The United States and counterinsurgency: 'political first, political last, political always'

According to the status of forces agreement signed by Iraq and the United States in November 2008, US troops are to be withdrawn entirely from Iraq by the end of 2011. A few days later it was also revealed that the British force in Iraq, numbering about 4,100 troops, will be reduced to a contingent of just a few hundred military advisors by summer 2009. The counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan, on the other hand, is to be intensified in the form of a ‘surge’ in military and political effort. Counterinsurgency operations in both Afghanistan and Iraq have long been at the centre of the security policy debate in the United States and elsewhere; a debate which seems unlikely to be resolved in the near future. But what exactly is counterinsurgency? This article offers some reflections on the practice and the politics of an especially complex form of military engagement. All military activity should be understood through the prism of politics, and counterinsurgency particularly so.     

Blair's wars and Brown's budgets: from Strategic Defence Review to strategic decay in less than a decade

The Labour government's 1998 Strategic Defence Review (SDR) marked the end of almost twenty years during which Labour had been little more than a bystander in British defence policy-making. The 'foreign policy-led' SDR marked an impressive and authoritative debut, emulated by other national governments. Ten years later, however, the SDR is a fading memory. British defence is out of balance and facing immense stress, and calls are mounting for a new strategic defence review. This article examines the difficult choices which a defence review would have to make. But a defence review also requires the governmental machinery with which to analyse and understand defence, and with which those difficult choices can be made. The article argues that this machinery is wearing out. Defence policy, planning and analysis in the United Kingdom have reached a state of organizational, bureaucratic and intellectual decay which may be irrecoverable.     

Masquerade politics: race,Islam and the scale of Amazigh activism in southeastern Morocco*

ABSTRACT. This article explores the different scalar dimensions of Berber masquerades in southeastern Morocco. By ritually performing Jewish characters and demonstrating philo‐Semitic nostalgia for a former Jewish presence, Berber (Amazigh) activists simultaneously engage different audiences at a local, national and transnational scale. In the first place, they assert themselves as moderate (even secular) Muslims for a transnational audience for whom Muslims' supposed anti‐Semitism has been a mode of excluding them from modernity. At the same time, their performances underline the specificity of Berber culture as part of a national folkloric archive, welcome to a Moroccan national state interested in forging an authentic, national Islamic practice distinct from pan‐Islamic Wahhabism. Thirdly, in allying themselves with Jews, Berber activists distance themselves from a variety of rivals to local political and economic dominance, particularly black “Haratin” whose demographic and economic strength in the southeastern oases has increased since Moroccan independence. In exploring the confluences and contradictions between these different scales of activism, this article points to the internal fractures within social movements organised around religion or ethnicity.     

HOW NINETEENTH‐CENTURY GERMAN CLASSICISTS WROTE THE JEWS OUT OF ANCIENT HISTORY

This essay considers why Jewish antiquity largely fell outside the purview of ancient historians in the Germanies for over half a century, between 1820 and 1880, and examines the nature of those portraits that did, in fact, arise. To do so, it interrogates discussions of Jewish antiquity in this half‐century against the background of those political and national values that were consolidating across the German states. Ultimately, the article claims that ancient Jewish history did not provide a compelling model for the dominant (Protestant) German scholars of the age, which then prompted the decline of antique Judaism as a field of interest. This investigation into the political and national dimensions of ancient history both supplements previous lines of inquiry and complicates accounts that assign too much explanatory power to a regnant anti‐Judaism or anti‐Semitism in the period and place. First, the analysis considers why so little attention was granted to Jewish history by ancient historians in the first place, as opposed to its relative prominence before ca. 1820. Second, the essay examines representations of ancient Judaism as fashioned by those historians who did consider the subject in this period. Surveying works composed not only for the upper echelons of scholarship but also for adolescents, women, and the laity, it scrutinizes a series of arguments advanced and assumptions embedded in universal histories, histories of the ancient world, textbooks of history, and histories dedicated to either Greece or Rome. Finally, the article asserts the Jewish past did not conform to the values of cultural ascendancy, political autonomy, national identity, and religious liberty increasingly hallowed across the Germanies of the nineteenth century, on the one hand, and inscribed into the very enterprise of historiography, on the other. The perceived national and political failures of ancient Jews—alongside the ethnic or religious ones discerned by others—thus made antique Judaism an unattractive object of study in this period.     

Approaches to the Recent Past

These five books address the evolution of cognition and consciousness, the two topics no longer considered synonymous but separate though related inquiries. Two books focus on consciousness as revealed in art and artifacts from prehistoric sites of anatomically modern humans; one evaluates the intelligence of anthropoid apes through ecological, ethological, behavioral, and anatomical studies of living and fossil apes; one concerns intelligence as revealed in fossil brains and skulls; and the fifth is an essay using many types of data and imaginative scenarios to comment on the mind.     

Smart muddling through: rethinking UK national strategy beyond Afghanistan*

One of the first steps taken by the newly elected Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government was to initiate a review of the national strategy of the United Kingdom. The review culminated in October 2010 in the publication of a revised National Security Strategy as well as a new Strategic Defence and Security Review. With the benefit of over twelve months of hindsight, this article is concerned with the formulation, the implementation and the longer‐term implications of the 2010 strategy review. The first part of the article assesses the review as a national strategic plan. What were the strategic challenges addressed by the review, what decisions, judgements and misjudgements were made, and what was overlooked? In part two the authors turn to operational matters: how far was the UK's post‐review strategic experience (i.e. in Afghanistan and Libya) consistent with the decisions and promises made in 2010? Part three discusses the review as a public statement of national policy, gauging the impression it has made on the national strategic narrative since 2010: how was the review received, what reputation has it acquired and what was/is the quality of the debate surrounding it? Finally, in part four the article asks what the 2010 review and its aftermath reveal of the formulation and implementation of national strategy in the United Kingdom. Was the 2010 review simply the latest in a long series of attempts by government to find a convincing and durable compromise between security challenges and national resources? Or was the review the beginning of something different altogether? Could UK national strategy henceforth be more of an adaptive, iterative process than a compressed period of analysis and reflection followed by the publication of a policy statement with an inevitably brief shelf‐life?     

More than Samad in Oman: Iron Age pottery from Şuhār and Khor Rorī1

The publication of field work in central Oman has lagged behind the excavations themselves. Whereas the pioneer archaeologists in Oman could identify sites and finds only as “Iron Age”, the work of the past 10 years has enabled a clear conceptual distinction to be made between the Early and Late Iron Age assemblages, as well as their regional characters. Using as a point of departure the Samad Complex, for which most intact contexts exist, the less well-known Late Iron Age of the North and South of Oman is compared by means of newly recorded material from old excavations, there, as well as from a recent survey. There were contacts between central Oman and the South Province, Dhofar although such are elusive. Despite, archaeologically speaking, undeniable trade and ethnic contacts with the outside world, central Oman has a distinctive character of its own which has not been properly credited by specialists of the final Pre-Islamic Period.     

The futures past of the Women,Peace and Security agenda

The Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda has developed at the United Nations over the course of the past 15 years, and there have been critical engagements with it for nearly as long. In this article, we first take stock of the operationalization of the WPS agenda, reviewing its implementation across a number of sectors. In the second section, we expose the tensions that have marked the WPS agenda from the start. With others, we argue that there has been a narrowing of the agenda's original scope, reducing it to the traditional politics of security rather than reimagining what security means. We highlight this reduction primarily through an analysis of the tension between the ‘participation’ and ‘protection’ pillars of the agenda. Further, we argue that the WPS agenda faces a current challenge in terms of the actors entrusted with it. Although in some ways involving civil society, the consolidations and implementation of WPS principles at the national and international levels have become increasingly state‐centric. Third, we imagine some possible futures of the agenda, from a trajectory characterized by increasing marginalization or even irrelevance, to new avenues like the emergent, albeit tentative, ‘Men, Peace and Security’ agenda. We close with an argument for a revival of the WPS agenda beyond a fixation on states, beyond a narrow heteronormative or essentialist focus on the ‘Women’ of the WPS resolutions, and moving towards the radical reimagining of security as peace that inspired the original architects of these important resolutions.