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Seized Hearts: “Soft” Japanese Counterinsurgency Before 1945 and Its Persistent Legacies in Postwar Malaya, South Vietnam and Beyond
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2025
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Counterinsurgency tactics for winning hearts and minds are key weapons in state efforts to suppress rebellion and the possibility of rebellion. Always predicated on the threat of state violence, hearts and minds counterinsurgency is usually thought to originate in British or French strategies for managing insurgency in their colonies in Asia, especially in suppression of the 1948-1960 communist insurgency in Malaya. However, work with archival data, a genealogical approach to clear, hold and protect population management, which is a key principle of hearts and minds strategy, and careful review of scholarship on Japan's colonial military and governance (especially but not only in Japanese language) indicates that hearts and minds/hold and protect counterinsurgency principles have origins in imperial management of insurgency in Japan's colonies. It is also possible that elements of imperial Japanese “soft” counterinsurgency strategy undergird American and British hearts and minds counterinsurgency strategies in Malaya and South Vietnam in the 1950s and 1960s.
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Notes
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43 Personal communication, April 24, 2017.
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52 Ibid.
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65 Ibid.
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69 Ibid.
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