The Counterinsurgent Imagination: A New Intellectual History. Cambridge University Press, 2022.

My book, The Counterinsurgent Imagination, is a long-run intellectual history of counterinsurgency, from early modernity to the present.

Counterinsurgency, the violent suppression of armed insurrection, is among the dominant kinds of war in contemporary world politics. Often linked to protecting populations and reconstructing legitimate political orders, it has appeared in other times and places in very different forms – and has taken on a range of politics in doing so. How did it arrive at its present form, and what generated these others, along the way? Spanning several centuries and four detailed case studies, The Counterinsurgent Imagination unpacks and explores this intellectual history through counterinsurgency manuals. These military theoretical and instructional texts, and the practitioners who produced them, made counterinsurgency possible in practice. By interrogating these processes, this book explains how counter-insurrectionary war eventually took on its late twentieth and early twenty-first century forms. It shows how and why counterinsurgent ideas persist, despite recurring failures.

The book's cover image is a map of Hessian installations at Paulus Hook, Jersey City, on August 19th, 1779, from the diary of Johann Ewald, a Hessian officer serving with the British during the American Revolutionary War. Ewald is the subject of Chapter 3 of the book.

It's published by Cambridge UP, in the LSE International Studies series. You can get it in paperback and hardcover from the publisher, Amazon (US, Canada, Australia, UK, etc., including Kindle), Book Depository, IndieBound, and the other usual suspects.

You can read a short rundown of the argument at CUP's in-house blog, an interview about the book at JHIBlog, and some related opinion writing at Inkstick Media. You can listen to a New Books Network interview about the book here (or on Apple Podcasts), as well as an interview on the Undiplomatic Podcast here (Apple).