James Der Derian's Human Terrain manages to be both a thought-provoking documentary and a heartfelt tribute to a fallen colleague. Human Terrain is an investigation into the US military's increasing interest in using the ideas of anthropology and social science to better conduct so-called “wars amongst the people,” the concept being that the centre of gravity in wars such as those currently being fought in Iraq and Afghanistan is not terrain understood in the geographical sense of the term, but rather what the US armed forces have come to term “human terrain”Footnote ¹ – that is to say, the ability of the US and its allies to understand the cultural, political and social context within which it is being asked to fight, and, with that understanding, the ability to win the “hearts and minds” of the population.

To that end, both the US Army and the US Marine Corps have developed cultural-awareness and language programmes as part of the basic training that units assigned to either Iraq or Afghanistan receive. What Human Terrain investigates is the process by which particularly US academics are made part of the process of devising this training, and also the inherent tension between asking soldiers to be at one and the same time culturally aware diplomats, town planners or social workers who interact with, respect, and become part of the local community, whilst asking them at the same time to retain both the skill and the moral distance from the enemy to kill efficiently and effectively.

But, as well as being an investigation of the changing nature of warfare and the role of anthropology and social science within that, Human Terrain is also a tribute to Michael Bhatia, who was killed whilst working as part of the Human Terrain System team in Afghanistan in May 2008. What this section of the film details quite movingly is the tension Michael Bhatia struggled with, both in his own mind and in his relationships with academic colleagues, between, on the one hand, maintaining what could be seen as the appropriate critical distance an academic should take from government policy and, on the other hand, Michael's profound idealism and desire to make a difference. The film comes to no conclusions about whether Michael Bhatia, by agreeing to serve with the US military, was acting as an enabler for a failed military venture in Afghanistan or whether, by choosing to get involved, he was helping the US military conduct the war in a more culturally sensitive, more humane fashion. However, what the film does movingly portray is the idealism and bravery that Michael Bhatia and those like him show.

Human Terrain raises more questions than it answers, but, in a sense, that is the point of the film: to make the viewer question both the nature of warfare in the twentieth century, and what the appropriate role of the academic is in response to that. Human Terrain is an important work that sheds light on a metamorphosis taking place in the nature of warfare that is too often overlooked in mainstream reporting of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.