How the Algerian War Made Modern Counterinsurgency

🎧 In this episode, I review Terrence G. Peterson’s Revolutionary Warfare: How the Algerian War Made Modern Counterinsurgency, a sharp and unsettling account of how the French army’s defeat in Algeria produced a doctrine that outlived empire itself. Peterson shows how Pacification fused violence, social reform, and surveillance into a coherent model of warfare, one that treated society as the battlefield and civilians as the primary objective. Far from disappearing with Algerian independence, these techniques traveled globally, shaping US counterinsurgency from Vietnam to Iraq.

This is not just a book about Algeria, but about why counterinsurgency keeps failing while remaining stubbornly influential, and what that legacy still means today.

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