‘Minimum Force’: a reply to Huw Bennett

Thornton, R. P.

doi:10.1080/09592310802573657

Cited by 16 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…2The debate about “minimum force” played out in similar ways at the beginning of the 1990s and again at the end of the 2000s, mainly in the pages of the Small Wars & Insurgencies journal. For the main interventions, see: Mockaitis, British Counterinsurgency ; Newsinger, “Minimum Force”; Mockaitis, “Minimum Force: A Reply”; Thornton, “British Army and the Origins”; Bennett, “The Other Side of the COIN”; Thornton, “‘Minimum Force’: A Reply to Huw Bennett.”…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Press the thumb onto the eye”: Moral Effect, Extreme Violence, and the Transimperial Notions of British, German, and Dutch Colonial Warfare, ca. 1890–1914

Menger¹

2022

Itinerario

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Historiography on the extreme violence of fin de siècle colonial wars has often remained nationally fragmented or actively invested in theories of national exceptionality. Focusing on the British, German and Dutch empires, this article seeks to understand the extreme violence as a transimperial phenomenon and asks how we can conceptualise and give empirical substance to this transimperial dimension. First, I give some indication of the degree of transimperial connectivity in the field of colonial warfare, highlighting how intensive mutual imperial observation and the individual mobility of actors fed knowledge into what Kamissek and Kreienbaum have called an “imperial cloud.” Secondly, I argue that a transimperial body of thought behind the extreme violence can be discerned on the level of colonial warfare's racialisation and the resulting specific communicative and performative aspects. Drawing on fin de siècle manuals of colonial warfare and a selection of case studies, I take the transimperial notion of “moral effect” to demonstrate how such basic notions both generated and legitimised extreme violence in colonial warfare.

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