It has been a busy week with Nikki Haley announcing her 2024 bid, Don Lemmon shares his views on a “woman’s prime”, new information regarding the Chinese balloon, and the kids are not driving.
Counterinsurgency, the violent suppression of armed insurrection, is among the dominant kinds of war in contemporary world politics. Often linked to protecting populations and reconstructing legitimate political orders, it has appeared in other times and places in very different forms – and has taken on a range of politics in doing so. How did it arrive at its present form, and what generated these others, along the way?
Spanning several centuries and four detailed case studies, The Counterinsurgent Imagination: A New Intellectual History(Cambridge UP, 2022) unpacks and explores this intellectual history through counterinsurgency manuals. These military theoretical and instructional texts, and the practitioners who produced them, made counterinsurgency possible in practice. By interrogating these processes, this book explains how counter-insurrectionary war eventually took on its late twentieth and early twenty-first century forms. It shows how and why counterinsurgent ideas persist, despite recurring failures.
Yi Ning Chang is a PhD student in political theory at the Department of Government at Harvard University. She works on the history of contemporary political thought, postcolonial theory, and the global histories of anticolonialism and anti-imperialism in Southeast Asia. Yi Ning can be reached at yiningchang@g.harvard.edu.
Spanning a century of fraught history, Being Indigenous in Jim Crow Virginia: Powhatan People and the Color Line (University of Oklahoma Press, 2022) by Dr. Laura J. Feller describes the critical strategic work that tidewater Virginia Indians, descendants of the seventeenth-century Algonquian Powhatan chiefdom, undertook to sustain their Native identity in the face of deep racial hostility from segregationist officials, politicians, and institutions.
Like other Southeastern Native groups living under Jim Crow regimes, tidewater Native groups and individuals fortified their communities by founding tribal organizations, churches, and schools; they displayed their Indianness in public performances; and they enlisted whites, including well-known ethnographers, to help them argue for their Native distinctness. Describing an arduous campaign marked by ingenuity, conviction, and perseverance, Dr. Feller shows how these tidewater Native people drew on their shared histories as descendants of Powhatan peoples, and how they strengthened their bonds through living and marrying within clusters of Native Virginians, both on and off reservation lands. She also finds that, by at times excluding African Americans from Indian organizations and Native families, Virginian Indians themselves reinforced racial segregation while they built their own communities.
Even as it paved the way to tribal recognition in Virginia, the tidewater Natives’ sustained efforts chronicled in this book demonstrate the fluidity, instability, and persistent destructive power of the construction of race in America.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
Days after three objects were shot down over North American air space, President Biden confirmed they were not linked to Chinese spy activity – and they were taken down out of an abundance of caution.
A report from the special grand jury investigating alleged election interference by former President Donald Trump and his allies was partially made public. It found no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, and concluded that "one or more" witnesses who testified may have committed perjury.
We'll be taking short break for the President's Day holiday, with a new episode on Tuesday, February 21st!
Crooked Coffee is officially here. Our first blend, What A Morning, is available in medium and dark roasts. Wake up with your own bag at crooked.com/coffee
We'll update you about a grand jury out of Georgia that's been investigating former President Trump and his allies: what criminal charges it's now recommending.
Also, what federal officials are now saying about a toxic train derailment in Ohio as lawsuits start piling up.
Plus, where there's a new law giving women time off work for period pain, the odd, human-like AI responses showing up on the search engine, Bing, and the world's biggest Carnival is making a comeback today.
Those stories and more news to know in around 10 minutes!
Next Friday will mark one year since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a war against Ukraine, a war that many anticipated would end in a matter of days after the invasion. Yet, Ukraine, with the support of America and its European allies, has succeeded in significantly weakening Russia and preventing its victory.
For Putin, the current military campaign in Ukraine is "one of greatly reduced expectations," Victoria Coates, a senior research fellow in international affairs and national security at The Heritage Foundation, says. "He has gone from wanting to capture the entire country to just trying to capture some small chunks of eastern Ukraine, so that is in and of itself something of a victory, for a starter."
Although U.S. support for Ukraine is necessary, Coates says, the Biden administration owes it to the Americans to ensure that the billions of dollars in aid sent to Ukraine is being used as intended, and that a plan exists for how the U.S. will provide assistance moving forward.
Coates joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss the situation on the ground in Ukraine, how long the war that began last Feb. 24 likely will go on, and reports of Russia's stealing Ukrainian children and placing them in “reeducation camps.”
Awards season can be a frustrating moment for Black writers in Hollywood, when even their most successful shows and films are frequently overlooked. Rodney Barnes has built a thriving career by telling stories of Black life, from “Everybody Hates Chris,” to “The Boondocks,” to “Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty.” On today’s episode of A Word, he joins Jason Johnson to discuss the challenges and rewards of his rise as a screenwriter and producer. His latest work is a graphic novel, “Blacula: Return of the King.”
Guest: Screenwriter Rodney Barnes
Podcast production by Kristie Taiwo-Makanjuola
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Make an impact this Black History Month by helping Macy’s on their mission to fund UNCF scholarships for HBCU students. Go to macys.com/purpose to learn more.
Come to think of it, a giant balloon seems like a pretty conspicuous way to spy on another country. So what was that Chinese spy balloon doing above the U.S.—and what have American planes been shooting down since?
Guest: Shane Harris, Washington Post reporter covering intelligence and national security.
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