Perhaps the least commented-upon tactic of counterinsurgency is also the one which affects the largest numbers of people. Beginning with the Boer War, counterinsurgent militaries began resettling civilian populations in a variety of new "habitations", which eventually -after the Second World War had given concentration camps macabre meaning- were given a series of innocuous-sounding names, such as New Villages, Reservations, Strategic Hamlets and the like (Cornaton 1998; Elkins 2005; Harper 1999; Short 1975; Thompson 1966). What resettlement entailed was population control technologies applied to civilians that an occupying or metropolitan power sought to discipline, tame, or pacify. With these mass incarceration methods, civilians suspected of support for insurgents could be concentrated under the surveillance and monitoring of the counterinsurgency army, their food, movement, and medical care could be closely controlled and rationed, and they could be brought to acquiesce through force, bribery, or hegemonic "persuasion." The language used to justify mass incarceration of civilians was the language of "protection," whereby ostensibly neutral civilians were to be made secure from the temptation of supporting irregular combatants. The most major recent innovation in counterinsurgency has occurred in this area, where instead of resettlement, in situ mass incarceration through improved technologies of control and surveillance can be exercised. The most obvious instance of such enclavisation is, of course, the areas within West Bank and Gaza which are bounded via a matrix of roads, checkpoints, walls, fences, barbed wire, settlements, and military patrols (Gordon 2008; Segal and Weizman 2003; Weizman 2007), and just as important, the US control of Falluja after 2004 (Carr 2008; Hills 2006; Rosen 2005). Here, the civilian population is made fully visible to the counterinsurgent army and reproduced en masse as suspect civilians subject to punitive measures and extreme ghettoisation. The utilisation of fingerprinting and iris scans to maintain a complete database of all civilians is another specific method of biopolitical control. This article will trace the evolution of the idea of population control through ethnographic and archival research, and drawing on memoirs of participants on both sides. The article will argue that civilian mass incarcerations are intended -however unsuccessfully- to produce docile subjects amenable to domination by and collaboration with counterinsurgent power (also see Foucault 2003; 2007).

Since 2004, there has been a flood of information confirming that the US systematically and pervasively tortured thousands of people in Afghanistan, Guant?namo, Iraq and CIA "black sites." This paper uses the American case to analyze the "liberal ideology of torture." What distinguishes "liberal" from "illiberal" torture is not the harshness of the practices themselves--not some mythic distinction between "torture" and "torture lite" or other euphemisms. Rather, "liberal" torture derives from: 1) the nature of the perpetrating state as a representative democracy, and 2) the ideological rationalization that interrogational violence is necessary and thus legitimate to protect an innocent and vulnerable society, and 3) the unrepresented "otherness" (i.e., foreign, alien, enemy) of those who "need" to be tortured (or do not deserve not to be). The liberal ideology of torture is popular and seductive--"our guys" used "enhanced techniques" on "terrorists/evil doers/the worst of the worst" "for us." Its opposite, the liberal ideology of prohibition, is unpopular, literally: no constituency has applied electoral muscle to enforce the prohibition, and there is bipartisan consensus to immunize US officials from accountability. Moreover, critics of the torture policy have been derided as "un-American" and "terrorist sympathizers." In the first part of this paper, I examine why torture was embraced as a "war on terror" tactic, rationalized as a necessity (rather than a choice), and popularly accepted as a legitimate exercise of state power. In the second part, I address the issue of tortureability, which has been premised on the basis of racial-religious-ethno-national identities (i.e., Muslims and Middle Easterners). In the third part, I provide a comparative analysis of the treatment of three individuals: Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen of Arab origin who was rendered to Syria for torture, subsequently found to be entirely innocent and released, but denied recourse in US courts; Muhammad al-Qahtani, a Saudi citizen who was suspected of being the "20th 9/11 hijacker" and for whom the "special methods" for Guantanamo were initially devised, which led in 2008 to a determination that he is unprosecutable but will remain imprisoned without trial; and Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, the "mastermind" of 9/11, whose brutal torture overshadows efforts and plans (as yet, still in flux) to "bring him to justice." As these cases illuminate, the liberal ideology of torture cannot be reconciled with the liberal tenets of individual rights, limited government and the rule of law.

During the first seven years of the French occupation of Syria, colonial forces faced a series of armed insurrections which culminated in the nationwide Great Revolt of 1925-7. While the French Mandate is typically seen as a unwieldy hybrid of liberalism and colonialism, this paper pursues the post-colonial argument that empire does not contradict but constitutes liberalism (Mehta 1999). It focuses on French practices of counter-insurgency during the 1920s to show that liberal and colonial models of warfare are profoundly intertwined and mutually enabling. The paper looks at the discourse, practice and spaces of colonial violence in Syria. Drawing on archival sources in Arabic and French, it shows how the practices of colonial warfare were ordered according to the peculiar spatial logic entailed by the French tradition of counter-insurgency and colonial occupation. 'La guerre coloniale' adopted a distinctive vision of the battlefield as a military, social and even geographical space. The paper details the kind of vision implied by colonial modes of controlling, ordering and even moving through spaces of insurrection in Syria. Colonial counter-insurgency entailed not simply the destruction of nationalist enemies, but the reconstruction of occupied Syria in a manner subsumed within the broader paradigm of liberal governmentality. The colonial regime of practices conveys the essence of the liberal way of both war and peace.

This study examines the gendering of public security politics in contemporary Cairo and the rise of "human security" para-statal rescue industries that have emerged with the collapse of the latest round of speculative urban development. Campaigns focus on three new categories of sexual outlaws: "perverse" populations of homeless boys, "predatory" sexual harassers that cruise depressed shopping boulevards, and "Russian" (actually Central Asian) immigrant women dancers and sex workers. These populations are seen as security threats circulating between downtown Cairo and Giza. And they haunt Cairo's new peripheral ghost towns - the ring of partially abandoned gated communities and villas that sucked up investment in the 1990s, but are now victims of the bursting speculative real-estate bubble. These ghost towns, and the trafficked sexualities associated with them, are represented as the "perverse" icons of globalization and its effect on landscape, gender, sexual and social norms. I analyze public campaigns to rescue or repress Egyptian citizens associated with these forms of sexualized threat to public security, religious-values security, and the "national security" of the nation's image. Research reveals how in a time of severe economic and political crisis, the incommensurabilities of new, experimental security doctrines reveal the emergence of new logics that articulate gendered notions of work, citizenship, and public space. I measure the collision and intersection of three governance logics (1) repressive, moralizing humanitarian-rescue logic, (2) a surprisingly resilient juridical personal rights logic, and (3) a revived anti-neoliberal, Nasserist, nationalistic workers' "rights to the city" logic. How these conflicting logics are contingently joined in the context of security and economic crises leads to surprising outcomes. For example, I look at how Egypt also ended up 'nationalizing' its sex workers (although without legalizing them). In the late 1990s, Egypt's government created a new set of laws governing private security companies meant to route out Russian crime organizations from the private policing economy. But the Cairo press and government continued to fret about the power and visibility of Russian women dancers and sex workers, widely referred to as "the Natasha Invasion." In 2003, an extraordinary series of laws were passed by the national legislature that in effect nationalized belly dancing (and by implication, sex work), saying that only Egyptian women perform for pay in Cairo's clubs. This alliance provisionally overwhelmed the 'morality politics' which typically dominates discussions of cultural security and sexual rights.