“Legitimate Violence” in the Prose of Counterinsurgency

Abstract

Drawing on a critical engagement with the claims made by (and interpretations of) the 2006 US army and marine corps field manual on “Counterinsurgency,” this article engages some of its underlying concerns with the problematic relation between violence, legitimacy, and political order. Since this manual draws heavily on many commonplaces of contemporary political science, the analysis explores their problematic presuppositions and the ways in which they play out in contemporary warfare. The primary conclusion is that while the encounter of legitimacy and violence is claimed by the doctrine to produce and maintain political order, its framing of this encounter is deeply rooted in a specific political order, that of the modern state, which severely constrains the conditions under which this encounter can take place. These constraints cast serious doubts on many of the doctrine’s assertions, especially as they have shaped recent wars in Afghanistan and, until recently, in Iraq.

Can’t live with them, can’t live without them: ‘the enemy’ as object of controversy in contemporary Western wars

“…A sociology of practice must be attentive to four things in relation to this particular subject. First, let me begin with official state discourse pronounced by individuals formally vested with the authority to perform state acts (Olsson 2013b). To name enemies, traditionally, is to perform 'authorized acts, endowed with an authority that, by a series of delegations [indeed all official acts are based on pre-existing acts], goes back step by step to an ultimate site, like Aristotle's god: the state.…”

“…Second, while 'enemy' is a term of everyday language, it potentially takes more specific connotationslinked to previously institutionalized conceptswhen used by state-officials, be it in an official capacity or not. It is accordingly important to specify that we are here looking at invocations of enemies as performed by senior military and political leaders in the context of armed conflict (Olsson 2013b(Olsson , 2013a(Olsson , 2012b. This notion forms part of different professional, and more or less technical, jargons depending on the locutor's background knowledge (Pouliot 2010;Adler and Pouliot 2011), i.e.…”

The SAGE Handbook of Political Sociology: Two Volume Set

“…Even the theoretically opposed notions of war and peace seem to have become intertwined. Indeed, notions of pacification, policing or (rebel-)governance have become as relevant for the study of war as for the study of pacified political orders (Holmqvist, 2014;Olsson, 2013a;Staniland, 2012b).…”

Interventionism as Practice: On ‘Ordinary Transgressions’ and their Routinization

“…Does this imply that the realm of international relations has undergone a radical transformation, perhaps even marking an evolution towards an imperial order in which respect for national sovereignties is the exception rather than the rule? Such a conclusion would be premature at best since such a development would mark the end of the 'inter-national' that to a certain extent is premised upon the complementary opposition between national sovereignty and intervention (Walker 2006a;Olsson 2013). In fact, what seems to have happened is that the meaning of 'intervention' has become increasingly polysemic and vague.…”