Introduction

In 2009 General David Petraeus was voted ‘public intellectual of the year’ by the British liberal arts magazine Prospect, triumphing over names like Noam Chomsky, Francis Fukuyama and Slavoj Žižek. The magazine’s motivation was that the United States Counterinsurgency Field Manual COIN FM 3–24, of which Petraeus was the lead author, was seen to constitute ‘the first actively humane war fighting doctrine ever to come out of the Pentagon, enshrining the ideas that winning a modern war requires ensuring the security and wellbeing of the civilian population’.1 The COIN way of warfare, it appears, is in tune with the Zeitgeist; the Field Manual has reportedly been downloaded over two million times a year after its release in 2006.2 With its emphasis on social, economic and political ‘governance’ it constitutes the most recent reincarnation of liberal interventionism. And for the purposes of this study, it epitomises the narration of war as an order-creating force, as ‘policing’, metaphorically understood.