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<p><i>Weaponizing Civilian Protection: Counterinsurgency and Collateral Damage in Afghanistan</i> by Thomas Gregory offers a powerful analysis of counterinsurgency warfare in Afghanistan, the inaugural frontier of the US-led Global War on Terror (GWOT). Centring the testimonies of military personnel and counterinsurgency training manuals, this book is an in-depth look into a pivotal moment in the GWOT’s military strategy—the shift to conducting a more ‘humane’ war through reducing civilian deaths. In this commentary, I will put Gregory’s book in conversation with recent scholarship by both socio-cultural anthropologists and scholars whose work has influenced ethnographies of the social effects and political logics of COIN. I will point to how Gregory’s analysis can be supplemented by such analyses, focusing on the following themes: COIN as reflective of an increasingly pre-emptive approach to war in the age of the GWOT; COIN as a calculus that normalizes civilian death; and COIN as emblematic of the ‘cultural turn’ in the US imperial project which operates with limited and essentialized notions of cultural knowledge.</p>

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Imperial narratives and the cultural turn

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年4月13日

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  • Helena Zeweri

摘要

Weaponizing Civilian Protection: Counterinsurgency and Collateral Damage in Afghanistan by Thomas Gregory offers a powerful analysis of counterinsurgency warfare in Afghanistan, the inaugural frontier of the US-led Global War on Terror (GWOT). Centring the testimonies of military personnel and counterinsurgency training manuals, this book is an in-depth look into a pivotal moment in the GWOT’s military strategy—the shift to conducting a more ‘humane’ war through reducing civilian deaths. In this commentary, I will put Gregory’s book in conversation with recent scholarship by both socio-cultural anthropologists and scholars whose work has influenced ethnographies of the social effects and political logics of COIN. I will point to how Gregory’s analysis can be supplemented by such analyses, focusing on the following themes: COIN as reflective of an increasingly pre-emptive approach to war in the age of the GWOT; COIN as a calculus that normalizes civilian death; and COIN as emblematic of the ‘cultural turn’ in the US imperial project which operates with limited and essentialized notions of cultural knowledge.