Forgotten, recovered, forgotten again: counterinsurgency and its intellectual histories

Thomas Gregory’s new book critically rethinks the wartime politics of civilian protection, as experiencedduring the US-led war in Afghanistan. He shows US strategy aimed to treat protecting the civilian population as bothan end and a means alike: something that was desirable to do, but that would also aid in producing political supportfor a US project of armed statebuilding. I locate the roots of this reasoning in the intellectual history ofcounterinsurgency. I argue the ideas underpinning these practices were not new: they are refl ections or refractions ofprevious counterinsurgency theories of civilian politics and protection. Their presence here refl ects a historicaltendency to periodically forget and then later (mis)remember them in new contexts. This pattern has implications forhow we should read their recurrence in the present.