Plugging Cultural Knowledge into the U.S. Military Machine: The Neo-Orientalist Logic of Counterinsurgency.

Brancher le savoir culturel à la machine militaire américaine : la logique néo-orientaliste de la contre-insurrection. (French)

In this contribution to "Cultures of Militarization and the Military-Cultural Complex" I wish to analyze the recent trend toward the militarization of culture; or, to be precise, the military deployment of cultural knowledge in efforts to pacify recalcitrant non-Western populations and extend stable governmental structures to spaces at the margins of Western power. I will map how cultural knowledge is currently sought to be plugged into the U.S., or more broadly Western, counterinsurgency machine and show how this weaponization of culture (re-)produces a sovereign distinction between liberal and illiberal spaces and populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Je souhaite analyser la tendance récente à la militarisation de la culture, ou, plus précisément, le déploiement militaire du savoir culturel dans le but de pacifier des populations non-occidentales récalcitrantes et pour étendre des structures gouvernementales stables dans les espaces situés aux marges du pouvoir occidental. Je dresserai une cartographie de la manière dont on cherche à l'heure actuelle à brancher le savoir culturel à la machine de la contre-insurrection américaine, ou plus largement occidentale, et je montrerai comment ce fait d'armer la culture (re) produit une distinction souveraine entre les espaces et les populations libéraux et non-libéraux. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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