Sociology

This article seeks to understand the dynamics of twenty-first century military intervention by the United States and its allies. Based on an analysis of Bush and Obama administration policy documents, we note that these wars are new departures from previous interventions, calling on the military to undertake post-conflict reconstruction in ways that was previously left to indigenous government or to the civilian aspects of the occupation. This military-primary reconstruction is harnessed to ambitious neoliberal economics aimed at transforming the host country’s political economy. Utilizing the Iraq and Afghanistan interventions as case studies, the study analyzes the dynamics set in motion by this policy. The key processes are two concatenated cycles of military pacification and economic immiseration in discrete localities operating through varying paths of causation.  Pacification by the military as well as subsequent military-primary introduction of neoliberal economic reform generates immiseration; locally based resistance. as well as ameliorating efforts aimed at reconstructing the old system, generates repacification. Each iteration of the cycle deepens the humanitarian crisis, and assures new rounds of local and sometimes national resistance.

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In this essay, we seek to understand why and when social movements do succeed in extracting concessions from dominant institutions. We begin by briefly theorizing the notion of disruption as central to social movement success. We then distinguish between two types of disruption that are often practiced by student movements and viewed as similar by sociologists. We argue that the radically different dynamics of these two forms of disruption very often affect the success of student movements in leveraging social change: when demands are made to internally, against educational administrators, student can exercise leverage directly; external disruption confers little leverage, and therefore success requires coalitions with groups that can internally disrupt the institution targeted.

Back in the 1960s, we could hardly expect the intellectual establishment to heed much less embrace the insights about American life and politics that were contained in Bob Dylan's lyrics. In those days, the academy and the media were dominated by children of the rich and/or assimilated European immigrants who embraced the old "high culture/ low culture" distinction, saw rock and roll as a social problem, and analyzed the student rebellions of the 1960s as a narcissistic exercise. The intelligentsia was part of the problem: it could not comprehend the validity of his portrait of life; it could not appreciate his poetry; and it was even one of the targets for his criticism. 1 But things are different now. The American intelligentsia is dominated by people who we adolescents and young adults in the 1960s, and many were committed participants in the rebellions of that era -both cultural and political. Many, if not most, listened to Dylan in his (and their) youth; and many continue to listen to him today. The rebels who digested his insights about the ugly realities of U.S. society in the 1960s, who explored the drug culture with him in the 1970s, and who, like him, became immersed in personal 1 Perhaps the most pointed of all his criticisms of intellectuals was his inclusion of the sarcastic phrase "You who philosophize …" in the refrain of 'The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll'.

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Odds are that Chris Rhomberg did not set out to write a social movement book; and odds are that even when he finished he did not think he had written one. But it is a book that all social movement scholars should read and maybe even emulate, because it is an exemplar of what we ought to be doing.