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Inderjeet Parmar, Indian wars everywhere: colonial violence and the shadow doctrines of empire, International Affairs, Volume 100, Issue 4, July 2024, Pages 1812–1813, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiae164
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During the military operation that ended Osama bin Laden's life, Barack Obama code-named him ‘Geronimo’, after the famous resister of US colonial expansion (whose real name was Goyakhla). The mere conflation of the name of an anti-colonial fighter with a far more ambiguous figure who fought US power is instructive—anyone who resists it is a target, because US power is, by definition, right for the world. Hence, even during Obama's presidency, racialized imagery of wars for civilization and against savagery remained the norm. In order to understand why that was the case, Stefan Aune argues that in American military culture there is still a ‘shadow doctrine’ of racialized, colonial thinking and attitudes. These have developed and renewed with each successive war on America's ‘internal’ and global peripheries. The artificial divide between domestic and global war-making collapses under the weight of evidence supplied in this remarkable book. Aune has performed a real service, providing the first systematic history of exactly how this process works and what it means. In brief, he shows how ‘ideas about race have always been present in the contours of US militarism, and Indian/fighting has been a mechanism for transmitting some of those ideas across time and space’ (p. 5). Before the US went out into the world, its military had perfected its art of ‘irregular warfare’ during wars of continental conquest and extermination. In a tragically neat and tidy manner, the book ends with an analysis of the US police and the use of irregular warfare at home. Most recently, this was visible in the suppression of the Sioux Standing Rock pipeline movement of 2020 that sought to protect Native sovereignty.
