The concluding chapter reviews the book’s findings, then considers implications for ongoing conflicts globally. Counterinsurgency and cognate ideas, I argue, are likely to persist, whatever their past failures and ambivalent reception. I consider potential future developments, in a period of reactionary politics and “the empire come home.” Alternatives are nonetheless possible.

This chapter introduces the study and sets out a framework for investigating counterinsurgency’s intellectual history. I argue late twentieth and early twenty-first century counterinsurgency is a form of conservative, high modern utopianism. It is conservative in aiming to protect a given status quo against revolution or other transformative change. Counterinsurgency is “high modernist” in James C. Scott’s sense: it imagines a linear, schematized world, effacing local difference and resistance—in line with modern ideologies of progress. It is utopian in aiming to (re)make not actually existing systems and practices, but instead the idealized preferences of their elites, shorn of compromise, incidental variation, and historical specificity. Counterinsurgencies are thus conservative worldmaking projects: attempts to reimagine and reorder the world, in response to insurrection. The book’s purpose is the explain how this configuration of armed politics arose. To do so, it focuses on counterinsurgency manuals: the military theoretical and instructional texts designed to make counterinsurgency doable in practice.

This chapter introduces the concepts of convergence and fragmentation in international human rights law (IHRL) by providing and discussing their definitions and meanings. Building on the conclusion of the 2006 ILC Report on Fragmentation in international law and drawing on existing literature on the matter, the chapter assesses the extent of normative fragmentation and proposes a new definition of judicial fragmentation in IHRL. Moreover, this chapter also engages in a discussion of how convergence and fragmentation relate to the concepts of universality and relativism, key for any comparative discussion on human rights.

The US Army and Marine Corps’ (2006) Field Manual 3-24: Counterinsurgency is the famous known and controversial military doctrinal document in recent memory. While it replicates many aspects of the Cold 1960s “hearts and minds” counterinsurgency of Galula and others, it differs in its form, style, tone, and ambitious detail. I show how a large writing team from a wide range of overlapping backgrounds, working rapidly in a distinct institutional context, produced it. The mostly uniformed authors and their civilian peers drew on past manuals, history, social science (particularly organizational theory), and their own professional experience. The result is an assemblage of overlapping but distinct ideas, deeply imbued with the organizational and managerial discourses. While often described as politically pragmatic or expedient, I show the manual internalizes a patchwork of ideological material. Its ideological orientation, while in large part liberal and managerial, is ultimately complex and opaque. It’s influence and contentious status were nonetheless exceptional.

In the past decades, the international human rights law system welcomed the proliferation of regional and international human rights adjudicatory bodies, as they meant better and closer protection of human rights for people worldwide. Yet, this proliferation also increased the likelihood of conflicting interpretations of fundamental rights and freedoms, which may trigger what we call judicial fragmentation. Judicial fragmentation, described as the situation where two judicial or quasi-judicial bodies issue contrasting judgments, is certainly a double-sided phenomenon. On the one hand, it can bring adverse consequences, such as reduced legitimacy of the adjudicatory bodies, lower protection of human rights and a threat to universality. On the other hand, fragmentation is a constant element in lawmaking and possibly the only way for the law to develop and adapt to new challenges. In 2006, the International Law Commission (ILC) published a report, which found that fragmentation was significantly threatening international law.1 Following such a worrying alert, scholars have started investigating whether fragmentation was also affecting international human rights law (IHRL), reaching the initial conclusion that the situation was not as alarming as expected.