Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies by Khalili, Laleh(November 21, 2012) Paperback

by Laleh Khalili

Detention and confinement―of both combatants and large groups of civilians―have become fixtures of asymmetric wars over the course of the last century. Counterinsurgency theoreticians and practitioners explain this dizzying rise of detention camps, internment centers, and enclavisation by arguing that such actions "protect" populations. In this book, Laleh Khalili counters these arguments, telling the story of how this proliferation of concentration camps, strategic hamlets, "security walls," and offshore prisons has come to be. Time in the Shadows investigates the two major liberal counterinsurgencies of our Israeli occupation of Palestine and the U.S. War on Terror. In rich detail, the book investigates Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay, CIA black sites, the Khiam Prison, and Gaza, among others, and links them to a history of colonial counterinsurgencies from the Boer War and the U.S. Indian wars, to Vietnam, the British small wars in Malaya, Kenya, Aden and Cyprus, and the French pacification of Indochina and Algeria. Khalili deftly demonstrates that whatever the form of incarceration―visible or invisible, offshore or inland, containing combatants or civilians―liberal states have consistently acted illiberally in their counterinsurgency confinements. As our tactics of war have shifted beyond slaughter to elaborate systems of detention, liberal states have warmed to the pursuit of asymmetric wars. Ultimately, Khalili confirms that as tactics of counterinsurgency have been rendered more "humane," they have also increasingly encouraged policymakers to willingly choose to wage wars.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Terrorism, Middle East, Politics, War

Unknown Binding

First published November 21, 2012

About the author

Laleh Khalili is an Iranian American and Professor of International Politics at Queen Mary University of London. She was formerly a Professor of Middle Eastern Politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.

She graduated from University of Texas, and received her PhD from Columbia University. Her primary research areas are logistics and trade, infrastructure, policing and incarceration, gender, nationalism, political and social movements, refugees, and diasporas in the Middle East.

Reviews

[Rizwaan Sabir · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m yet to read such an eloquent and confident critique of counterinsurgency theory, history, and practice as this one. Probably on my of fav books.

[Erin · Rating 4 out of 5]

An engaging and accessible scholarly critique on how liberal democracies incarcerate.

[Bell Curran · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this book, Laleh Khalili, a political scientist at SOAS, "critically engage[s] with the assertions of today's counterinsurgent theorists and practitioners," including Petraeus, Kilcullen, and Nagl, "that counterinsurgency is about 'securing' and 'protecting' the population" (p.5). She demonstrates the irony of modern liberal democracies which deny the violence they commit, pushing it into the shadows and/or calling it more "humane," thus making it more likely to occur.

Counterinsurgencies and confinement in places like Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and the CIA proxy-run prisons were created as a response to liberal objections to mass colonial slaughter in previous wars. Thus the rule of law and humanitarian ideals are paradoxically responsible for generating the hidden violence of expanding states, embodied in new mechanisms of containment which are envisioned as opportunities for "socially engineering the people and places they conquered" (p.3). This book examines extensively the "micropractices of coercion" (p.7) and shows that these are not accidents or exceptions committed by violent fringe elements in a nation's military but rather central components of a liberal order when states expand beyond their borders.

Brilliant and comprehensive in scope. Highly recommended.