When there were endless real bookshops for me to haunt, I lost count of the number of times I’d take a book from the shelf, seduced by its lead title, only to put it back once I saw what came after the colon.   But that isn’t always a fail-safe strategy, and I’ve received news of a new book by Alex Fattal where that really wouldn’t be smart.  Guerrilla Marketing has a relevance far beyond Colombia (interesting and important though that is in its own right):

Brand warfare is real. Guerrilla Marketing details the Colombian government’s efforts to transform Marxist guerrilla fighters in the FARC into consumer citizens. Alexander L. Fattal shows how the market has become one of the principal grounds on which counterinsurgency warfare is waged and postconflict futures are imagined in Colombia. This layered case study illuminates a larger phenomenon: the convergence of marketing and militarism in the twenty-first century. Taking a global view of information warfare, Guerrilla Marketing combines archival research and extensive fieldwork not just with the Colombian Ministry of Defense and former rebel communities, but also with political exiles in Sweden and peace negotiators in Havana. Throughout, Fattal deftly intertwines insights into the modern surveillance state, peace and conflict studies, and humanitarian interventions, on one hand, with critical engagements with marketing, consumer culture, and late capitalism on the other. The result is a powerful analysis of the intersection of conflict and consumerism in a world where governance is increasingly structured by brand ideology and wars sold as humanitarian interventions.

Full of rich, unforgettable ethnographic stories, Guerrilla Marketing is a stunning and troubling analysis of the mediation of global conflict.

The resonance of Guerilla Marketing clearly transcends its subtitle, as this tantalising extract makes clear:

Total mobilization is no longer a matter of a fluid transition from peace to war, but a matter of the continual co-presence of the two in a hot peace in which everywhere is always a potential scene of violence.  As commentators frequently note, the Global War on Terror is unbounded in scope and duration, an unending concatenation of episodes that render the world a battlefield from Waziristan, which has borne the brunt of drone warfare, to suburban Watertown, Massachusetts, in the wake of the Boston Marathon bomb attacks of 2013. What connects sites as disparate as Waziristan and Watertown is not only the War on Terror but marketing as a system of global provisioning that is productive of affective attachments. I borrow the idea of affect as a form of infrastructure from anthropologist Joseph Masco, who deftly teases out continuities between the Cold War and the War on Terror. For Masco, this affective infrastructure is built by the national security state, expansive in the wake of the “ongoing injury” of the September 11 attacks.  “Affect,” Masco writes, “becomes a kind of infrastructure for the security state, creating the collective intensities of feeling necessary to produce individual commitments, remake ethical standards, and energize modes of personal, and collective, sacrifice.”

The layering of national security affect, primarily paranoia and fear, I argue, cannot be separated from the aspirational affect of consumer culture, for the two have coevolved. At the height of the Cold War, for instance, advertisements pitched “Luxury Fall- Out Shelters” to people who would prefer to wait out a nuclear apocalypse in comfort. Such advertisements normalized the very idea of nuclear warfare and the paranoia it generated. Similarly, George W. Bush’s call on Americans to go shopping one week after September 11, 2001, mobilized consumption as a means of coping with the Global War on Terror. I take as given the idea, demonstrated by historical accounts of the coevolution of marketing and warfare in the twentieth century, that marketization and militarization are deeply interpenetrated. I am fascinated by how their convergence shapes an affective mode of governance in the early twenty-first century, a moment when simmering fears of an everywhere war and the rising aspirations of the global middle classes expand in tandem. It is more than a little curious that in the 2000s, just as war diffused further into everyday life, everything—nations, militaries, cities, universities, individual selves— became brands.

The language of the convergence of marketing and militarism is revealing. Targeting, for example, serves as a switch that connects the marketing nation and the security state. As marketers study, segment, and create new publics to target, the military compiles lists of targets to monitor and, at the right moment, destroy. A drive toward ever- greater precision unites both practices of targeting. Each year marketers improve their ability to micro- target tightly defined demographic groups by tracking users across the internet with algorithmic intelligence.  Similarly the military, through the use of special forces and drone warfare, creates micro-kill zones. In the words of Grégoire Chamayou, a French theorist of drone warfare, “The zone of armed conflict, having been fragmented into miniaturizable kill boxes, tends ideally to be reduced to the single body of the enemy-prey”— modern warfare as hunting. Whether it’s data capitalism’s drive to psychologically profile individual consumers or the whack- a-mole logic of twenty-first-century counterinsurgency, this scaling down to the individual approaches a vanishing point: advertising as nonadvertising, war as nonwar. Neither negation is neutral, nor is their entanglement haphazard. To the contrary, I would like to suggest that in this double negation there lies a key to understanding the state of the relationship between war and capitalism in the early twenty- first century.

Enter the double meaning of this book’s title, guerrilla marketing, which in business parlance is code for a bundle of tactics, most of which seek to invisibilize the sales pitch. Tom Himpe, an advertising intellectual, describes this tendency as “advertising that blends in seamlessly with real entertainment, real events or real life to the extent that it is not possible to tell what is advertising and what is not.”  Drawing upon the legacy of guerrilla warfare as articulated by Che Guevara and Mao Zedong, guerrilla marketing draws its strength from camouflage. But marketing’s camouflage aspires not merely to blend into the background but to act upon it. Branding, I argue, operates as an activist form of camouflage that seeks to subtly transform the environment. As an instrument of total mobilization, brands have proved to be modular weapons of productive persuasion, from the black flag of ISIS and its calls to mobilize individuals alienated from the West to a real estate mogul’s use of brand strategies to bluster his way to the White House. As an emergent phenomenon of extraordinary political consequence, brand warfare is ripe for critical analysis.

Since Guerilla Marketing comes from a US publisher (Chicago UP) the paperback is not pitched at a silly-extortionate price; there’s an e-book too.  More here.