They have mobilized the progressive counterinsurgency – the aff’s calls for “non-reformist reform” and “redistribution” attempt to capture radical content in liberal form, naturalizing a violent identification with state power and legitimating imperial governance as “self-correcting.”

Taken in its totality, the archive of counterinsurgency is an extended, insidious mutation of the Civilizational “American” text. Counterinsurgency attempts to toxify imagination while laying siege to collective practices of radical freedom and autonomy. It is not only formed in the state’s repressive military, policing, and political might, but is also advanced through the narratives, aesthetics, rhetorics, and institutional solicitations of reformism. Various institutional responses to the global uprisings of 2020 openly expropriate the language, thought, and creativity of radical, abolitionist, revolutionary, and anti-colonial movements as part of a cultural ensemble of counterinsurgency. The symbolic, aesthetic, pedagogical, and other cultural productions of counterinsurgency attempt to domesticate the lexicons of revolt in what might be conceptualized as a strategic reformist conquest of ideas and imagination, knowledge and language, pedagogy and aesthetic. Published in 2006, the US Army and Marine Corps’ Counterinsurgency field manual (also known as US Army Field Manual 3-24) articulates multiple pedagogical strategies and tactics as primary methods for subduing and pacifying resistance to US militarism and empire. While much of the text familiarizes readers with on-the-ground military protocols for neutralizing insurgencies against US occupation and “integrating civilian and military activities” (Chapter Two), it also weaponizes “The Learning Imperative” as a primary technology of occupation. Counterinsurgency directs Army and Marine Corps officers to Open channels of discussion and debate … to encourage growth of a learning environment in which experience is rapidly shared and lessons adapted for new challenges. The speed with which leaders adapt the organization must outpace insurgents’ efforts to identify and exploit weaknesses or develop countermeasures.13 [emphasis added] There is nothing in Counterinsurgency to suggest that its contents are not as applicable to the political geographies of the United States as they are to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Mindanao. Addressing the text’s interdisciplinary and multiple methodology approach to pacification, Wendy Brown writes in her 2008 review of Counterinsurgency that its contents exhibit a “relentless confounding of conventional boundaries among military, political, economic, and anthropological spheres of activity, on the one hand, and [an] upending of conventional military structure and protocol, on the other.”14 That this text was downloaded about 1.5 million times within a month of its publication in December 2006 further indicates that it has been perused by a broad audience of readers that extends well beyond Army officers, War on Terror soldiers, or professors and students at West Point (the US Army’s prestigious military academy).15 Counterinsurgency, in other words, seems to be a versatile publication with a remarkably wide circulation that belies its origins and intended usage. Perhaps it is worth considering how this military text both reflects and informs a geography of war that encompasses the reformist responses to an early twenty-first-century crisis of police legitimacy. In resonance with Brown’s critical review, I would situate Field Manual 3–24 as part of an extended statecraft of counterinsurgent domestic warfare in continuity with the long legacies of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO).16 Counterinsurgency departs from COINTELPRO, however, by adopting a more expansive approach to asymmetrical warfare and (domestic) pacification. While retaining the broad, urgent objective of slowing and neutralizing militant opposition to and revolt against US police/colonial power, the field manual foregrounds interdisciplinary methods of solicitation, selective empowerment, and reform, including piecemeal changes to economic, governmental, and schooling infrastructures. Counterinsurgent reformism, in this instance, is a primary composite of an ensemble of legitimation: notably, the text introduces a discrete discussion of this matter with the boldfaced heading “Legitimacy Is the Main Objective.”17 The broad directive for fulfilling the pacification mandate indicates an aspiration toward a twisted version of Gramscian hegemony: “counterinsurgents achieve [pacification] by the balanced application of both military and nonmilitary means.”18 Accounting for the fact that hegemonic consent is not possible under conditions of conquest, occupation, or displacement, the strategic goal of legitimacy—a term that must be distinguished from both hegemony and consent—relies on reformism as a technology of policing. To clarify, i am not merely thinking of reforms to the police in this instance, but am conceptualizing the full cultural, political, aesthetic, and infrastructural apparatus of reformism as a marshaling of police power that includes and exceeds the discrete institution of the police. Alongside the immediately recognizable counterinsurgency protocols of infiltration, assassination, and blunt military/police force, Field Manual 3-24 outlines a strategy of reformist triage that ostensibly addresses the material conditions underlying occupied/policed peoples’ revolts: [K]illing insurgents—while necessary, especially with respect to extremists—by itself cannot defeat an insurgency. Gaining and retaining the initiative requires counterinsurgents to address the insurgency’s causes through stability operations as well. This initially involves securing and controlling the local populace and providing for essential services. As security improves, military resources contribute to supporting government reforms and reconstruction projects.19 This passage extends a strategic narrative that draws lessons from the US state’s protracted, multifront response to Black radical, liberation, and revolutionary movements during the mid-to-late twentieth century. As Robert Allen details in the classic study Black Awakening in Capitalist America, a coalescence of philanthropic foundation executives, elected politicians, police officials, academics, opportunistic community-based liberal reformers, and other counterinsurgent actors played a central rather than corollary role in institutionalizing the suppression of domestic Black radicals and revolutionaries during the late-1960s and 1970s. Describing an opening scene in this period of reformist counterinsurgency, Allen shows how Ford Foundation president McGeorge Bundy averred his organization’s involvement in the orchestration of a national agenda that in contemporary terms might be described as a philanthropic “social justice” commitment. Speaking at the annual banquet of the National Urban League in 1966, Bundy revealed to banquet attendees that the Ford Foundation, the biggest foundation in the country, had decided to help in the task of achieving “full domestic equality for all American Negroes.” This announcement came as no immediate surprise to Bundy’s hearers. For some time the foundation had been involved in efforts to upgrade [B]lack higher education, and it had given money to Urban League projects in the field of housing … . What the Urban League delegates and the American public did not know was that the gigantic Ford Foundation, which had already fashioned for itself a vanguard role in the neocolonial penetration of the Third World, was on the eve of attempting a similar penetration of the [B]lack militant movement.20 Here it is worth re-emphasizing that the rise of such domestic philanthropic initiatives cannot be disentangled from the broader strategic and tactical network of state-organized and state-condoned political/cultural repression that targeted organizations like the Black Panther Party, Malcolm X’s Organization of Afro-American Unity, Robert and Mabel Williams’ chapter of the NAACP in North Carolina, the post-1964 iteration of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and other Black radical groups during this period.21 In fact, this ensemble of pacification is a relatively durable one that is overtly endorsed by Counterinsurgency: [C]ounterinsurgents typically have to adopt different approaches to address each element of the insurgency. For example, auxiliaries might be co-opted by economic or political reforms, while fanatic combatants will most likely have to be killed or captured.22 If ongoing and emerging movements in the first quarter of the twenty-first century are refusing the normalization and long perpetuity of police violence, terror, and gendered antiblack killings, then the US Army’s Field Manual would properly characterize them as an “insurgency,” and its most militantly committed participants as domestic “insurgents.” The US state’s mobilization to create a counterinsurgent “learning environment” has and will continue to rely on a combination of state and extra-state strategies to circulate waves of police reform messaging through the efforts of elected officials, philanthropic foundations and nonprofit organizations, schooling, and educational institutions, corporations, industrialized professional sports, and religious leaders, among others. Echoing Geo Maher’s assertion that “police reform has been largely successful in its own task: to legitimize the police,” Schrader suggests that such reform has historically “aimed to bolster the legitimacy of the institution and rehearse new modes of regulating and producing social order.”23 A stream of counterinsurgency thus works through both “reform” and “reformism,” terms that are often conflated but which require clear practical and conceptual differentiation. For the sake of clarity, it is helpful to conceptualize “reform” as a logic of institutional maneuvering rather than a discrete agenda or outcome. It represents an approach to social change that concedes the existence of prevailing social, economic, political, and/or legal systems, including those organized through the power of antiblack, racial capitalist, colonial, apartheid, and other violently oppressive (anti-)social forms. Agitating for reform within such systems entails identification and adjustment of relatively isolated aspects of their operation, often for the announced purpose of increasing (perceptions of) access and equity in their administration and everyday functioning: think voting rights reforms, police training and hiring reforms, and criminal justice policy reforms (e.g., the emblematic Obama era reform of sentencing guidelines for crack cocaine possession).24 In many cases, the purpose of a given reform is to protect systems against collapse, whether caused by internal contradiction and dysfunction or external forces of opposition. “Reformism,” on the other hand, is a militant ideological and political position that is often sanctioned by a combination of state power and the institutions that constitute gendered racial capitalism, including those encompassed in the formation of the nonprofit industrial complex that Allen’s 1969 study so astutely anticipated at the time of its publication. Reformism militantly stakes the claim that the cultural and political ensemble—including the epistemological structure—of an existing order ought to be protected, legitimated, and sustained rather than transformed, abolished, or creatively disrupted. As a defense of the existing order, the reformist position may passively and/or actively criminalize and endanger those people, communities, and movements that seek fundamental—that is, radical, abolitionist, anti-colonialist, or revolutionary—change to an oppressive arrangement. As Erica Edwards has demonstrated, reformism often pivots on gendered racial performances of (Black) respectability, which often induce or converge with cultural logics of commodification and racial fetish as well as entrepreneurial (neoliberal brand building) opportunism.25 Finally, and perhaps most importantly, reformism attempts to delimit the imaginative horizon of political possibility to that which is seen as achievable within the protocols and power relations of existing institutional forms.