A Corrective for Cultural Studies: Beyond the Militarization Thesis to the New Military Intelligence

Abstract

This paper theorizes a new military intelligence and offers a modest corrective to the orthodoxy of the militarization thesis prevalent in cultural studies and the critical human sciences. The biopolitical orientation of population-centric counterinsurgency (COIN) warfare in Afghanistan reveals the multidirectional travel of rationalities and forms of coherence between modern liberal ways of rule and Western-bloc expeditionary ways of war. Through the work of Michel Foucault, and drawing on Michael Dillon and Julian Reid’s analysis of the biopoliticization of war (2008), COIN is interrogated as a continuation of biopolitics by other means. Conceptualizing a continuum of “fast” and “slow” military violence to produce islands of security and stability, COIN generates a mix of persuasive material forces that, while not kinetic or combat-oriented, are internal to the battlespace of military warfighting. The aim of this theoretical intervention is to trouble our understanding of military violence and power. Rather than subscribe unconditionally to the idea of a domineering military contaminating domestic civilian environments, the paper establishes a different trajectory: perhaps there is always-already a spirit of counterinsurgency internal to the art of biopolitical governmentality, which in turn conjugates contemporary military ways of war.