Abstract

The United States’ failing counterinsurgency wars of the 2000s birthed a number of new ideas, as crises often do. One of the most striking, rapidly becoming banal, is that warfare must be fought not only on geographic terrain but also on “human terrain”. From those wars has emerged the idea not only that the social sciences have much to contribute to their successful prosecution, but the notion that the idea itself represents the next stage in the progressive evolution of modern warfare. Counterinsurgency planners tell us that human thinking and affect are the primary terrain which must be mapped and conquered in order to defeat or convert the enemy, or to at least render the surrounding population neutral in that struggle of wills which is called counterinsurgency war. This human terrain can be successfully captured with knowledge about the enculturated human hearts and minds and the specific and often exotic social orders that create and motivate enemy and population. The rich and incisive papers pulled together by Matthew Farish and Patrick Vitale for this issue of Antipode describe the complex topography of the human terrain of the United States, at war in one way or another since the 1940s. None of that terrain emerges anew during World War II and the Cold War, of course; the United States was made through war from its sixteenth century beginnings, shaped by the security concerns that have been colonialism and slavery’s racializing twin. But what is different in the period these papers describe is the massively increased scale of spending on both the weaponry and science of war: that investment begins to spike in the late 1930s and never really wanes. The new political economic climate of that era allowed, for the first time, massive state spending on preparing for war and preparing the war’s investors—the US citizenry—for permanent war. What would need shaping were expectations of threat, and increasingly, as Morrissey notes, risk as well.

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