fluid and sometimes unpredictable.

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In the Metropole, where policies are formulated, ideologies are articulated, and wars are planned and legitimised.

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Two ways in which counterinsurgency practice and discourse have become gendered in the Metropole have been most striking.

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On the one hand, the creation of a new counterinsurgent masculinity, that of the soldier scholar,

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and on the other hand the appropriation of a colonial feminist discourse and its saturating of counterinsurgency discourse

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by women bureaucrats and policymakers explicitly allied their counterinsurgency credentials to their gendered identities.

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The Salter Scholars are numerous and now well-known. They are overwhelmingly represented in the ranks of counterinsurgency.

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This is particularly interesting to me. David Petraeus, who's got a place in international relations.

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David Kilcullen and political science. John Nagl in history.

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From here H.R. McMaster, PHC in History.

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Andrew Exum facing war studies are all vocal, articulate and highly educated military or ex-military men, all of whom are ranked quite high,

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all of whom are engaged in policy making vis a vis the war on terror, and all of whom are enthusiastic counterinsurgency.

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Some have written influential books and articles on counterinsurgency.

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Others have been online or think tank presences, pushing forward a counterinsurgency agenda.

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While Petraeus, of course, is needs no introduction, the Soldier Scholars all advance a notion of war fighting,

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which ostensibly takes into account political nuances,

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aims to win over civilian population, and deploys an openly liberal discourse of salvation and humanitarianism.

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Not only is a soldier scholar the ultimate in civic virtue, he's also the embodiment of international wisdom,

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warfighting prowess and a kind of knowingness about the world.

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This transformation in the notion of masculinity from a kind of a macho warrior to

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a soldier scholar is actually something that they very specifically talk about.

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So, for example, when an old school warrior that many of the counterinsurgency did not like,

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called Nathan Sassaman, wrote a book called The Warrior King.

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Many of the blogs burst into commentary about how no real soldier would call himself a warrior.

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They were soldiers. So it's a new form of masculinity that is being discussed here.

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Even the official discourse around counterinsurgency reflects a shift.

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The Counterinsurgency Field Manual from 324 compares a regular fighter to that ultimate icon of raw, physical masculinity,

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a pugilist who's nevertheless blind and is wasting energy flailing at unseen opponents and perhaps causing an unintended harm.

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They say that access to military intelligence, on the other hand, transforms the counterinsurgent from a blind boxer into story,

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into surgeons cutting out cancerous tissues while keeping keeping other vital organs intact.

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So on the one hand, you have this wholly embodied, corporeal presence of the boxer.

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On the other hand, you have the precise intellect of the surgeon.

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The theoreticians of counter-insurgency obviously prefer the latter.

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Not only does this counter positioning of boxers and surgeons contains implicit notion of masculinities to different kinds of masculinities,

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they, perhaps even more importantly, hide within plain sight a particular gradation of class.

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The boxer is the working class hero. The surgeon is.

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For a middle class professional, the former is emotional and boring.

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It's perhaps even irrational. The latter is intellectual, cool, steady hand at all the ways in which counterinsurgencies seem to be most effective.

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The soldier scholars particularly well suited to the liberal interventionist model,

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which sees its job as cautiously and pragmatically doing the bidding of the U.S. national interest.

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Soldier scholars are not interested in chest thumping gestures, deploying the language of heart and mind much more readily and see their want.

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They deploy the language of heart and minds much more readily and see their want as being the wielders of softer or smarter power.

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Alongside this new form of masculinity and much more familiar colonial feminism is

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crucial in advancing a particularly new form of metropolitan warrior femininity.

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Colonial feminism of today deploys the language of humanitarian rescue.

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The feminised security rhetoric has become completely commonplace, and in the administration, says one of these warrior feminists.

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So much so that it is typical for an official who gives a speech about American actions in Iraq and Afghanistan,

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or about U.S. policy of promoting democracy around the world, to draw the connection to the pursuit of women's rights.

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This colonial feminism is appealing to a new category of women policymakers who pride themselves in a kind of collaborative warrior femininity.

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These counterinsurgent women not only deploy a gendered analysis in their discussion of counterinsurgency, for example,

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they say that these types of operations require very perceptive and deep emotional IQ, and therefore they are particularly well suited to women.

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This is one of the women counterinsurgency arguing this, and they also say women have a more collaborative style,

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which again makes them more suitable to counterinsurgency, but also use feminist justification for their involvement.

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So another woman counterinsurgency says we aren't going to win by telling half the population they can't play the counterinsurgency.

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Women have been particularly crucial in creating or sustaining the humanitarian elements of the war on terror.

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The human terrain system is also on this side.

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The cultural side, for example, which was originally conceived by counterinsurgent woman Montgomery McFate,

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who wrote her doctoral thesis in cultural anthropology on British counterinsurgency in Northern Light in Northern Ireland,

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and who was for a while a highly visible figure, both as a target of U.S. anthropologist Sanger and as a fashionable and uber feminine policy wonk.

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MCFATE And becoming a fellow at the Office of Naval Research.

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She had her nose ring and she said, writing, realising that there were certain semiotic cues that would unnerve paranoid all old white men.

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She found no contradiction between her awareness of the gender difference of old white men and counterinsurgent women,

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and the particularly militarist role that she envisioned for social scientists.

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A significant part a new category of women security scholars who circulate between the domain of academy think tanks and policymaking world.

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As sorry as significant are the new category of women's security scholars who circulate between the domain of academy,

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think tank and policymaking world. And many of them have been very significant until very recently,

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and I'll answer this in question and answer is if need be in the Obama administration, but some are now leaving.

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Sarah Sewell, for example, is in addition to having been formerly the head of the Carter Centre for Human Rights at Harvard

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and a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence for Peacekeeping during the Clinton administration.

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I was also the author of the foreword to the U.S. Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual and has been serving President Obama.

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Samantha Power, also in the Obama administration, is a strong advocate of humanitarian military intervention and the author of a book about Rwanda.

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She is also advisor to President Obama and was involved in drafting his

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controversial Nobel speech in defence of U.S. counterinsurgency in Afghanistan.

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Similarly, the authors of the foreword and introduction to the U.S. Army Stability Operations Field Manual are also women.

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Michele Flournoy, who was one of the one of the founders of Centre for a New American Security, which is counterinsurgency,

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originally started off as a South Asia think tank but became a counterinsurgency think tank, and Janine Davidson, respectively.

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Flournoy is will be, I think, until the 1st of March.

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And then she leaves Deputy Undersecretary of defence for policy at the Obama Pentagon.

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And as I said, she was a founder of CNAS.

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Davidson was in the Bush Pentagon Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict and Special Capabilities Directorate.

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She is also a former pilot and she has been the first Deputy Secretary of Defence for plans in the Obama Pentagon.

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So there are all these women security officials who.

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I've written extensively all of them and taught counter-insurgency.

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These women are also increasingly present in the field of military operations.

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Two women in particular worth mentioning here. Sarah Pious, adviser to General McChrystal, who was adviser to General McChrystal in Afghanistan.

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And Emma Sky, who might be a familiar figure here. Advisor to General Odierno in Iraq,

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neither women have ever spoken about gender or feminism or the ways in which

388
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their being women may have influenced their work and their political decisions.

389
00:40:33,170 --> 00:40:37,700
So in this, they differ from the group that I talked about just a couple minutes ago.

390
00:40:38,060 --> 00:40:46,850
Yet they both embody a kind of an intersection of particular class, class and gender positioning in particular imperial contexts.

391
00:40:47,390 --> 00:40:54,080
Both women come from non-military backgrounds. KSA is the daughter of liberal Democrats who worked closely with President Kennedy.

392
00:40:54,440 --> 00:40:59,030
Skies of a middle class background which provided her with private secondary education

393
00:40:59,450 --> 00:41:04,130
before their careers as advisors to the military commanders of Afghanistan and Iraq.

394
00:41:04,490 --> 00:41:10,430
The prize was a journalist. Sky was a development specialist working for Different and then later British Council.

395
00:41:11,510 --> 00:41:15,110
Both received their educations in elite universities Harvard and Oxford,

396
00:41:15,590 --> 00:41:21,890
and both have learned to speak the predominant language of the country in which their advisor So Sky speaks Arabic.

397
00:41:21,920 --> 00:41:25,280
She also speaks Hebrew because she was appointed to Jerusalem for a while.

398
00:41:25,700 --> 00:41:29,420
Hires has also had tutoring in Arabic, but has learned to speak Pashtu fluently.

399
00:41:30,470 --> 00:41:33,530
Both their previous works has had anthropological elements in it,

400
00:41:33,620 --> 00:41:38,390
requiring close and intimate knowledge of the indigenous people amongst whom they have worked.

401
00:41:38,930 --> 00:41:43,370
Both are often described in a vocabulary that emphasises their femininity.

402
00:41:43,820 --> 00:41:47,660
Kais is called tall and stylish, skies considered petite.

403
00:41:47,930 --> 00:41:54,920
But Andrew Exum also says that she's one of those tough intrepid women the old British Empire excels at producing.

404
00:41:55,610 --> 00:42:01,679
I hope she's not here. You're not here. Sky I'm supposed to be sitting on a panel with her in about two weeks time.

405
00:42:01,680 --> 00:42:04,980
I'm hoping she hasn't read this or if she has.

406
00:42:05,390 --> 00:42:08,630
Anyway, she probably quite likes being compared to Margaret Bell.

407
00:42:10,190 --> 00:42:18,440
They both have assumed that kind of drag. While living in Afghanistan, Cyrus has decided to wear men's clothing as a lifestyle choice,

408
00:42:18,830 --> 00:42:25,730
and on one blog post says Emma Sky has huge legions of admirers among counter insurgents in the US.

409
00:42:26,000 --> 00:42:32,090
And somebody just writes about. I love this. They were like admiring her in different ways, her intellect, their travels.

410
00:42:32,300 --> 00:42:37,150
And one of them said. And when the car broke down, she changed the tires.

411
00:42:38,270 --> 00:42:46,819
That manliest of manly tasks. But these humanitarian workers with their backgrounds of privilege and their education,

412
00:42:46,820 --> 00:42:52,850
training and experience in humanitarian development work, have become convinced of the good offices of the military.

413
00:42:52,940 --> 00:42:58,819
On the one hand, they represent the soft, feminised notions of politics, developmental work, NGO work,

414
00:42:58,820 --> 00:43:07,490
reconciliation work all posts that are often considered emotional, soft, womanly, and which are all too often also populated by women.

415
00:43:08,150 --> 00:43:18,440
Yet they both see in the new way of war in the population centric counterinsurgency, a totally new way of doing development.

416
00:43:20,600 --> 00:43:24,890
Sky is described as, as I say, the modern Gertrude Bell, not more rebel,

417
00:43:24,980 --> 00:43:32,220
seeing her advisory job as to Odierno as a position of influence and speaks of loving the US military.

418
00:43:32,240 --> 00:43:34,820
She thinks the military is better than the country it protects.

419
00:43:36,090 --> 00:43:41,150
Hires describes the US military as public spirited and doing its darndest to do the right thing.

420
00:43:41,630 --> 00:43:45,860
There's even a familiar element of screwball romance in the way that the pair's McChrystal,

421
00:43:45,860 --> 00:43:49,520
Kais and Odierno skies were always portrayed in the writing.

422
00:43:49,850 --> 00:43:54,050
The women come across as kind of frank and sassy companions who don't hesitate to talk back.

423
00:43:55,460 --> 00:44:02,360
So there are these three fields. Counterinsurgency provides a fertile ground and conclusion in which a new kind

424
00:44:02,360 --> 00:44:06,200
of new warrior masculinity regenerates itself through the figure of soldier,

425
00:44:06,200 --> 00:44:06,650
scholar,

426
00:44:06,920 --> 00:44:15,860
and the manner in which the self-declared emancipatory feminist project is co-opted by the Metropolitan Power Complex is also itself newsworthy.

427
00:44:16,340 --> 00:44:23,030
This reproduction of resilient to new forms of masculinity and femininity show not only the flexibility of the machinery of rule,

428
00:44:23,270 --> 00:44:32,030
but also the dynamic recreation of power hierarchies constantly in this reordering more like feminism and scholarly soldiering,

429
00:44:32,060 --> 00:44:33,860
take their place at the top of the pyramid.

430
00:44:34,250 --> 00:44:40,640
A few rungs further down, the imperial grunts themselves are much more ensconced in the traditional warrior masculinities,

431
00:44:41,000 --> 00:44:44,900
about whom a good deal of lucidly critical scholarship has already been penned.

432
00:44:45,380 --> 00:44:50,660
Their masculinity emerges out of a specific complex of class and racial geopolitical positioning,

433
00:44:50,990 --> 00:44:56,959
where national security discourses are often problematically conjoined to heteronormative tropes of manliness,

434
00:44:56,960 --> 00:45:00,250
courage and virtue below the man they embody.

435
00:45:00,340 --> 00:45:02,799
Aerial grunts are the working class white women who,

436
00:45:02,800 --> 00:45:07,450
in the scheme of encounter with the indigenous forces, find themselves elevated above the colonised men.

437
00:45:07,480 --> 00:45:15,850
Their charge to monitor, control or subdue while ambiguous the empire gives them a pathway to climbing the ragged ladder of social mobility.

438
00:45:16,540 --> 00:45:19,299
Racialized women are placed below them in this hierarchy,

439
00:45:19,300 --> 00:45:24,070
too troubling to the kinds of social order envisioned in the Empire to be named in the heroic narratives

440
00:45:24,070 --> 00:45:29,890
of imperial rescue and at the very bottom layer of this pyramid of power are the conquered men and women,

441
00:45:30,160 --> 00:45:32,500
their bodies subjected to violence and surveillance.

442
00:45:32,540 --> 00:45:39,640
Their lives re-engineered to suit urban counterinsurgency specifications, population control and the winning of hearts and minds.

443
00:45:40,150 --> 00:45:40,990
Thanks very much.