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This chapter examines Antigone: Insurgency (2007) — a response to state measures taken in the name of national security in the USA and Canada after 9/11 — staged with a cast of three. The script treated Sophocles' text as a score into which modern material was interpolated. For example, Creon's first speech drew on both that of George Bush at ground zero on 14 September, and another by Canada's former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. Antigone's list of fellow resisters included names that many would have characterized as terrorists. Yet the play ended with a vision of reconciliation: Creon holding the dead Antigone, posed like the pieta. The deconstruction of the text in Antigone: Insurgency mirrors the seeming destruction and chaos of post-9/11 society.

Naval power had a huge impact on the rise of Mao Zedong and the Communists in China from 1926 to 1949. Despite this, scholars have often marginalized its role because Mao himself wrote very little about the topic. This chapter by Francis Gricerebuts the belief that naval power was unimportant by providing an extensive account of the different ways that Mao and the Communists were affected by naval power during three main periods: their early struggles with the Kuomintang and foreign powers, the war against Japan, and the subsequent Civil War. The chapter asserts that Mao paid little heed to naval issues because he lacked strategic vision and because he was determined to provide a "victor" narrative that emphasized the strengths of the Communist movement and marginalized its weaknesses. The chapter links the absence of naval components within Mao's writings with the surprising dearth of attention to maritime issues within modern counter-insurgency literature, including the recent U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. Finally, the chapter argues that the omission of naval power from Mao's writings helps to demonstrate that his relevance for later insurgencies was considerably lower than is conventionally assumed.

This introduction chapter identifies the rationale for a comparative study of the counterterrorism responses of non-Western states. It argues that much of the counterterrorism literature is biased towards Western perspectives, particularly that of the United States, United Kingdom, and Israel, and tends to ignore the distinct counterterrorism approaches of non-Western states. This chapter defines what is meant by “non-Western” in this volume and identifies the drivers – historical, social, political, cultural and religious – that determine their counterterrorism response.

The final chapter discusses how and why the Bush administration's grand ambitions turned to dust. Having taken no account of the existence, or lack of them, of the preconditions for democracy in Iraq, and having failed utterly to prepare for a prolonged occupation, the Bush administration's decision to invade precipitated chaos in Iraq. State collapse was followed by a descent into anarchy and escalating sectarian warfare that the USA and its allies were seemingly powerless to contain. After three years of failed policies a change of course in 2007–2008 did bring improvements, but at the end of George W. Bush's term of office Iraq remained a state perched on the brink of a return to sectarian warfare and America's position in the Persian Gulf remained as precarious and problematic as ever.

This chapter describes the situations under which the special category status was accorded to these five northeastern states. Meghalaya was carved out of Assam in 1972, and the union territories of Tripura and Manipur were accorded full statehood in the same year, following which special category status was accorded to them. Union territories of Mizoram and Arunachal Pradesh were accorded full statehood in 1987 when they were also brought within this category. The chapter discusses the brief histories of each of these states including the history of attainment of statehood by them, their traditional socio-political institutions and ways of life, socio-economic changes in them since becoming special category states and the role of central assistance in expanding their infrastructure and improving the developmental indicators in them. The chapter examines the management of public finances by them as well as their planning priorities. It also discusses the violent insurgency that singed Mizoram, Tripura, and Manipur for decades together and the present situation.

Starting with a vignette that details a mass protest in Dimapur against excessive ‘rebel’ taxations and the perceived degeneration of the long lingering Naga Movement for Independence, this opening chapter introduces the Naga struggle, its history, political and territorial entanglements, complexities, and, after the 1997 Indo-Naga ceasefire, post-ceasefire practices and patterns. Theoretically, this chapter introduces the idea of ‘insurgency-complex’ to argue that, after long decades of political violence and volatilities, the politics of Naga insurgency, and the Indian state’s response to it, has flooded the shores of political conflict and inundates all areas of social life. This chapter ends with a reflection on the challenges and experiences of carrying out extensive ethnographic research in an area long shaped by violent conflict and political instability.

This book explores the causes as well as the meaning and significance of political violence in Northeast India, focusing on the formal and informal structures of governance and the democracy deficit in the region. It looks at the life and times of the United Liberation Front of Assam(ULFA), the conflict between the Indian government and the Nagas, as well as the cultural politics that animate the militias of the region, and their relationship to their constituencies and to ‘mainstream’ social and political forces. In addressing the politics of militancy in Northeast India, the book focuses on areas both inside and outside the borders of what is called Assam today. Instead of reinforcing a false separation between ‘insurgency’ and the ‘mainstream’ of social and political life, the book argues that ethnic militias, counter-insurgency operations, state-backed militias, developmentalist practices, and the deformed institutions of democratic governance constitute a coherent whole, known as durable disorder.

Many forest management institutions and the ideologies that govern them, all hallmarks of modern states, were produced in Southeast Asia in the crucible of war. Insurgencies, ethnic wars, and “Cold Wars” in the tropics shaped institutions and practices, because “jungles” were their front lines. Although the direct impacts of war on forests are well-known, indirect and institutional effects of war and an array of “medium hard “technologies of power, such as forced relocation ( strategic hamlets), state colonization of historical territories (resettlement and transmigration), criminalization of traditional practices (edicts against the use of fire, shifting cultivation, etc.), exclusion of local populations from their traditional resource terrains (national park and forest legislation), and the transformations of bureaucratic/ military structures and surveillance for the management forests, are barely documented. This chapter focuses on the institutional dimensions of war in the creation of forest politics that exclude traditional ethnic or “racialized” populations. It further argues that war, insurgency, and counter-insurgency contributed to the resurgence of forests in many areas.

This chapter deals with American attempts to defend the fragile state in South Vietnam by enhancing its security forces.It focuses on conflicts between South Vietnamese officials and American advisers, especially police specialists from Michigan State University and the US Operations Mission, over the relationship between security and the state.The story of US assistance to South Vietnam’s law enforcement organizations reveals clearly the disastrous consequences of American and South Vietnamese policy makers’ insistence on employing military solutions for political problems.

Chapter Three looks at the effects of the “war by budget” on the Cambodian Civil War. It discusses the inability of the Cambodians to hold off the Khmer communist insurgency and the subsequent fall of Cambodia. It suggests that the U.S. Congress’s failure to provide the funding necessary to adequately support the war effort caused defeatism among the Cambodian forces. The Khmer communists, in contrast, seemed to become better equipped and supplied as the war wore on. Another key factor was that, as in South Vietnam, the United States withdrew its supporting combat forces, attempting to augment the loss by providing the Cambodian forces with additional armor, artillery, and tactical air equipment. This chapter suggests that both cases were due to ideological clashes.

The Iraq War was a mixed outcome for the United States: a military success but diplomatic failure. Militarily, America sought the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime with a minimal amount of combat power expended in the effort. Diplomatically, top policymakers sought to create the conditions for the emergence of a stable and democratic Iraqi state. The U.S. achieved its military objective, but it did so at the expense of its diplomatic objective as the effort to foster a democratic regime succumbed to the rise of a Sunni-based insurgency. This chapter argues that this mixed outcome resulted from America's moderately truncated information institution. President George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld received the vast majority of their strategic intelligence from U.S. Central Command headed by General Tommy Franks. This “empowered stovepipe” produced a military strategy that resulted in regime change, but which undermined post-conflict stabilization and reconstruction efforts.

This chapter presents an intertextual account of colonial discourse and psychotic delusion. By ‘reading madness’, the chapter aims to show the intimate relationship between prevailing ‘white writing’ and the imagination of the ‘white insane’. Returning to the idea of Africa as a site of madness, the chapter considers Mau Mau in the delusional content of European psychiatric patients in order to develop an analysis of the salience of transgression and its denial for the European settler at a time of incipient decolonisation.

This chapter covers Iraq policy from June 2004 until mid-2006 from the standpoint of security and of politics, analyzing Bush and Rumsfeld's conceptions of what was necessary and the conflict between these two visions. Paradoxically, Bush and Rumsfeld's worldviews led them to very different conclusions as to what was required, but their styles meant that they did not have a direct debate about these differences. The puzzling U.S. behavior during this period – describing Iraq as central to the war on terror and the spread of democracy, yet simultaneously drawing down forces and planning to leave – is revealed here as a product of the conflict between the visions of Bush and Rumsfeld.

This chapter identifies the nature of the ‘five techniques’ of interrogation used during the State of Emergency in Aden. The threat from nationalist insurgents led not only to the declaration of a State of Emergency, but to the use of the ‘five techniques’ as well. In order to explain how such controversial techniques came to be used in this case the history and development of the techniques is addressed, as is the process of decision-making that led to their use. The reasons why the military brought these techniques to Aden will be made clear. It will be shown that the purpose behind the use of the ‘five techniques’ in Aden was to improve the intelligence available to the security forces.