Laleh Khalili's Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies is a lucid analysis of a dark history. Khalili maps the global movement of military and security knowledge, policy, and tactics in an effort to demonstrate how liberal states and empires have managed colonized and enemy populations in the past and present. Through her prodigious research, Khalili demonstrates how liberal states employ law and social welfare as rationales to justify especially violent forms of confinement and counterinsurgency, and more subtly, how counterinsurgency logics often migrate across colonial battlefields and between colonies and metropoles, thus representing a crucial object of imperial transfer.

Drawing on Foucault's theorizing of biopolitics, Khalili shows that counterinsurgency warfare is produced discursively via logics of security and protection, while employing social engineering under incarceration in order to achieve ends. Moreover, Khalili maps in painstaking detail the transnational process through which carceral techniques deployed in colonies transit to the metropolis. In doing so, Time in the Shadows places the current U.S. War on Terror within a much longer genealogy extending to colonial wars on the U.S. frontier, French warfare in Algeria, and British warfare in India, to name only a few of the geographies covered in the book.

Khalili's genealogy of counterinsurgency begins with 19th-century colonial wars, including the French conquest of Algeria and American Indian Wars. She argues that in each of these cases, colonial warfare tactics were transported across colonial settings. For example, North American Indian wars, according to Khalili, became the template for U.S. overseas warfare in the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Philippines: “many U.S. military governors of the Philippians had fought and administered Native Americans, and they compared various Filipino peoples—both favorably and unfavorably—to their former charges” (p. 18). In addition to demonstrating the transfer of military tactics from U.S. domestic frontiers to U.S. overseas colonies, Khalili shows that throughout the 20th century, colonial warfare was often administered via proxies in order to give the appearance that the colonies enjoyed independence while shielding the metropole from culpability. Through careful readings of military leaders’ manuscripts, Khalili demonstrates that counterinsurgencies were often framed as beneficial to colonized people, while serving as a form of liberal population control to be distinguished from the overt violence of actual warfare.

Khalili demonstrates that in the later part of the 20th century counterinsurgencies were increasingly framed in the language of social work. In this framework of control, militaries were expected to act as police forces guaranteeing good governance and security. Khalili notes, for example, how the U.S. military in Iraq touts its managerial expertise as well as an “ostensibly humanitarian agenda that relies far more on pliant proxies . . . than on gung-ho occupying forces, [and] depends on scientific or ethnographic knowledge of the peoples who are to be made legible to the state . . .” (p. 57). In this way, U.S. and Israeli military force is often understood through liberal discourses of modernity and ultimately of legality, while the messy colonial violence at the core of militarism is often overlooked.

In Khalili's brilliant read of confinement in Guantanamo, she analyzes the concept of lawfare, which she defines as the use of legal means as weapons of war. Working against the arguments of Schmidt and Agamben, who argue that law is suspended in imperial and colonial spaces, Khalili argues that, “liberal empires and conquering powers create ostensibly lawless places through a conscious and deliberate legal process of temporarily and functionally setting aside one body of law and adopting another, or in rarer and more extreme instances, replacing legal procedures with administrative procedures.” Given this argument, Khalili views Guantanamo not as a “state of exception,” where law is suspended, but instead as a place of “liberal carceral confinement,” whose very existence is produced via legality (p. 67).

Beyond the presumed legality of Guantanamo lie invisible zones of detention, which Khalili analyzes in her discussion of proxy detention and renditions. Here Khalili compares Khayam, the Israeli detention facility run by the Southern Liberation Army during Israel's occupation of Lebanon, with various global detention facilities employed in the U.S. War on Terror's rendition program. Khalili is interested in the transnational alliances that enable proxy detention and rendition, as well as the ways in which proxies help exonerate perpetrating nations of their violence. Proxies also allow for countries like Israel and the United States to conduct brutal counterinsurgency operations while working within the spirit of international legality.

The final example in Time in the Shadows is also the most familiar: prisoner of war camps used in the U.S. counterinsurgency operations in Iraq, like Abu Ghraib. Khalili argues that hidden prisoner of war camps, called black sites, are forms of social control that go well beyond detention; Abu Ghraib is also a project of social engineering with liberal intent. Mass incarceration in warfare confines supposed enemy combatants and establishes a massive surveillance infrastructure that demands a certain form of bodily comportment and discipline. In this way, Khalili shows that prisoner of war camps are productive spaces that generate information and data, in addition to being spaces of violence that enact social death on presumed enemies.

Taken together, the case studies that comprise Time in the Shadows add up to a tremendously useful study that helps us to understand the violence at the heart of liberal counterinsurgency. Confinement, Khalili clearly and hauntingly demonstrates, is not a divergence from liberalism; rather it is constitutive of liberal forms of imperial warfare that rationalize violence through population control and social engineering. Moreover, Khalili provides exactly the analysis we need in order to draw transnational linkages in security and warfare tactics, logics, and expertise. As a result of her deft analysis, we can understand our proximity to seemingly distant global battlefields, as well as the violence that can be perpetuated in the name of liberal governance. Time in the Shadows is not only interesting, but is also very much needed by scholars interested in charting the global and multidirectional capillaries of liberal imperial power.