Making Modern Counterinsurgency with Dr. Terrence Peterson

Today’s special episode is an interview with Dr. Terrence G. Peterson. Peterson is a historian of Modern France and the French Empire whose research and teaching focus on decolonization, migration, and warfare. He has published articles in a number of academic journals including the Journal of Social History, the Journal of Contemporary History, the Journal of North African Studies, and French Politics, Culture & Society.  In 2024 he received a Society for Military History Vandervort Prize for outstanding journal article in the field of military history. In 2025, he received a National Endowment for the Humanities Faculty Award to support 12 months of research on his second book project, which examines the nearly seventy-year history of the Rivesaltes Camp in southern France to understand why migrant detention camps emerged as a quintessential tool of modern governance and remain so today. Today we are discussing his new book Revolutionary Warfare: How the Algerian War Made Modern Counterinsurgency.

Gary

Thank you very much for being on the show, Dr. Terence Peterson. Your book, Revolutionary Warfare: How the Algerian War Made Modern Counterinsurgency is an incredible work. Now, your book's subtitle,  How the Algerian War Made Modern Counterinsurgency is a very thought-provoking, intriguing idea. Can you explain why this war set the stage for modern warfare?

Terrence

Sure. And first, let me say thanks, Gary, for having me on. It's a pleasure.  The Algerian War really occurs at this precipitous moment in history. We're about 10, 15 years out from the end of World War II.  Colonies around the world are becoming independent countries. The Algerian War itself is a highly mediatized event.  Algiers is a big press hub. There's lots of international press there. The war sort of starts with these terror attacks in Algiers and lots of people are watching. And in fact, part of the strategy for the National Liberation Front which is, or the FLN, I'll call it today, which is this organization that's fighting for Algerian independence is to draw as much press and diplomatic attention as possible. They seek this attention and the French seek this attention and it really makes the Algerian war into a crucible for this much larger global process of decolonization.

Gary

Let's do some background before diving into the Algerian situation. Can you explain how World War II led to the decline of European empires?

Terrence

This is a great classic question.  We sort of know intrinsically that World War II changes something about the world, and it takes a while before that shakes out in colonial spaces.  So the most immediate effect for empires is that in many places, European colonial control is cut off.  So, Indochina, which becomes modern-day Vietnam and a couple other countries, is the perfect example of this. The the French state in colonial Indochina is literally cut off from France after the fall of France. But World War II also opens all these existential questions.

Who's a citizen, who gets the right to citizenship if they're fighting to liberate European countries like France or Great Britain from, sort of the shadow of the Nazi empire.

What kind of racial violence is tolerable, if at all.  Empires are predicated on racial difference. They articulate them in different ways. The French famously don't like to talk explicitly about race, although they do that plenty. But the question really arises after the war driven by colonized peoples themselves.  M.A. Césaire writes this tract where he says Nazism is just colonialism re-imported. It's a boomerang effect back in the Europe.

And so all these existential questions arise both about what's owed to colonized peoples who helped fight and win World War II, about how do you retrench colonial rule, both morally, but just actually and materially after this war, and so the push for independence or autonomy or some greater form of home rule is really one of the defining questions for most European colonial powers, but especially for the French after 1945.

Gary

The Algerian War was not occurring in a vacuum. A number of important events involving France are occurring during the early period. Can you tell us how global setbacks, particularly in the imperial sphere, spurred Algerian independence?

Terrence

Yeah, so this is a great question.  Because the fight for Algerian independence is often portrayed as a sort of Franco-Algerian story. And of course, it really deeply is a Franco-Algerian story. It's about how this event unfolded on the ground, but it's also about this sort of climate, what's happening all around.  What you pointed to in 1954 with Dien Bien Phu, the French essentially send an expeditionary military force to Indochina after in 1945, and they fight for nine years to try and retake the colony. Obviously, we know that doesn't happen, and the French military suffers this catastrophic defeat in 1954 at Dien Bien Phu, and the French colony of Indochina ends. We get North and South Vietnam. You also have all sorts of other events going on.

Independence movements across North Africa in Tunisia and Morocco, which sit on both of Algeria's borders, are not only pushing for independence, but fighting really violent, powerful street protests at the time. And the French military is intervening and fighting wars in police actions, they call it. But they're active in Tunisia and Morocco.

In fact, those two countries gain their independence as French prime minister sort of says, like, look, we need to really focus on Algeria, which is a big deal. And the French are viewing this whole struggle sort of geopolitically.  One of the big curiosities is why in 1956 did the French send troops to invade the Suez Canal alongside Great Britain?  Why should they care. And the answer is that they see the struggles for independence in Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria all connected to a newly independent Egypt and this sort of Egypt fomenting this pan-Arab subversive war across their North African colonies. Of course, they're really greatly exaggerating that.

But this is a serious motive for them to intervene militarily in Egyptian affairs. So the French Empire is fraying at its ends, and it's fraying really violently, and it's doing so for a decade before the Algerian War. I didn't mention the Madagascar uprising, the Malagasy uprising, another violent revolution that the French military puts down. Eventually, of course, they also pull out of Madagascar.

Gary

Let's look at the early years of the war and the early attempts by France to hold on to Algeria. What were some of the major reforms the military first instituted?

Terrence

So the military takes on this métier or this sort of idea that it's own special responsibility to do reform very early in the war.  And part of the reason for that is is that colonial officials have been calling for reforms in Algeria for a really long time.

They're really trying to liberalize the state.  Some people put less sort of credence in that, but in 1955, we have this new governor general of Algeria named Jacques Soustelle and he's super invested in this.

And he calls for all sorts of things.  He says Algeria is supposedly part of metropolitan France rather than just a colony and so he says it should have the same economy, it should have the same laws, it should have the same labor practices and not only that but we have excluded Algerians because the colonial state's an extractive exclusionary state.  He says we've excluded Algerians for so long we have to discriminate in their favor and create all sorts of social programs to employ Algerians, to train them for the jobs of the future, to educate them, basically sort of make up for all the things colonialism didn't do. Well, he doesn't have the boots on the ground to do this. He faces this powerful settler lobby that doesn't wanna do this. And so he turns to the military. He creates a special administrative sections. These are officers that hold civil and military powers. They start to carry out reforms like, instantiating new local codes, carrying out economic reforms. And the French military picks up on this writ large under his successor in 1956, where they really become the sort of militarized arm of economic reform and social reform.

Gary

So I think in particular one of the things that you bring up in your book that is very interesting and it is a very thorough investigation of how modern militaries are very different from what they had been and are different then from what a lot of people imagine it.

You bring up the idea of the military as a social welfare program, something which I think a lot of people might find strange. Can you explain how the military was involved in the Algerian economy and remaking society?

Terrence

Yeah, so there's all sorts of programs that the French military launches. And I have to say at the very beginning that the French army is still doing lots of violence. They're very famously using torture on an endemic level. They essentially imprisoned two million Algerians between barbed wire, in barbed wire camps for the duration of the war.

But at the same time, they're sort of imagining that what their job is, is to help set up communal reform. So to take the old sort of administrative structures of the state and replace it with the same administrative structure as was in the French communes in French cities.

They launch open-air schools for kids, sports programs for kids, all with the ideas of making Algerians healthier, more hygienic, teaching them things like how to punch a time clock, how to apply for social security benefits. They open sewing workshops for women. They arrive sort of in the countryside with guns, but also with sewing machines with the idea that they're going to spark folk industry. And this is all tied to their sort of broader project. They really see themselves as carrying out an accelerated reform. They're going to make up for everything that colonialism hasn't done to make Algeria's economy modern.

And part of the thinking behind this is that if they're more modern, they're more French. They're sort of like Pierre Bourdieu, avant la lettre. If we make people adopt French habits, they'll feel more French.

So there's that part of it. There's a sort of a propaganda part that says look, we're bringing you all these social services. We're bringing you food aid.  By the way, why do Algerians need food aid? Because they've been just stripped of resources amidst this war.  But we're bringing food aid.  We're building bridges. We're building town halls.  The other part of that, that's less propaganda and fits more with this sort of idea of how they're going to reconstruct society is that they have this sort of secret plan to rebuild Algerian society. They want to, Algeria has these big extended patrilineal structures. Your extended family really matters for your local politics and for who you know and your support network.

And the French army says, no, we have to refound Algerian society around the nuclear family in its individual household. And we're going to do that by setting up these sort of clandestine village councils and these women's groups and these youth groups. And we're going to use these to sort of plow down Algerian society to its roots and rebuild it as a sort of Western society based on the nuclear family.

Gary

Yeah, I was particularly interested in your talk of the military as this social program because as someone who knows perhaps not too much about the French case, but I think that a lot of people that I talk to are pretty taken aback when I point out that the single largest welfare organization in the world today is the United States military. A lot of them are pretty shocked by that because they wouldn't think of it as a large-scale welfare program, and yet this is something that provides healthcare care to its troops. it provides it's one of the only universal or total government-run healthcare care systems in the U.S., provides education, retirement pensions, also provides numerous grants. I mean, you can apply for grants to study history. One of my old advisors actually got a grant from the Pentagon to publish in history.

Not only that, but the US military invests in a lot of colleges. For example, MIT in I think the 1950s, something like 50% of its funding came from the Pentagon. And as a result, you get stuff like the internet, which originally began as a ah early communication device for troops in the field. That was the intent, but then it ballooned into something else.  So I think a lot of people don't really understand how modern militaries are not just things that fight wars, they are very much integrated into societies.

Terrence

Yeah, part of it has to do with the way that soldiers and strategic thinkers understand war after 1945.  All of these sorts of programs, they're meant to address concerns about mission readiness, like will we have the soldiers we need?

Are our civilians going to be able to resist the sort of subversive propaganda coming from our enemies and feel a sufficient level of patriotism, that when we call on them, they'll be ready to serve.

But, I mean, they're literally concerned about psychological warfare coming from the Soviet Union.  And so that there is a sort of slippage there in their thinking. A lot of these youth programs, for example, they target Algerian youths for sure. They are concerned with making Algerian youths into sort of like new model citizens. And part of that is because they see Algerian youths as a vulnerable population who might be corrupted by the enemy,  They're worried about Algerian youths absolutely.  Part of the reason for that is they see the Algerian youths as the material for the FLM.  These are the fighters for the FLM.  Or they are potentially the material for building a new Algerian state.  But they are sort of pre-programmed to worry about youths already because they're worried about French youths.

World War II is super tough on French society.  And they're worried that young French people like don't have a sufficient level of patriotism, don't have a sufficient level of geopolitical knowledge, aren't physically fit enough to serve as soldiers.

And so a lot of these social programs come out of a concern on the part of the military that they're facing a sort of new existential era of warfare and they need to create a population that's going to serve as a basis for national defense.

Gary

Yeah, no. And I think on a very basic level, one reason that militaries do tend to explode in the modern era is that you can always get funding for the military.  Anytime a politician wants to get funding for any other project, it's usually hard to get through. But if you say that something is for national defense, you can get anything passed.  It really, Voltaire said it hundreds of years ago. He said that there is always money to be found when men are sent to the frontiers to fight, but not when they are needing care in their own country. Isn't quite the Voltaire quote, but it's something like that.  And again, I don't know particularly in know the French case, but I know in the United States that especially,  this is how America can compete with the rest of the world economically, because for so long, the United States government would not okay

the sort of welfare programs to help particularly people of color, particularly black Americans, because there was this idea that, black people were taking white people's hard earned money. And so how do you take these people who don't have a job and you know don't have the ability to integrate in society? Well, you make soldiers out of them.  That's how you give them a paycheck.

Terrence

And I should note here that while sort of the flavor of military welfare changes after World War II, there's a long tradition in the French Empire of welfare and military service being tied together, particularly in Algeria, I mean, in World War I, and in World War II, you have all of these Algerians that serve in the French military, and they then have a powerful claim. And the French state recognizes that claim that you know they deserve healthcare. They deserve pensions. They deserve family allocations to help raise their kids decently. After all, they defended the nation. So there's a sort of relationship here between military service and welfare that has long allowed people to lay claims on the state and for state funders to justify those funds. And it almost gets turned on its head in the Algerian case that the French military says, look, we've got the logistics, we've got the know-how. If we want to change something big about society, we're already in this game

Gary Girod

Absolutely. So you talked about the transformation of Algerian society away from these larger networks down to the nuclear family, but there were other attempts to remake Algerian society. One was granting women the right to vote and by creating this sort of Western society, one where women are involved, one where traditional Islamic roles are not adhered to.  Can you talk about these and other modernizing attempts by the French military to remake Algerian society?

Terrence

Sure, so the women's question is one that is really contentious and sort of known about, but is actually kind of surprisingly, doesn't align with popular narratives about it. So very famously in 1958 there are these mass protests in Algiers and they lead to the declaration. Military folks show up and they declare a committee of public safety and a suspension of the normal rule of law.  And very famously as part of this moment, these mass protests in May 1958, Algerian women come out and burn their veils publicly and sort of renounce tradition and Islamic tradition and whatever you want to call it. This is all engineered by the Army Psychological Warfare Division.

There's no smoking gun in the archive, but there's enough folks who've worked on this that have really demonstrated pretty clearly that that this is an orchestrated event. And it's one the Army abandons very quickly. They realize that the idea of getting women to abandon the veil is not at all popular.

What they start to focus on instead is getting women out of the home and engaged and serving a sort of the role of like a bourgeois consumer housewife. And so they open these women's circles in coordination with French and Muslim women from the middle classes, what the French call the evolué, which literally means it evolved. It's got some racial baggage to it. They form these women's circles where they try to get women out of the home thinking about themselves as political actors. And in fact, the French army stakes the sort of popular referendums to approve the new Fifth Republic Constitution and bring De Gaulle back to power on the participation of women.  That said, women participate in really strategic ways.

They sort of understand the propaganda value of this program and resist it in all sorts of creative ways.  My favorite is there's this small town south of Algiers and all these women show up and they're supposed to hear lectures on like their duty to vote and like how to balance the family finances and like how to apply for family benefits, and instead they just talk over the team who's supposed to propagandize to them to the point that they sort of give up in frustration. This is a great example of passive resistance. So there's really a fixation on evolving, in the words of the French army, evolving Algerian women to become sort of emancipated modern women but it's really based on a very shallow understanding of French or Algerian society and it falls short really pretty quickly.

Gary

Let's get to the last few years in the war. It's very complicated and could easily take several hours to do it justice, but can you briefly explain how France went from feeling like it held control over Algeria around 1957 to the entire situation falling apart in just a few years?

Terrence

That's a great question. And so I'll talk about it in terms of stuff happening inside Algeria and stuff happening outside Algeria. So the French army... really very effectively, so we have this sort of moment where the French military assumes civil power and brings Charles de Gaulle back to power in 1958. And the French army is sort of at the height of its confidence. They've got a new commander who comes in the next year in 1959, General Maurice Challe. He launches this ambitious, what he calls the Challe plan to reconquer Algerian wipeout, Algerian militants. And it looks like this is working.

They plow across the countryside. They really dramatically reduce the capacity of the FLN's internal sort of combat units to do anything at all. And they also steamroll the population in the process. And in December 1960, without any provocation from the FLN or nationalist actors,

sort of spurred by a visit of Charles de Gaulle to Algeria. Algerians in major cities rise up en masse. They protest in the streets. They sort of openly bear Algerian flags they've sown themselves. They declare that they will never recognize French sovereignty and they want Algerian independence.

At the same time outside Algeria, the FLN is winning win after win after win in the diplomatic sphere. They reach out to all these partner countries and get them to go to the UN and vote. They actually call the question on whether the French should allow Algerians to vote for their own independence. The UN votes that yes, they should allow Algerians to vote. It's really this sort of this organic movement on the part of Algerians paired with this really strategic and successful effort on the part of the FLN to change diplomacy and win legitimacy for themselves, that all of a sudden it looks like the supports of empire are hollow and it's teetering.

Gary

One major myth that persists to this day is that France won the war but lost the political battle. Please dispel this tiresome myth.

Terrence

(Laughs out loud) You've picked up on one of my favorite things to talk about which is that you can't win a war militarily and lose it politically. This is for folks who do military history. This is the basic question of Karl von Clausewitz who argues that war is an extension of politics.

But part of the way that this myth, which by the way is spread by French officers themselves after the war, is they're trying to market their ideas as a sort of universal solution for other upheavals in the era. Part of the way that this persists is that military campaign that Challe runs. It looks super duper successful and then all of a sudden there's political developments outside of Algeria. The main thing that happens is that Challe and a couple other generals, Raoul Salan,

They launch a coup in April 1961. The coup sort of immediately fails. They go into hiding. They form a right-wing terrorist organization to sort of fight for Algeria still being part of France.  And Charles de Gaulle reasserts civilian power over the military. He says immediately, we are gonna allow Algerians to vote on self-determination and their independence. And so then French officers are able to say, well, like, look, regardless of all that political mumbo jumbo, our strategies were working until politics intervened.  And part of the way that they really solidify this impression around the world is that when things are at their height of success, under Challe, and they look like they're doing really well, they bring in all sorts of military officers from foreign countries to show them what the French military is doing. And so when they say like, look, it was going great until politics intervened, a lot of folks around the world are really compelled by that argument.

Gary

Yeah, it is, I think as someone who observes the world and does try to make it a little bit better, it is very depressing that this seems to take place anytime there is a morally gray and failed war by a major power. I mean, I think as historians, especially in your case, being a military historian, that you're aware that imperial powers, they don't lose wars because they're too humane and they're too kind to the people they deal with, despite the fact that that seems to be a popular talking point within these societies. So you have France on the one hand, I can't help but think of the American case with famously Vietnam, but now Iraq and Afghanistan. And I'm not going to go too much into that because we're focusing on French history. But if you study any of these, the United States did not lose any of these wars because they were too kind to the populations.

In the famous case of Vietnam, the United States dropped more bombs on the Vietnamese than all of the bombs they dropped during World War II when they were fighting this giant global war.

Terrence

Yeah.

Gary

So these countries, they're not losing wars because they're too kind or they're too adhering to the sentiments and feelings of the local populations.

They lost them, in fact, in largely because of the exact opposite, that they were far too brutal and they convinced more and more people in these regions to stand up and fight against them

Terrence

Yeah, it's really the the violence and the immiseration of this war that drives Algerians to reject French rule. One to two million Algerians are detained in barbed wire camps. They're sort of named new villages or recruitment camps euphemistically, but it's essentially a barbed wire tent camp.

If you look at the numbers of Algerians who are engaged by these programs, I think something like 700,000 young people participate in these youth sports camps, that number is dwarfed by  the young people that are living in barbed wire camps. So there's a sort of myth that, oh, you know if only we did it right or with enough resources or with a zealous enough, personnel, it would have gone right. And this is a sort of foundational myth that structures French counterinsurgency throughout and then gets fed into Cold War counterinsurgency writ large as the canon of counter-insurgence from the French, British, American empires is all sort of coming together in the mid 1960s. And you can see this sort of stabbed in the back myth of counterinsurgency, anytime it repeatedly, and it repeatedly does not work, this is the idea. Congress didn't allocate enough resources. Oh, our our staff wasn't committed well enough. ah If only we had more time. It's always some sort of, it's never that the strategy itself was actually deeply alienating and profoundly misunderstood the society that it sought to work on, which was definitely the case in Algeria.

Gary

So final question, how did the Algerian war impact counterinsurgency strategy across the world?

Terrence

So this is a great question to end on because one of the things I'm often asked is, so does your book argue that France sort of invented counterinsurgency and everybody took it and ran with it? And the answer to that question is no. I think we have to understand this moment and here's where the sort of precipitous moment that we talked about at the beginning matters. This moment is a moment when lots of Western militaries are trying to rethink what they know about warfare after World War II, in light of the Cold War, in light of new techniques of propaganda, in light of mass politics and mass media. And the French become a really integral part of that conversation. And so they help form the canon of counterinsurgency. They're a constitutive part. They help drive the sense that populations and not territories are really the objective of modern warfare. So they're not actually doing something radically new or different from their counterparts. What they're doing is they're capturing the sort of zeitgeist of a moment into a doctrine that is easily portable. They can send it to other militaries. Other militaries can use it and they can say, oh yes, look, we need to fixate on capturing the population rather than capturing the territory. And so in that sense, they really helped shape the the ontology of the Cold War.  The understanding of like, who's the enemy? How do they work? What do you need to do to defend a territory from them?

Gary

And specifically, you talk about one famous member of the French military who wrote a book, and then that book is going to be picked up and read by other military figures, particularly those in the United States. And this, the lessons of the Algerian War are going to be part then, of this global strategy by Western powers, particularly the United States, in fighting counterinsurgency.

Terrence

Yeah, definitely.  So Roger Tranquier is one. His book, Modern Warfare, is still taught in professional military education across the U.S. Another one is David Galula, who, by the way, is not at all important in Algeria and who sort of vulgarizes what French strategy is for an American audience because he spent most of his career as a liaison officer to American military officers and knows his audience really well.

And their writings get picked up right away. Galula participates, it's not very often as historians that we can sort of point to an exact moment when a canon of literature gets established. But in counterinsurgency, we have an exact moment, and that's 1964. The Rand Corporation holds a conference on counterinsurgency to figure out what is this new kind of warfare. David Galula is there with all sorts of American counterinsurgents and British counterinsurgents, and he becomes a really foundational text. He's rediscovered again in 2007 by David Petraeus and rehabilitated to think about Iraq. So these ideas stick around in their original form.

Gary

The book, Revolutionary Warfare: How the Algerian War Made Modern Counterinsurgency, a great read. Thank you very much, Dr. Terrence Peterson, for being on the show.

Terrence

Thank you so much Thanks for having me.