In his blurb for Laleh Khalili’s book, Vijay Prashad calls it the “ghostly other of The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual,” and certainly that is an apt way to characterize it. Shadows and ghosts play an important role in explaining policies, practices, and actors in counterinsurgencies, and the author reveals a long and dark history of asymmetric warfare relevant to the present moment. Indeed, by their own admission, U.S. officials have maintained that a number of policies had to remain in the shadows for them to exist, and yet bureaucratic procedures required them to be documented and subsequently revealed through leaks and reports, making it possible to trace and theorize this “world of shadows” (p. 7).

In Time in the Shadows, Khalili reminds the readers, first and foremost, that U.S. policies on confinement and detention observed in the post-9/11 context are either the direct regurgitation of previous colonial and imperial policies or at the very least inspired from that history. Second, the author points to the emergence of “confinement and incarceration as central tactics of counterinsurgency warfare” (p. 3) in liberalism. In other words, even though there were attempts to humanize asymmetric warfare, making it less brutal and more regulated (in part due to popular mobilizations), the eventual result was these new forms of confinement and management of populations, legitimizing cost-effective war making in the process. Khalili traces the genealogy of detention and confinement in two liberal counterinsurgencies, namely, Israel in Palestine and the United States in the war on terror (Afghanistan and Iraq), noting four different kinds of detention: camps for combatants (Abu Ghraib, Iraq); extraterritorial detention (Guantánamo Bay, Cuba); invisible or proxy detention (CIA black sites or southern Lebanon prisons); and mass confinement of civilians, as in Gaza.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the book is the tracing of colonial policies on asymmetric warfare. Rather than accepting a more standard narrative that asymmetric warfare occurred mostly in the war on terror, Khalili traces it back to British and French colonial policies, on the one hand, and previous American imperial ventures in the Philippines and Vietnam, on the other. For instance, mass confinement of civilians in Gaza was very much inspired by colonial modes of control. In the nineteenth century, the British in South Africa, Spanish in Cuba, and the Americans in the Philippines created concentration camps as “protective” spaces for civilians. In South Africa, the Boer War was the context in which Boer women and children were put in camps, with black Africans placed in separate ones. Here, the centrality of race becomes important in the ostensible move from brutality to incarceration, since the Boers being white could not be as easily killed as black and brown bodies elsewhere. The twentieth century witnessed concentration camps not just in their most infamous versions but also in colonial contexts renamed to sound more innocuous, such as New Villages in British Malaya. Often conceived as places of protection and security in some reform programs, they were actually means of controlling the population, sometimes by explicitly asking residents to be spies (Malaya) or at the very least subjecting them to extremely restricted services and facilities (Algeria). Ultimately, the programs had the effect of coercing the populations in new ways, though always appearing as “carceral programs with liberal intent” (p. 211).

In the twenty-first century, mass confinement appears in the form of U.S. and Israeli policies toward Iraqis and Palestinians, respectively. Here, the presence of walls and checkpoints, as well as the use of curfews, closures, and stringent and arbitrary processes, lead to the confinement of these populations. Such a strategy requires a particular way of defining and engaging with populations. As Khalili puts it “What is new about counterinsurgency is the explicit emphasis on quotidian knowledge about civilians and not tactical knowledge about combatants. … The new form of intelligence, pieced together as in a mosaic, includes such prosaic information as the layout of spaces, kinship structures, and everyday needs of civilian populations” (p. 196). While the use of identity cards and other forms of surveillance and measurements dates back to colonial times, the need to further understand the “culture” of a population means by definition a fixed and static notion of culture that can fit knowledge grids. Alongside racial and religious assumptions about males of a certain age or tribe being most suspicious, such policies tend to label entire civilian populations as suspect. In turn, these populations—under constant surveillance by occupying forces—experience a form of social engineering and end up feeling subjugated and confined, as opposed to being “protected.”

Khalili draws upon Michel Foucault’s work, especially the College de France lectures on “Security, Territory and Population” to explain a number of strategies used in asymmetric warfare. The combination of surveillance, diagnosis, and the potential transformation of people requiring technical/bureaucratic solutions instead of political ones becomes the paradigm for management of a population within prisons (in addition to impacting the general population). In the Abu Ghraib prison, for instance, we observe the disciplinary practices (as opposed to blatant sovereign violence) and the Taylorization and bureaucratization of the military. The obsession with categorizing detainees as unlawful, lawful, ghost, security, and high value, or even uncategorizable, while appearing to be a precise classification, was actually highly arbitrary with real consequences for the treatment of detainees. Perhaps because the categories were so amorphous and by their very nature required discretion, the intricate bureaucratization had the opposite effect of precision since it actually led soldiers to transgress acceptable behavior, especially in a racialized context. While official rules and documents were meant to ensure that torture did not legally take place, the “cool, rational, bureaucratic” definition of techniques merely minimized the appearance of pain, rather than remove it, or as Khalili notes, “through proceduralism evacuate the infliction of pain of its abhorrence” (p. 158).

Here, Khalili points to the role of law with the help of experts—doctors and psychologists—in enabling torture with the use of language and proceduralism, rather than ensuring its absence. Humanization in such a context becomes a way to transform the hierarchical relationship between an interrogator and detainee to that of negotiation and management. The relation between coercion and persuasion in the Gramscian sense is also significant for Khalili to explain how counterinsurgencies work and how there are moments of crisis when attempts at hegemony fail and military solutions emerge.

One of the questions that is constantly present throughout the book, though inadequately addressed, is the tension between the violence that liberalism is able to accommodate and what it is forced to withdraw primarily as a result of popular mobilizations. While Khalili is absolutely correct in assessing that liberal legalism is perfectly capable of accommodating violence, at the same time there appears to be some doubt about its ability to do so successfully, whether due to challenges by the colonized /occupied people or interventions by international and national legal and human rights activists. Gramscian conceptions of balancing coercion with consent and the Foucaldian framework of management of populations are exciting theoretical tools for explaining this tension to some extent, but they may not be adequate to account for the unexpected moments of crisis for legitimacy that may not be easily contained.

Overall, Time in the Shadows is an incredible contribution to our understanding of counterinsurgency. The extent to which shadows are easily accommodated within liberal orders, and the challenges their revelation may raise, make this book essential reading for anyone interested in debates on state, democracy, liberalism, racialization, violence, law, and counterinsurgency across all fields of political science and beyond.