Search results

The author offers a candid reassessment of the role of anthropologists in mediating encounters between Western armies and non-Western peoples.

The Human Terrain System (HTS) was catapulted into existence in 2006 by the US military's urgent need for knowledge of the human dimension of the battlespace in Iraq and Afghanistan. Its centrepiece was embedded groups of mixed military and civilian personnel, known as Human Terrain Teams (HTTs), whose mission was to conduct social science research and analysis and to advise military commanders about the local population. Bringing social science - and actual social scientists - to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was bold and challenging. Despite the controversy over HTS among scholars, there is little good, reliable source material written by those with experience of HTS or about the actual work carried out by teams in theatre. This volume goes beyond the anecdotes, snippets and blogs to provide a comprehensive, objective and detailed view of HTS.

Intro -- Title Page -- preface [2014] -- preface and statement of disclosure [1994] -- list of illustrations and tables -- Chapter One: -- The 'Tribe in the Desert': Anthropology and the War Machine -- a war by any other name... -- bloody theory -- making war on culture -- the anthropology of political violence in Northern Ireland -- the war machine -- Chapter Two: -- Counterinsurgency and Lethal Exchange -- the counter-insurgency loop -- muzzling dogs/suppressing rebellion -- walk softly: constraints on the use of force -- counterinsurgency cul-de-sac -- the dogs of war -- Chapter Three: -- Force and Counter-Force -- peacekeeping -- communists do not play golf -- ubermensch boyscouts -- the terrible paradox -- Chapter Four: -- Permanent Emergency and the Control of Force -- savagery, disorder, terrorism -- the status of war -- cultural permanence -- martial law/military culture -- permanent emergency -- Chapter Five: -- Systems Intelligence/Intelligent Systems -- mastery of the neo-nomadic -- no one is innocent in West Belfast -- point blank -- the tribes at war -- Chapter Six: -- The Death of Culture: Hungerstrikes against Counter-Insurgency -- tradition, famine, law -- spectacular death -- silent bodies, warring bodies -- body-map -- republican mandates -- Chapter Seven: -- In Conclusion: Thing-killing Lethality -- derealization and hyper-vigilant paranoid inversion -- military compassion and anti-politics -- Appendix 1: principle security legislation -- Appendix 2: victorian small wars (1837-1901) -- Appendix 3: brush fire wars -- Appendix 4: security statistics -- Appendix 5: glossary and list of abbreviations -- bibliography -- Footnotes.

The Human Terrain System (HTS) was catapulted into existence in 2006 by the US military's urgent need for knowledge of the human dimension of the battlespace in Iraq and Afghanistan. Its centrepiece was embedded groups of mixed military and civilian personnel, known as Human Terrain Teams (HTTs), whose mission was to conduct social science research and analysis and to advise military commanders about the local population. Bringing social science - and actual social scientists - to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was bold and challenging. Despite the controversy over HTS among scholars, there is little good, reliable source material written by those with experience of HTS or about the actual work carried out by teams in theatre. This volume goes beyond the anecdotes, snippets and blogs to provide a comprehensive, objective and detailed view of HTS. The contributors put the program in historical context, discuss the obstacles it faced, analyse its successes, and detail the work of the teams downrange. Most importantly, they capture some of the diverse lived experience of HTS scholars and practitioners drawn from an eclectic array of the social sciences

The article focuses on the need for a paradigm shift in diversity management for sustainable peace and security. We discuss the bidirectional influence of security and defence organisations and society; the intersectionality of issues related to social justice, health, race, and ethnicity; sexual abuse and exploitation; and cultural factors that influence the functioning of LGBTQ+ personnel and the gender/technology nexus in the context of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). During the application of the Sustainable Security Paradigm to gender diversity management, we found that ecofeminism and the ideas of post-colonial theory should inform the transformational shift of contemporary security and defence organisational cultures. This approach was used by the multinational NATO Science & Technology Organization Exploratory Team ET-197 Gender, Peace and Sustainable Security (2022-23) and its successor, the NATO HFM-368 Research Task Group (2023-26). Our research efforts were triangulated by an analysis of doctrinal textual, audiovisual and art sources that relate to gender diversity and its management. Given the complexity of future warfare, there is a strategic imperative to develop an inclusive defence strategy that reconfigures the traditional white male-focused military paradigm. It is evident that the root cause of gender inequality cannot be solved solely by doctrine and training solutions—rather a transformational organisational culture shift is pivotal and critical to the future global security. This is the first article that addresses the issues of gender diversity management for sustainable security and peace in an interdisciplinary and holistic manner. Our approach is relevant to any organisation with internal gender and intersectional diversity and systemic discrimination.

Focusing on some of the most important ethnographers in early anthropology, this volume explores twelve defining works in the foundational period from 1870 to 1922. It challenges the assumption that intensive fieldwork and monographs based on it emerged only in the twentieth century. What has been regarded as the age of armchair anthropologists was in reality an era of active ethnographic fieldworkers, including women practitioners and Indigenous experts. Their accounts have multiple layers of meaning, style, and content that deserve fresh reading. This reference work is a vital source for rewriting the history of anthropology