Description
The “hearts and minds” agenda of contemporary counterinsurgency explicitly located war in cultural and affective terrain, setting up imagined geographic and cultural dichotomies between the West and its ‘enemies’ in so doing. What emerges from the population-centric COIN doctrine brought to bear in Iraq and Afghanistan by the U.S. military and its allies is a deeply affective project. Examining U.S. military programmes such as the Human Terrain System and Female Engagement Teams through a range of first-hand participant and documentary accounts reveals a range of affective relations embedded within a complex militarised political project. By asking ‘feeling what for whom?’, this paper explores the everyday politics of empathy contained within the urgent political demand for more adequate socio-cultural understanding of the Iraqi and Afghan ‘other’ to support the military in their mission. It also examines the argument that ‘hearts and minds’ represents a ‘kinder’ and ‘gentler’ way of fighting war, thus seeking to re-orient our attention to the forms of violence that are written out of the cultural narrative of population-centric counterinsurgency.
