Counterinsurgency, the violent suppression of armed insurrection, is
among the dominant kinds of war in contemporary world politics. Often
linked to protecting populations and reconstructing legitimate
political orders, it has appeared in other times and places in very
different forms - and has taken on a range of politics in doing so.
How did it arrive at its present form, and what generated these
others, along the way? Spanning several centuries and four detailed
case studies, The Counterinsurgent Imagination unpacks and
explores this intellectual history through counterinsurgency manuals.
These military theoretical and instructional texts, and the
practitioners who produced them, made counterinsurgency possible in
practice. By interrogating these processes, this book explains how
counter-insurrectionary war eventually took on its late twentieth and
early twenty-first century forms. It shows how and why
counterinsurgent ideas persist, despite recurring failures.