Challenging common beliefs about the value and effectiveness of counterinsurgency policies purportedly aimed at winning hearts and minds, Patricia Owens’s book lays bare the ways in which “armed social work” aims to coerce obedience from civilians. In compelling fashion, Owens urges the reader to view the violence of counterinsurgency as more than the application of military force to defeat armed insurgents. As Economy of Force makes clear, the violence of counterinsurgency in many cases involves the intentional violent upheaval and destruction of domestic life, through a combination of military force and violent social administration—what she refers to as “despotic household role.” Liberal states, she argues, have used sociological theories to conceal and justify this harsh administration of foreign populations in Malaya, Kenya, Vietnam, and more recently in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The book prompts a rethinking of counterinsurgency—a rethinking of the lessons of past counterinsurgencies, a rethinking of the nature of counterinsurgent violence, a rethinking of the function and effectiveness of efforts to win the hearts and minds of civilians, and a rethinking of the justifications that counterinsurgents use to account for their behavior during wartime. After critically examining the evolution of social theory and showing how ideas about the development and betterment of society emerged in the modern era, Owens then explores the evolution of household rule—the governance of the basic life processes of the individuals within the household unit. She argues that household rule was “scaled-up and transformed in the late eighteenth century” (p. 130) as ideas about the proper organization of society brought the governance of basic life processes into the purview of the modern nation-state.
Using five detailed case studies of counterinsurgency operations in Malaya, Kenya, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, Owens argues that these ideas about the proper structure, management, and improvement of society shaped how liberal states explained and responded to resistance to their rule. Domestically, liberal states used social reform to minimize resistance to the modern capitalist economy from organized labor and other groups. Abroad, liberal states explained violent resistance to imperialism as resulting from social dislocation—responses to the disruptions of colonialism and modernization—rather than political opposition. The appropriate response to such resistance was a social response: the remaking of local society. In conjunction with large-scale military campaigns against insurgents, liberal states pursued “armed social work”—despotic household rule aimed at controlling a variety of life processes—to domesticate and pacify local populations.
The British counterinsurgency in Malaya, for example, is often held up as evidence of the effectiveness of policies aimed at winning hearts and minds. The British depicted the provision of social services to resettled populations as a form of compensation for their displacement, justifying resettlement as a program that would facilitate progress within Malay society. Owens persuasively argues, however, that the success of counterinsurgency in Malaya, in fact, was the result of a brutal military campaign that denied insurgents access to local sources of support through mass detention, torture, and the systematic and forced resettlement of hundreds of thousands into camps—“an exemplary instance of despotic household governance” (p. 184).
In Kenya, the British argued that the breakdown of traditional society had led to violent resistance to British colonial rule, and used such arguments to justify the remaking of Kikuyu society. Targeting Kikuyu domestic space as a key source of support for the Mau Mau insurgency, the British used mass detention, interrogation, and torture in combination with the forcible relocation of more than a million Kikuyu to pacify the population. However, the resources available for social reconstruction were fewer in Kenya as compared with Malaya, making it more difficult for the British to cite social policies as the reason for success in defeating the Mau Mau.
In Vietnam, the United States framed the causes of violent resistance as social; from the U.S. perspective, it was a desire for protection rather than political agendas that drove rural populations to support communist insurgents. U.S. rhetoric about the necessary reorganization of Vietnamese society provided justification for extreme counterinsurgent violence. To attack Viet Cong forces and to deny them cover, the United States destroyed the human networks that provided insurgents with sources of intelligence, recruits, and sustenance, using massive firepower and defoliation, destruction of villages, and large-scale relocation of civilian populations into “Strategic Hamlets.” By providing social services to displaced populations, the United States could claim that its policies were intended to win the hearts and minds of the population.
In Afghanistan and Iraq, as in Vietnam, ideas about civilian neutrality—the belief that few civilians possess strong loyalties to one side or the other—served as justification for “population-centric” counterinsurgency policies that sought to use the provision of social services as a means of securing civilian support. Often relying on gendered assumptions about women’s desire for protection, these policies sought to win over women with the provision of social services. Men, on the other hand, desired respect, and were often co-opted as local partners. In Iraq, the United States worked with local tribal patriarchs to implement a decentralized form of despotic household rule, and similarly relied on local warlords to control the local population in Afghanistan.
Through the careful analysis of these five cases, Economy of Force calls for a shift in thinking about counterinsurgency. First, the book urges us to look beyond the direct killing of civilians to understand other ways in which counterinsurgents seek to destroy civilian life and, ultimately, to control the civilian population. Much of the literature on insurgency and civil war has focused on a narrow definition of counterinsurgent violence against civilians—mainly, violence that either deliberately kills or injures the insurgents’ civilian base or violence from the collateral damage associated with intense military campaigns. Either way, Owens demonstrates that this focus on the killing of civilians fails to acknowledge other aspects of counterinsurgent brutality, such as the devastation of communities through mass forced relocation.
In fact, the book presents an even deeper challenge to research on counterinsurgency: it urges a more honest account of the goals of counterinsurgency. Despite the attempt by liberal states to present their counterinsurgency policies as sensitive to the needs of local populations and aimed at societal improvement, this book spotlights a pernicious reality—that the goal of counterinsurgency is ultimately to control civilians and to destroy their will to engage in political resistance. For Owens, counterinsurgents attempt to pacify the population through the oppressive management and manipulation of civilian domestic life, or the establishment of despotic household rule.
Economy of Force also criticizes commonly held views about the role of the civilian population during wartime. Both scholars and counterinsurgent governments often assume that civilian loyalties are highly malleable, with the majority of civilians remaining neutral during wartime and willing to support whichever side can provide them with security. Owens persuasively shows that this view mistakenly assumes that civilians are primarily motivated more by concerns about securing basic life processes than by politics. She thus raises the question: what would be the impact on both scholarship and policy if we applied different assumptions about human motivation? For example, if civilians are not politically neutral (or if the degree of civilian neutrality varies across conflicts), then physical control over territory might not induce civilian cooperation as readily as some have proposed (see, for example, Stathis Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War, 2006).
Although Owens specifies that in all five cases counterinsurgents used military force against insurgents in conjunction with strategies aimed at controlling the civilian population, her work underemphasizes the variation in the use and combination of these strategies. How do policies aimed at social administration—despotic household rule—vary across cases? Do all counterinsurgents seek to control the civilian population to the extent seen in these five cases, or do some forego these methods of social administration and control? Not all counterinsurgencies are large-scale wars fought at a high intensity, like the cases examined in the book. Does this matter? Perhaps these five cases are at one end of a spectrum of counterinsurgent violence, broadly conceived.
Owens also confines her analysis to the counterinsurgency policies of liberal states. Yet many contemporary counterinsurgencies involve nonliberal states. Much like Great Britain in Malaya or the United States in Vietnam, nonliberal states often seek to pacify the civilian population. The Sudanese government used aerial bombardment in conjunction with ground attacks on Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa villages in Darfur, burning and destroying civilian homes as a means of forcibly expelling civilians. In Uganda, the government forcibly relocated hundreds of thousands of civilians into “protected villages” to clear territory in northern Uganda, making way for offensive operations against the Lord’s Resistance Army. Perhaps these governments face less pressure to account for their policies of despotic household rule. Still, do these governments ever use similar ideas about the betterment of society to justify their counterinsurgency strategies? If so, how? A case study analyzing the counterinsurgency policies of a nonliberal state would have allowed Owens to explore the extent to which liberal states are distinctive in their approach to counterinsurgency.
Finally, the book raises crucial questions for policy: is it possible to undertake counterinsurgency in such a way as to be less destructive to civilian populations, or must counterinsurgency always involve the violent pacification of civilians? Owens convincingly demonstrates that even in cases where liberal states devoted extensive resources to social administration, the policies were brutal in their impact. Her book does not offer an explicit alternative to counterinsurgency policies of despotic household rule. Perhaps an alternative does not exist if, as she makes clear, even liberal states are guilty of deploying sociological ideas in the service of extreme brutality. Nevertheless, Economy of Force calls for empirically informed normative work that might prove otherwise.
