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Wednesday, February 27th, 12:00 PM - 1:30PM, Truland 555
"Counterinsurgency and Culture: US Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan"
Dr. Rochelle Davis is an Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology in the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. During the academic year 2001-2012, she was a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
Event Video Part 1 - Presentation
About the Lecture:
In 2006, culture took on a new role in war with the release of Field Manual 3-24: Counterinsurgency (The COIN Manual). Cultural knowledge was positioned not only be useful for mission effectiveness and battlespace awareness, but that it would also help win the hearts and minds of civilians. The resulting strategizing resulted in an internal change to integrate culture into U.S. military strategy, tactics, and training, and a subsequent push to define what the U.S. military meant by culture and to implement that definition into concrete policy and related training activities. Research conducted between 2007 and 2012, including interviews with US troops and Iraqis, lays out the culture arguments, charts the challenges and conflicts around COIN and culture, and offers lessons for military engagement with culture and conflict.
Research:
Dr. Davis’ research focuses on refugees and conflict. Her book, Palestinian Village Histories: Geographies of the Displaced, (Stanford University Press) was was co-winner of the Middle East Studies Association’s Albert Hourani Book Award to recognize outstanding publishing in Middle East studies. The book addresses how Palestinian refugees today write histories of their villages that were destroyed in the 1948 war, and the stories and commemorations of village life that are circulated and enacted in the diaspora. This work is based over 120 village memorial books composed by refugees and displaced persons in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel, and ethnographic research in these communities. Her book chapter “Mapping the Past, Recreating the Homeland” on the subject appears in Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory, edited by Lila Abu Lughod and Ahmad Sa’di (Columbia 2007).
Professor Davis’ current research focuses on the role of culture in the U.S. military in the war in Iraq. She examines the cultural training material produced by military institutions and contractors about Iraqis, Arabs, and Islam. Through interviews with U.S. soldiers and marines, Dr. Davis’ research discusses how the servicemen and women assess the cultural training they received, their experiences with Iraqi culture and society. See her publications page for articles and book chapters she has published on the subject. Dr. Davis has presented this research at the TRADOC Culture Summit IV, two University of Chicago conferences (“Reconsidering American Power” and “Anthropology and Global Counterinsurgency”), the Middle East Studies Association annual meeting in 2008, the National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations, and the American Studies Association. The research has been funded by Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, a CCAS Oman Faculty Research Grant, and The American Academic Research Institute in Iraq.
Her past research has explored Arab and Arab American identity and Palestinian social and cultural life prior to 1948. She has also collected over fifty oral histories of Palestinian Jerusalemites about their lives in the twentieth century.
-Please RSVP to Barre Hussen. Email: [email protected] or Phone: 703-993-1930