{"id":3088,"date":"2018-04-12T16:10:29","date_gmt":"2018-04-12T20:10:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/?p=3088"},"modified":"2018-04-14T16:43:13","modified_gmt":"2018-04-14T20:43:13","slug":"emily-gruber-reading-guide-to-uprising-13-13-the-counterrevolution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/emily-gruber-reading-guide-to-uprising-13-13-the-counterrevolution\/","title":{"rendered":"Emily Gruber | Reading Guide to Uprising 13\/13 The Counterrevolution"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Emily Gruber<\/strong><\/h2>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

“Mai Elliott, working in the RAND villa on Rue Pasteur. The windows are taped to prevent the glass from shattering in case of an explosion from a mortar round.” Gladwell,\u00a0Saigon 1965<\/em><\/p>\n

Related Readings Authored By Panelists<\/h1>\n

Malcolm Gladwell<\/h1>\n

Malcolm Gladwell’s episode on Saigon ’65:\u00a0https:\/\/revisionisthistory.com\/episodes\/02-saigon-1965\u00a0<\/a><\/h3>\n

“In the early 1960s, the Pentagon set up a top-secret research project in an old villa in downtown Saigon. The task? To interview captured North Vietnamese soldiers and guerrillas in order to measure their morale: Was the relentless U.S. bombing pushing them to the brink of capitulation?”<\/p>\n

“Saigon, 1965 is the story of three people who got caught up in that effort: a young Vietnamese woman, a refugee from Nazi Germany, and a brilliant Russian \u00e9migr\u00e9. All saw the same things. All reached different conclusions. The Pentagon effort, run by the Rand Corporation, was one of the most ambitious studies of enemy combatants ever conducted\u2014and no one could agree on what it meant.”<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Bernard E. Harcourt<\/h1>\n

Bernard E. Harcourt. \u201cThe Counterrevolution: Governing Our New Internal Enemies.\u201d The Nation<\/em>(February 28, 2018). https:\/\/www.thenation.com\/article\/the-counterrevolution-governing-our-new-internal-enemies\/<\/a>.<\/h3>\n

More information here:\u00a0https:\/\/bernardharcourt.com\/the-counterrevolution\/<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cBut the transition from large-scale battlefield warfare to anti-colonial struggles and now to the war against terrorism brought about a historic transformation in the way that we govern in the United States. Variously called unconventional, anti-guerilla, or modern warfare, this new prototype of counterinsurgency war is the very opposite of large-scale battlefield encounters: It involves strategic, surgical operations, total information awareness, targeted elimination of a radical minority, psychological techniques, and political savvy to gain the trust of the general population. The target is no longer an enemy army, so much as it is an internal enemy. It involves a new way of thinking about war, and politics, that gradually has come to dominate the American public imagination.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bernard E. Harcourt. Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing, and Punishing in an Actuarial Age <\/em>(2007).<\/h3>\n

Abstract included below:<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom random security checks at airports to the use of risk assessment in sentencing, actuarial methods are being used more than ever to determine whom law enforcement officials target and punish. And with the exception of racial profiling on our highways and streets, most people favor these methods because they believe they are a more cost-effective way to fight crime. This book challenges this growing reliance on actuarial methods. These prediction tools, the author demonstrates, may in fact increase the overall amount of crime in society, depending on the relative responsiveness of the profiled populations to heightened security. They may also aggravate the difficulties that minorities already have obtaining work, education, and a better quality of life\u2014thus perpetuating the pattern of criminal behavior. Ultimately, the author shows how the perceived success of actuarial methods has begun to distort our very conception of just punishment and to obscure alternate visions of social order. In place of the actuarial, he proposes instead a turn to randomization in punishment and policing, concluding that the presumption should be against prediction.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Laleh Khalili<\/h1>\n

Laleh Khalili. \u201cThe Roads to Power: The Infrastructure of Counterinsurgency.\u201d World Policy Journal <\/em>34: 93-99 (2017). https:\/\/eprints.soas.ac.uk\/23856\/<\/a>.<\/h3>\n

\u201cMost of today\u2019s wars are neither the pitched battles of the Napoleonic era nor colonial invasions. This is an age of counterinsurgencies, yet these \u2018small wars\u2019 nearly always require large infrastructure investments\u201d<\/p>\n

Laleh Khalili. \u201cThe Uses of Happiness in Counterinsurgencies.\u201d Social Text <\/em>32, no. 1: 22-43.\u00a0 <\/strong>https:\/\/read.dukeupress.edu\/social-text\/article pdf\/32\/…\/ST321_118_02Khalili_FF.pdf<\/a>.<\/h3>\n

\u201cI argue that the counterinsurgents\u2019 notion of the population\u2019s happiness is ultimately a projection of a fantasy generated at the intersection of several overlapping fields of practice: a managerial and technocentric militarism that counterinsurgency disavows but which indelibly marks it, a \u201ccultural\u201d or ethnographic form of military administration that both implicitly and intentionally revivifies the precepts of colonial and imperial administration, and a Utilitarian understanding of happiness currently hegemonic in the United States\u201d (25).<\/p>\n

Laleh Khalili. Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies <\/em>(Stanford:2013).<\/h3>\n

Ebook available through Columbia CLIO: https:\/\/clio.columbia.edu\/quicksearch?q=Time+in+the+Shadows%3A+Confinement+in+Counterinsurgencies&commit=Search<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Read Introduction and Conclusion on Uprising 13\/13 website.<\/p>\n

Massimiliano Tomba<\/h1>\n

Massimiliano Tomba. \u201cPolitics beyond the state: The 1918 Soviet Constitution.\u201d Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory<\/em>24, no. 4 (December 2017).\u00a0https:\/\/onlinelibrary.wiley.com\/doi\/full\/10.1111\/1467-8675.12327<\/a>.<\/h3>\n

\u201cThe 1918 Russian \u201cDeclaration of Rights of the Working and Oppressed People\u201d and the first Soviet Constitution expressed an alternative political and economic trajectory, which was definitively crushed by Stalin’s 1936 Constitution. From the modern perspective of constitutionalism, the first Russian Constitution contains numerous anomalies that, strictly speaking, make it difficult to describe the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic as a state in the modern sense of the term. Among these anomalies are the dismantling of the national state by the universal distribution of power by local soviets; the anticolonial and antinational conception of citizenship, which could be conferred upon foreign workers by any local soviets; and an alternative practice of property relations different from both private and collective state property and rooted in the traditional communal possession of land.\u201d<\/p>\n

Emmanuelle Saada<\/h1>\n

\u00a0<\/strong>Emmanuelle Saada. \u201cThe Empire of Law: Dignity, Prestige, and Damnation in the \u2018Colonial Situation.\u2019\u201d French Politics, Culture, & Society <\/em>20, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 98-120. https:\/\/www.jstor.org\/stable\/42843234<\/a>.<\/h3>\n

\u201cThe insistence on the triad of \u2018dignity,\u2019 \u2018prestige,\u2019 and \u2018domination\u2019 by colonial administrators and by some members of the indigenous elite obliges us to reconsider — or at least in some respects — the view of the colonial state presented in much recent historiography\u201d (98);.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Additional related readings in chronological order of publication:<\/h1>\n

Bruce Hoffman. \u201cCounter-Insurgency in the Modern Age: An Interview with Professor Bruce Hoffman.\u201d Harvard International Review <\/em>(February 19, 2016). https:\/\/hir.harvard.edu\/article\/?a=12771<\/a>.<\/h3>\n