ABSTRACT

Within recent critical debates about the geographies and circulations of counterinsurgency knowledge, scholars have focused primarily on dominant centres of power and authority in the global North. Building a framework drawn from critical geography, this article decentres these locations and actors by exploring the global production and circulation of counterinsurgency knowledge from the vantage point of Indian strategic thinkers. Focusing on the work of the Indian think tank the Institute for Conflict Management (ICM), the article traces how Indian counterinsurgency knowledge has been produced, packaged and circulated transnationally since the late 1990s. It argues the power and utility that forms of counterinsurgency knowledge command – Indian or otherwise – are never reducible to the essential features of what actors or texts say. Rather, it suggests that counterinsurgency knowledge is produced through particular relations and locations of power-knowledge that define what they represent and where they fit in. It theorizes forms of counterinsurgency knowledge as positions within broader transnational forces, entwined with colonial histories of pacification. In doing so, it illuminates the contestations and forms of work involved in staging or organizing the world through practices that make some forms, actors, and locations important and relegate others to the peripheries of global politics.

摘要

在最近关于平叛知识的地理和流通的批判性辩论中，学者们主要关注全球北方的主要权力和权威中心。本文构建了一个从批判地理学中提取的框架，通过从印度战略思想家的有利位置探索平叛知识的全球生产和流通，将这些地点和参与者分散。文章聚焦印度智库冲突管理研究所 (ICM) 的工作，追溯了自 1990 年代后期以来印度反叛乱知识是如何产生、打包和跨国传播的。它认为，镇压叛乱知识的力量和效用——无论是印度的还是其他的——永远不能简化为演员或文本所说的基本特征。相当，它们代表什么以及它们适合的位置。它将反叛乱知识的形式理论化为更广泛的跨国力量中的位置，与殖民和平历史交织在一起。在这样做的过程中，它通过使某些形式、参与者和地点变得重要并将其他形式、参与者和地点置于全球政治边缘的实践，阐明了在筹划或组织世界时所涉及的竞争和工作形式。