From the Gallic Wars to the Conquest of the Americas and the Genocide in Gaza: Counterinsurgency as a Tool to Subdue Unruly Peoples

Ayman El Hakim, 23/1/2026

From ancient empires to contemporary powers, the same logic runs through the centuries: governing through violence populations that refuse domination. Gaza is not an exception, but the culmination of a long imperial history.

 

Counterinsurgency is often presented as a military doctrine born in the twentieth century, forged in colonial wars and later refined in the age of drones and algorithms. This is a comforting illusion. In reality, counterinsurgency is one of the oldest modes of imperial governance, experimented with long before modernity, systematized in the nineteenth century, industrialized in the twentieth, and today normalized under the language of security and humanitarianism.

What changes are not the fundamental objectives, but the vocabularies, the tools, and the thresholds of acceptability.

The Original Matrix: Conquer, Disperse, Erase

The wars of conquest in the Americas constitute one of the first modern laboratories of counterinsurgency. Confronted with organized, rooted, and resistant Indigenous societies, Spanish, Portuguese, and later Anglo-USAmerican colonial powers developed a grammar of domination that remains tragically familiar: the destruction of villages and subsistence economies, forced displacement and death marches, confinement in reservations, the fragmentation of communities, and racial and religious dehumanization.

The Indian Wars in the United States extended this logic throughout the nineteenth century. The goal was not merely to defeat Indigenous nations militarily, but to break their collective capacity to exist as peoples. The reservation was not a space of protection; it was a tool of permanent pacification, a technology of confinement.

Yet these populations were never passive. They resisted through guerrilla warfare, mobility, intertribal alliances, and the clandestine preservation of languages, rituals, and memory. Cultural survival was — and remains — a form of political resistance.

Before Modernity: Counterinsurgency Without a Mask

This imperial grammar did not originate with modern colonialism. It was already fully operative in Antiquity. The Gallic Wars, as staged by Julius Caesar, amount to counterinsurgency avant la lettre: exemplary massacres, systematic destruction of cities and granaries, mass enslavement of populations, and alliances with local elites to fragment solidarities. Rome understood that insurrection was not merely military, but social and political.

The repression of internal revolts — from the Servile Wars to the Jewish revolts in Judea — radicalized this logic: collective punishment, staged terror, deportations, territorial and symbolic erasure. The destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE and the renaming of the province after 135 were aimed not merely at defeating an enemy, but at destroying a people as a historical subject. Antiquity reveals without disguise what later empires would seek to obscure: counterinsurgency is first and foremost a technique of governance rooted in fear of unruly communities.

The Nineteenth Century: Empire Rationalized

Nineteenth-century European empires — British, French, Russian — systematized these practices. Counterinsurgency became an administrative science. In Algeria, India, Ireland, and southern Africa, the same methods recur: territorial grid systems, population registries, collective punishments, forced displacement, and the destruction of local economies.

“Pacification” was never peaceful. Its purpose was to produce a governable population stripped of autonomous political structures. In response, resistance took many forms: armed insurrections, clandestine networks, tax refusal, resistance to forced labor, symbolic reappropriation of land, and oral transmission of forbidden histories. Empire could occupy territory, but it could never govern without fracture.

The Twentieth Century: Counterinsurgency as Explicit Doctrine

With wars of decolonization and the Cold War, counterinsurgency became a formalized doctrine. In Malaya, Algeria, and Vietnam, the population was explicitly identified as the center of gravity of the conflict. Populations were regrouped, displaced, surveilled, tortured, and “developed.” Camps, “new villages,” strategic hamlets, and forbidden zones were not anomalies — they were the core of the system.

Politically, these strategies failed. Populations developed counter-counterinsurgencies: infiltration of imposed structures, reversal of colonial institutions, politicization of suffering, internationalization of struggles, and the construction of liberation narratives. Algeria and Vietnam demonstrate that a war can be lost militarily yet won politically and historically.

The Twenty-First Century: Containment Rather Than Conquest

The twenty-first century marks a major shift. The objective is no longer always to conquer or integrate, but to contain populations deemed irredeemable. Counterinsurgency becomes urban, permanent, technologized, and legally euphemized.

Gaza represents the extreme expression of this transformation: blockade, total enclosure, cyclical destruction, humanitarian dependency, and constant surveillance. Everything converges toward the management of life and death on a massive scale. What is happening in Gaza is not a moral or historical anomaly, but the most radical contemporary actualization of ancient imperial logics: governing a people by destroying the very conditions of its collective existence.

Yet resistance persists, often in invisibilized forms: the maintenance of social solidarities, self-organization of aid, transmission of memory amid annihilation, refusal of symbolic erasure, and the inscription of the Palestinian narrative in global space. Resistance is not reducible to arms; it is ontological — the act of continuing to exist as a people.

In a quieter register, Western Sahara operates according to the same contemporary grammar of counterinsurgency. Sand walls, territorial fragmentation, settler colonization, economic marginalization, and the criminalization of civil resistance: domination functions less through open warfare than through freezing, normalization, and the erosion of time. As in Gaza, international law is instrumentalized not to resolve the conflict, but to suspend it indefinitely. One is a loud laboratory; the other a silent one — but the logic is the same.

A Historical Constant: The Political Failure of Counterinsurgency

Across the longue durée, [long term] one conclusion is unavoidable: counterinsurgency can destroy, displace, and kill — but it consistently fails to produce lasting legitimacy. It radicalizes the societies it seeks to pacify, generates irreversible memories of violence, and transforms domination into chronic instability.

History teaches not the omnipotence of empires, but their structural fragility in the face of peoples who refuse to disappear.

Conclusion

From the Gallic Wars to the enclosed territories of the twenty-first century, counterinsurgency appears for what it is: not a response to violence, but a fear of politics — the fear of peoples who insist on deciding their own future. Every time it is imposed, it reveals less the strength of the dominant order than its inability to tolerate the existence of another historical horizon. And every time it fails, it leaves behind what empires fear most: peoples militarily dominated, yet politically irreducible.