Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla.

• Author: Moses, Jeremy
• Position: Book review

OUT OF THE MOUNTAINS: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla

Author: David Kilcullen

Published by: Scribe, Melbourne, 2013, 352pp, A$32.99.

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The cover of David Kilcullehs Out of the Mountains includes a quote from Mike Davis that calls Kilcullen 'the most unfettered and analytically acute mind in the military intelligentsia'. The book itself does indeed demonstrate Kilcullehs sharp intelligence and analytical capacities, but I was left less convinced by the suggestion that his work is somehow 'unfettered' by the demands and expectations of his long career in the military, as a high-level advisor in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, and his current role as a non-executive director of a strategic consultancy firm in Washington. In fact, as I will argue below, much of the analysis in the book is resolutely tied to a Western military perspective that at times appears to be unconscious of its own partial and political point of view, preferring instead to provide highly neutralised, universal and a historical accounts of contemporary conflict.

Out of the Mountains begins in the context of Afghanistan, with Kilcullen providing a compelling account of a battle he witnessed in a remote part of Afghanistan in 2009. The questions that arise out of this battle then lead into broader reflections on the problems and limitations of counter-insurgency theory and practice in the contemporary environment. We have reached a point, Kilcullen argues, where we must move our thinking and planning 'out of the mountains' and focus instead on the rapidly growing coastal cities that hold the vast majority of the world's population and are home to many of the world's most intractable violent conflicts. This leads to the identification of four key elements that feed into Kilcullen's prognoses of future threats: 'Population growth (the continuing rise of the planet's total population), urbanization (the tendency for people to live in larger and larger cities), littoralization (the propensity for these cities to cluster on coastlines) and connectedness (increasing connectivity among people, wherever they live).'

In Chapters 2 to 4, Kilcullen continues to show his mastery of the example, detailing cases as diverse as the gang conflicts in Kingston, Jamaica, the Mumbai terrorist attacks of 2008 and the revolutions of the Arab Spring, amongst many others, as indicators of the perils of the four elements in the 'feral city'. All of...