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Drawing on leading thinkers in the field and using key examples from Malaya, the Philippines, Vietnam, El Salvador, Iraq, and Afghanistan, Hearts and Minds brings a long-overdue focus on the many civilians caught up in these conflicts. Both urgent and timely, this important book challenges the idea of a neat divide between insurgents and the populations from which they emerge—and should be required reading for anyone engaged in the most important contemporary debates over U.S. military policy.
—Marilyn Young
"Hannah Gurman has assembled a groundbreaking volume filled with fresh perspectives and revealing insights. If you want to understand America's recent debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan, Hearts and Minds is essential reading.”
—Nick Turse, author of Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam
"Essential reading for anyone who wants to see beyond the illusions about counterinsurgency warfare that the U.S. and British governments and media have sold their people. These histories show that, despite decades of occupations and well-funded and well-lauded strategic thinking, the hearts and minds of the occupied have remained beyond their militaries' ken and control."
—Catherine Lutz, author of The Bases of Empire and a contributor to The Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual
"With America creeping toward military intervention in the Syrian civil war, Hannah Gurman's volume comes at an opportune time. While generals offer up moralistic bromides about protecting foreign populations at the barrel of an American gun, Hearts and Minds lays bare the brutal and destructive truth behind American military activism in the world."
—Colonel Gian Gentile
Hannah Gurman teaches U.S. History and American Studies at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. Her writing has appeared in popular outlets including The Nation, The Washington Post, Dissent, Jacobin, and The Baffler. She is the author of The Dissent Papers: The Voices of Diplomats in the Cold War and Beyond, co-editor (with Kaeten Mistry) of Whistleblowing Nation: The History of National Security Disclosures and the Cult of State Secrecy, as well as the author of The Opportunists: The Post-Liberals and the Reinvention of Reactionary Politics (both from The New Press). She lives in New York City.