Counterinsurgency, knowledge production and the traveling of coercive Realpolitik between Colombia and Somalia
| DOI | 10.1177/0010836718768641 |
| Date | 01 June 2018 |
| Author | Markus-Michael Müller,Louise Wiuff Moe |
| Published date | 01 June 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0010836718768641
Cooperation and Conflict
2018, Vol. 53(2) 193 –215
© The Author(s) 2018
Reprints and permissions:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0010836718768641
journals.sagepub.com/home/cac
Counterinsurgency, knowledge
production and the traveling
of coercive Realpolitik between
Colombia and Somalia
Louise Wiuff Moe and Markus-Michael
Müller
Abstract
Counterinsurgency witnessed a powerful revival in our post-9/11 world. With its focus on the
control of territory, populations and seemingly less kinetic hearts and minds campaigns—as
well as a good dose of liberal humanitarianism—contemporary counterinsurgency has become
the dominant form of the Western military interventionism. While most of the associated
debates focus on the potentials and pitfalls of Western counterinsurgency approaches, the
role of South-South cooperation in the making of ‘Global Counterinsurgency’, and the related
emerging geopolitical convergences of interest between Western and non-Western elites
in counterinsurgency, has received little attention. In focusing on counterinsurgency-related
forms of knowledge production, and by analyzing the role of transnational military knowledge
entrepreneurs promoting a form of coercive Realpolitik that supports ‘locally owned’ elite-driven
counterinsurgency efforts in the field of South-South military cooperation between Colombia
and Somalia, this article addresses this void. We show that conventional North/South divides no
longer capture the realities of counterinsurgent warfare going global and call for a de-centering
of the study of military interventions that is sensitive to how knowledge production in regards to
‘Global South’ contexts not only makes them legible, and thereby more governable, but also how
this knowledge production informs ongoing reconfiguration of interventions themselves.
Keywords
Colombia, counterinsurgency, knowledge production, Somalia, South-South cooperation,
stabilization
Introduction
In June 2014, a group of African ‘conflict veterans’ visited Colombia. Supported by the
Africa-Colombia Dialogue of the South Africa-based think tank, the Brenthurst
Corresponding author:
Markus-Michael Müller, Freie Universität Berlin, ZI Lateinamerika-Institut, Rüdesheimer Str. 54-56, 14197
Berlin, Germany.
Email: muellerm@zedat.fu-berlin.de
768641CAC0010.1177/0010836718768641Cooperation and ConflictMoe and Müller
research-article2018
Article
194 Cooperation and Conflict 53(2)
Foundation, the delegation visited military and government agencies with the aim of
providing African militaries and politicians with an opportunity to ‘draw lessons from
Colombia’s successes in dealing with insurgency’.1 The impressions of the participants
from Somaliland—an autonomous administration located in the northern Somali territo-
ries—were published in PRISM, one of the most influential journals regarding ‘informal
doctrine’ (Bickel, 2001) in the area of complex stabilization operations, located at the
Center for Complex Operations (CCO) at the National Defense University in Washington,
DC.2 The article drew comparative lessons from the Colombian government’s successful
fight against the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia, FARC) (Omaar and Mohamoud, 2014). One year later, PRISM
published another article on ‘Colombian lessons’, entitled ‘Colombia—A Political
Economy of War to an Inclusive Peace’. The authors of the article are Greg Mills, direc-
tor of the Brenthurst Foundation, and David J. Kilcullen (Kilcullen and Mills, 2015),
former advisor to the US State Department as chief strategist in the Office of the
Coordinator for Counterterrorism and one of the leading counterinsurgency thinkers, or
COINdinistas (Ricks, 2009). The article can be seen as an appetizer for the book ‘A Great
Perhaps? Colombia: Conflict and Convergence’, published in 2016. This study was co-
authored by Kilcullen, Mills, David Dickies, a retired major general of the British army
and a Brenthurst Foundation associate, as well as David Spencer, professor of counterter-
rorism/counterinsurgency at the William J. Perry Center for Hemispheric Defense
Studies, who actively worked on the Plan Colombia—the biggest US security assistance
programme for Latin America since the end of the Cold War (Rochlin, 2011). The book
also followed an earlier Brenthurst Foundation publication by Mills, Kilcullen, and J
Peter Pham, director of the Michael S. Ansari Africa Center at the Atlantic Council in
Washington, DC. The book was titled ‘Somalia—Fixing Africa’s Most Failed State’
(Mills et al., 2013), which offers insights into Somali ‘lessons learned’ for successful
‘African-led’ counterinsurgency and state-building efforts (Mills et al., 2013: pos. 80).
These developments in which a South Africa-based think tank—in cooperation with
actors and institutions that recently emerged as key ‘innovators’ in the US military estab-
lishment—showcases ‘local successes’ in regard to Global South security governance,
and supports South–South knowledge transfer of these ‘lessons learned’ between con-
texts that offer important insights into one of the most challenging forms of international
interventions in our post-9/11 world—counterinsurgency—raises questions concerning
the means and purposes of military knowledge production centered on ‘local’ best prac-
tices and lessons learned.
This article addresses these questions through an analysis of transnational military
knowledge entrepreneurs promoting the traveling of a form of coercive Realpolitik.
With this term, we classify an emerging informal military doctrine that (re-)empha-
sizes the role of force as a core element for stabilization efforts by supporting ‘locally
owned’ but externally enabled ‘small-footprint’ counterinsurgency efforts. The under-
lying mode of this military knowledge production, we demonstrate, does not operate
by directly imposing presumed superior knowledge from the Global North. Rather, it
signifies a networked making and circulation of knowledge spanning the Global
North-South divide.
To continue reading
Request your trial