Weaponizing Civilian Protection: Counterinsurgency and Collateral Damage in Afghanistan with Thomas Gregory (Oxford UP, 2025)

Thomas Gregory is Associate Professor in Politics and International Relations at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.  His new book, Weaponizing Civilian Protection (Oxford UP, 2025), exposes how coalition efforts to minimize and mitigate civilian casualties during the recent conflict in Afghanistan also worked to rationalize the harm inflicted upon Afghan civilians. 

Drawing on declassified documents and interviews with coalition officials, the book traces how civilian protection was reimagined as a martial tactic rather than a humanitarian imperative, with coalition officials reframing civilian casualties as strategic setbacks that could imperil the entire mission. 

Gregory examines the restrictions that coalition officials imposed on combat operations to minimize unnecessary harm to civilians, whilst showing how these restrictions served to constitute civilian casualties as necessary in certain situations, rendering their lives losable and their deaths ungrievable. At the same time, it examines the post-incident mitigation measures coalition officials used to prevent civilian casualties becoming strategic setbacks, including the condolence payments that were offered when civilians were harmed. Rather than seeking to make amends for the harm inflicted upon them, it claims that these post-incident mitigation measures are best characterized as a necropolitical device concerned with managing mortality more effectively. Crucially, Weaponizing Civilian Protection shows that co-opting civilian protection into a martial logic that is more concerned with winning wars than protecting the civilian population works to devalue and dehumanize civilians, leaving them more vulnerable to death and destruction in future conflicts. 

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