Introducing the Clay-Gilmore Institute for Philosophy, Technology, and Counterinsurgency

Notes on New Developments in Black Male Studies & the Use and Misuse of Counterinsurgency as a Lens of Analysis in Black Scholarship, Digital Punditry and Popular Media

By Dr. Tony Gaskew, Ph.D. & Dr. Miron J. Clay-Gilmore, Ph.D.

A Soldier’s Testimony and Critical Definitions

What is counterinsurgency (COIN)? As a conflict ethnographer and soldier scholar, who has researched and immersed myself into insurgent populations across the globe, everything that I know, understand, recognize, teach, and have applied in my academic career about the science and art of counterinsurgency, I learned in Southeast Asia: specifically, the Republic of the Philippines.

You see, from 1988-1991, I was a United States Air Force military working dog handler with a proficiency in asymmetrical warfare, air base ground defense, and explosive/narcotic detection, stationed at Clark Air Base, Republic of the Philippines, and actively involved in combat operations in a secret war against the New Peoples Army (NPA). Before, during, and equally as important, after the Soviet–Afghan War, the Philippines was always the home to some of the most dedicated, well-trained, and seasoned guerilla fighters in the world. This was no accident, as evidenced by the continued survival of the NPA, considered to be the oldest existing communist revolutionary guerrilla group in the world. What very few scholars today even realize, is that from its inception in 1947, and until the official closure of Clark Air Base in 1991 due to the cataclysmic volcanic eruption of Mt. Pinatubo, the Republic of the Philippines served as the most important regional hub in the world for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

During a forty-four-year time span, the CIA not only used the Republic of the Philippines to launch covert actions against other countries and global insurgent populations, but more importantly, the Philippine islands became the United States of America’s laboratory, testing, and training grounds for the most innovative and advanced counterinsurgency techniques and weapons of war on the planet – COIN advancements that would be later applied in covert against the Hukbalahap in the Republic of the Philippines and across the planet, to include Vietnam, Latin America, the continent of Africa, Iraq, Afghanistan, and even domestically in the US to neutralize the rise of the Black Power movement and other revolutionary activities in the 1960s/70s. It was at Clark Air Base, Republic of the Philippines, as a military combatant, where I learned the science and art of counterinsurgency - guerilla warfare, psychological operations (PSYOPS), and pacification.

Thus, for me, defining the term counterinsurgency and its critical elements of guerrilla warfare, psychological operations, and pacification becomes a matter of cultural, social, and political ethnological positioning. As well, before trying to understand and define the term counterinsurgency, it’s important that one first interrogates the terms insurgent and insurgency. Understanding these nuances, and based upon my own training, knowledge, and experience, this is where I would begin a dialogue to define these terms:

Counterinsurgency – actions directed at suppressing or neutralizing insurgent populations, including their cultural/social/political ideology and lived experiences.

Guerilla Warfare – unconventional/irregular asymmetric warfare or armed political activity that is directed at and/or by insurgents.

Psychological Operations - the use of propaganda and related informational measures designed to influence the opinions, emotions, attitudes, and behavior of insurgent and non-insurgent populations.

Pacification- the aim of counterinsurgency campaigns; the use of an array and combination of action programs primarily directed at non-combatant civilians of targeted populations, designed to extend the presence and influence of the counterinsurgent state/government and to reduce the ideological presence and influence of (potential) insurgents, using propaganda, political violence, and subversion, through a variety of selected NGO programs, military, and civilian institutions.

As a Marine veteran and philosopher, counterinsurgency is also not simply a scholarly object of knowledge for me. From 2011-2015, I served in Marine Aviation Training Support Group-21 (MATSG-21) at Naval Air Station, Pensacola as an administrative clerk and MATSG’s detachment unit at Training Wing Five (TRAWING-5) at Naval Air Station – Whiting Field as an administrative chief. Those who are familiar with the ethos of the Marines knows that the Rifleman’s Creed is one of the keystones of the branch’s doctrine. The concept that “[e]very Marine is, first and foremost, a rifleman. All other conditions are secondary” (coined by General Alfred Gray, the 29^th Commandant of the Marine Corps) was fully institutionalized during my term of service. Regardless of our occupational specialty or the deployable status of our assigned units, Marines were trained to be combat-ready with a ‘one shot, one kill’ mentality that started in boot camp, was reinforced at the School of Infantry (in either Marine Combat Training or the Infantry Training Battalion), and at our respective duty stations. Consequently, my Marine Corps experience exposed me to the various population-control tactics associated with Western/US colonial policing-counterinsurgency that I could not help but notice were also systematically practiced by domestic police agencies in my hometown. Especially after the killing of Michael Brown Jr., in St. Louis County, Missouri. Upon my discharge and return to my community as a young Black male, the deep symmetry between the control tactics used by the Marines in Fallujah and police departments in Ferguson became crystal clear to me.

New Developments in Africana Philosophy & Black Male Studies

Dr. Gaskew’s testimony and historical grasp about the scientific innovation associated with COIN for the purposes of social control is important because it illuminates the fact that counterinsurgency is not merely a tactical approach for individual campaigns but rather a long-standing mode of governance deployed to crush dissent and socially engineer non-Western peoples into Western forms of life. The definitions he provided—rooted in the tactical realities of guerrilla warfare, PSYOPS, and pacification—outline the basic machinery of counterinsurgency. However, understanding the full scope of its evolution into a globalized science of social engineering requires us to undertake a scholarly inquiry into the long history of colonial warfare over the last half millennium to examine population-level patterns of violence associated with these campaigns, to interrogate its roots in liberal democratic humanism/western philosophical anthropology, and to trace its relationship to the development of modern information-computing technologies. Here, the state of the scholarly work on COIN reveals a significant gap. This is a logical consequence of the fact that “US military studies have been hostile to treating counterinsurgency as a primary area of study.”^[i] Despite its rising prominence since 1815, “the study of insurgency and counterinsurgency in the academic fields of military and strategic studies has been a rather marginal enterprise.”^[ii] This diminished status isn’t new. As military historian Douglas Porch explains, in the 19^th century, it was not immediately obvious that there needed to be a doctrinal separation between [European] continental (now called conventional warfare) and colonial or savage warfare (now called counterinsurgency warfare) in European military doctrine. In fact, even when it was recognized as unique enough to warrant its own distinct category of warfare, counterinsurgency wars were seen as “quasi-professional tropical excursions by ragtag colonial mercenaries in which victory or defeat mattered hardly a jot in the wider scheme of national survival” in comparison to conventional operations.^[iii] This diminished status endures today and is so institutionally entrenched in Western fighting forces that they “all too often enter counterinsurgency operations” by relying on conventional tactics as a matter of reflex.^[iv] This tendency to marginalize counterinsurgency as a primary area of study is also reflected in the dominant scholarly trends, rubrics, and assumptions that guide scholarly inquiry in Africana Studies, Black Philosophy, and race theory in the Anglophone academic-university system writ large.

While the historical record is rich with operational data from the last four centuries—from Detroit to Dien Bien Phu and Mississippi to Madagascar—there existed no philosophical analysis of COIN as a basic structure of racism, colonialism, neo-colonialism or imperialism in the Anglophone University system before the publication of my dissertation — the first dedicated to expanding the fields of Africana philosophy and Black Male Studies at the University of Edinburgh in its almost 500 year history — Thinking for the Bound and Dead: Toward a Truly Universal Theory of Human Victory (2023).^[v] In this thesis, I integrated the insights of Black Male Studies (particularly the theory of phallicism), Huey P. Newton, and Sylvia Wynter to not only introduce counterinsurgency as a historical phenomenon expressed through New World settler colonialism, racialized-chattel slavery, European colonial imperialism/neo-colonialism and the various contemporary managerial strategies theorists understand to be racism against non-Western groups, but I also posited a philosophical theory – Killology/MAN3 or homo homini lupus – to explain the extent to which counterinsurgent forms of democratic liberal development, imprisonment and targeted killings are all simultaneously deployed as the primary forces of social regulation and how these are logical consequences of the dominant Western civilizational conception of what it means to be human. As I formulated it, the philosophical theory of killology seeks to explain:

“1) an evolution in the construction of [western-civilizational] threats – particularly the transformation of the ‘nigger/savage’ which justified the colonial civilizing mission to the criminal/terrorist trope which justifies a now spatially and temporally indeterminate counterinsurgent program of global pacification; 2) the civilizational mastery of counterinsurgency by the US empire (alongside this a positing of a new “universal” liberal subjectivity and economic laws which foster the modernization of all human societies from traditional to liberal free market “mass consumption” economies based on rational choice theory) via police professionalization and the construction of a prison/surveillance empire to suppress and anticipate the threat of communism, then all varieties of Black nationalism and anti-colonialism; 3) the breakthrough in technological capacity at both the level of signals intelligence or telecommunications, semi-autonomous weapons and human psychology which ground an unprecedented global surveillance apparatus, the application of drone/AI/cyber warfare operations and the desensitization of state agents towards the act of killing the designated “enemy” – making western military/police forces the deadliest in human history; and lastly, 4) the state sponsored facilitation of an evolution of the white power movement which is poised to execute a paramilitary race war in defense of Western civilization from the threat of both fundamentalist Islam as a tool of insurgent social organization and the populational threat of nonwhite people more generally.”^[vi]

During my time as a postdoctoral research fellow at Purdue University, I formalized the major premise of MAN3—the racism as counterinsurgency warfare thesis—and synthesized it with Leonard Harris’s philosophical theory of necro-being. In his work Necro-Being: An Actuarial Account of Racism (2018), philosopher Leonard Harris formulated an attenuated explanatory model of racism as a force that “kills and prevents persons from being born.”^[vii]Specifically, Harris argues that racism “is a polymorphous agent of death, premature births, shortened loves, starving children, debilitating theft, abusive larceny, degrading insults, and insulting stereotypes forcibly imposed.”^[viii]Because he is interested in formulating an actuarial method centered on “depicting, describing, and picturing” rather than explaining, Harris avoids any kind of explanations of racism (structural, rational-intentional, volitional, etc.).^[ix]Rather than tracking a causal origin or mechanisms, necro-being allows philosophers to depict racism as “a killing machine” that creates generation after generation of misery for its targets through death and ill-health (its “absolute indicators”).^[x]

For my part, I posited a formalized synthesis between necro-being and the racism as warfare thesis that would allow philosophers to both depict and explain racism as a killing machine. Importantly, the racism as (counterinsurgency) warfare thesis (RWT) argues that:

“Given the evidence of its global and indeterminate scope of application, its weaponization of the Western humanist sciences since the 1950s, and explicit congruence with (and evolution of) colonial warfare tactics employed by Euro-American powers since at least the dawn of chattel slavery in the Americas, I argue for a conceptualization of the “various phenomena analyzed by theorists and scholars as instances of dehumanization (criminalization), state-sponsored repression, imperialism, (neo) internal/colonialism and arbitrary set violence imposed on” Black and other racialized populations to be “expressions of a broader framework that has and continues to function as the organizing principle of western defense, military and policing apparati – counterinsurgency warfare.””^[xi]

Figure 1. Conceptual DAG of the racism as war thesis

More importantly, I argued that the RWT and necro-being “lay the basis for a cutting-edge philosophical project that depicts and explains racism as a killing machine. That is, a philosophical project which possesses not merely the conceptual acuity to depict the patterns of misery and death that can be discerned according to relevant demographic markers but also one able to provide a generalizable explanation of the basic principles of inter-group conflict, the evolution of unconventional Western strategic thinking, and how these tactics inform State managerialism to repress, govern, and war against racialized populations from the chattel enslavement/colonial era up to today.”^[xii]

Institutionalizing a Scholarly Intervention: Black Male Studies as a basis for an Observatory on the Use of AI by Liberal Law Enforcement Agencies in the Western Hemisphere

The Clay-Gilmore Institute for Philosophy, Technology, and Counterinsurgency (CG-IPTC) and its forthcoming inaugural digital exhibition emerge from the aforementioned synthesis of Black Male Studies and Necro-Being. Together, they give institutional form to a scholarly intervention that treats counterinsurgency not as a metaphor or interpretive lens, but as a historically grounded mode of governance that structures how populations are identified, monitored, and pacified. At the center of the Institute’s inquiry is the recognition that counterinsurgency and the deployment of advanced computational technologies are not neutral practices of security. Rather, they are expressions of deep contradictions within the modern Western conception of the human, MAN3—an abstract, exclusionary, and overrepresented figure that has long been projected as humanity as such.

CG-IPTC’s work contends that this hegemonic conception of the human does more than sustain racialized domination; it actively legitimizes technological regimes that erode human dignity and autonomy by rendering targeted populations as objects of surveillance, prediction, and elimination. By examining how counterinsurgency logics are operationalized through AI-driven security systems, the Institute challenges the philosophical foundations upon which these practices are justified and normalized. In doing so, it reorients the philosophical study of war, artificial intelligence, and state power toward the question of human existence beyond Western humanist frameworks.

BMS scholars—drawing from genocide studies, military science, and the analysis of intergroup domination—have demonstrated that androcentric targeting is foundational to racial governance. This evidentiary approach to studying racism is, however, frequently marginalized. A telling symptom of this marginalization is the attempt by certain scholars to co-opt or dismiss the field’s central premises. For instance, scholars such as Kerry Sinanan, Jairo I. Fúnez-Flores, and Jared Ball have publicly advised others to “avoid Black Male Studies,” dismissed its critiques, or appropriated the terminology of counterinsurgency for literary or intersectional analyses disconnected from military and historical evidence.^[xiii] In this way, BMS is not unique being that the emergence of any new field inevitably leads to the dispersion of its findings among non-specialists. Eager to appear innovative, these scholars often appropriate novel concepts to enhance their own reputation as pioneers in their respective fields. A simple review of the publication history and cited sources of said scholars will quickly reveal the origins of their ideas. Such an approach should shift our focus from subjective or contentious debates about motive or individual character to objective facts about the source of counterinsurgency as a scholarly intervention, which has a clear intellectual lineage.

Said differently, a scholarly analysis of counterinsurgency as a sex-specific account of continuous warfare against Black and other racialized populations has a verifiable foundation in Black Male Studies. The move by some to co-opt or dismiss BMS is not merely a reflection of personal disagreement but of a deeper epistemological problematic among Black/race/liberal scholars in the Anglophone university system. Within the US, it exemplifies a broader trend within contemporary Africana Studies, gender theory, and decolonial studies whose roots lie in the counterinsurgent institutionalization of Black Studies as a field in the US academy: the substitution of evidentiary, interdisciplinary analysis with speculative metaphysics, literary criticism, and pop culture critique/digital commentary. The CG-IPTC’s importance lies in its principled refusal of this dilution of intellectual rigor.

By placing the premises of liberal arts education itself under scrutiny, and subjecting the dogmas of humanist inquiry to analysis through a counterinsurgency framework, the CG-IPTC is a direct continuation of the Black Male Studies paradigm articulated by Tommy J. Curry and extended by scholars such as Norman Ajari, Dalitso Ruwe, Adebayo Ogungbure, Amir Jaima, T. Hasan Johnson, Ronald Neal, and others committed to analytically precise accounts of intergroup conflict, racialized domination, and social hierarchy. In institutionalizing this intervention, CG-IPTC establishes a durable platform for rethinking the philosophical endeavor, making visible the technologization of repression, and reconceptualizing human security in an era increasingly defined by algorithmic governance and permanent war.

The Institute is the first of its kind in explicitly situating three domains within a single analytic framework: Western imperial counterinsurgency, the contemporary deployment of AI and computational technologies of control, and the historically contingent Western conception of the human that underwrites both. Its aim is not merely to describe or catalogue the technological architectures of modern repression, but to establish a rigorous philosophical and empirical basis for understanding how these systems function as extensions of asymmetric warfare across the globe and within the liberal democratic regimes that deploy them.

Through a formal partnership with the Algorithmic Bias Project in Canada and the Centre for Ethics at the University of Toronto, CG-IPTC is configured to provide a proof of concept for the Western hemisphere’s first observatory on AI enabled policing by publishing original research and producing digital visualizations that make visible how AI-driven security infrastructures reproduce durable, historically patterned forms of population targeting across Canada, the US, and Brazil.

Suggested Readings

James Arnold, Jungle of Snakes: A Century of Counterinsurgency Warfare from the Philippines to Iraq. Bloomsbury Press, 2009.

Central Intelligence Agency, Psychological Warfare, FOIA: 2004/10/08: CIA-RDP84-00022R000400110010-8, 1949.

Central Intelligence Agency, Ideological Warfare, FOIA: 2000/08/30: CIA:RDP80-01065A000200080054-9, 1952.

Central Intelligence Agency, Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare, FOIA: 2010/05/28: CIA-RDP86M00886R001300010029-9 CIA, 1984.

Central Intelligence Agency, Guide to the Analysis of Insurgency, FOIA: 2011/01/20: CIA-RDP87T01127R000300220005-6, 2013.

Central Intelligence Agency, Communist Insurgency in the Philippines: Organization and Capabilities, FOIA: 2011/03/03: CIA-RDP87T01127R000100040007-6, 1985.

William Chapman, Inside the Philippine Revolution: The New People’s Army and Its Struggle for Power, Bloomsbury Academic, 2021.

Arthur Eckstein, Bad Moon Rising: How the Weather Underground Beat the FBI and Lost the Revolution, Yale University Press, 2016.

Ernesto Che Guevara, Guerrilla Warfare, Monthly Review Press, 1961.

David Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice, Praeger Publishers, 1964.

Richard Hunt, Pacification: The American Struggle for Vietnam’s Hearts and Minds, Routledge, 1998.

George Kent, Philippines: The New People’s Army, Harvard International Review, Vol. 8, No. 5, 1986.

Jose Magno, Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in the Philippines, Asian Survey, Vol. 26, No. 5, 1986.

F. A. Mediansky, The New People’s Army: A Nation-wide Insurgency in the Philippines, Contemporary Southeast Asia, Vol. 8, No. 1, 1986.

Aaron Morris, Counterinsurgency in Paradise: Seven Decades of Civil War in the Philippines, Helion and Company, Helion and Company, 2016.

Valeriano Napolean, Counter-Guerrilla Operations: The Philippine Experience, Praeger, Inc., 1962.

Liam Ó Ruairc, Peace or Pacification: Northern Ireland After the Defeat of the IRA, Zero Books, 2019.

Mao Tse-Tung, On Guerilla Warfare, China, 1937.

The Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and the New People’s Army (NPA), U.S. Army War College, 1988.

The Communist Insurgency in the Philippines A ‘Protracted People’s War’ Continues, Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, 2023.

Dinh Tho Tran, Pacification, U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1977.

Sun Tzu, The Art of War, translated by Samuel B. Griffith, Oxford University Press, 1963.

U.S. Army U.S. Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, U.S. Military Publications, 2021.

Dhoruba Bin Wahad, Revolution in These Times: Lessons for the Antifascist, Black Liberation, and a Culture of Resistance, Common Notions, 2025.

Stephen Watts, Counterinsurgency in the Philippines, RAND Corporation, 2014.

About the Authors

Tony Gaskew, Ph.D., is a Professor of Criminal Justice, Faculty Affiliate at the Center on Race and Social Problems (CRSP), and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs, at the University of Pittsburgh, Bradford. He is also a board member for Clay-Gilmore Institute for Philosophy, Technology, and Counterinsurgency (CG-IPTC). Dr. Gaskew is a conflict ethnographer, a Fulbright Hays Scholar, and an FDD Terrorist Fellow, who has conducted extensive field research on insurgent and counterinsurgent activities across the United States of America, Canada, Ireland, the Republic of the Philippines, Africa, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. He is the creator of the FBI-COINTELPRO-Pittsburgh Collection, a special digital archive of the FBI & CIA counterinsurgency operations targeting the 1960s Black Power Movement. Dr. Gaskew is a subject-matter expert on counterinsurgency and policing, and has authored over fifty publications, including three books. His latest book, Stop Trying to Fix Policing: Lessons Learned from the Front Lines of Black Liberation (Rowman and Littlefield), examines the phenomenon of police abolition through the cultural lens of armed Black resistance. His most recent journal article, How to Become a Soldier in the Black Liberation Army: Sixteen Tomes (Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Studies), focuses on newly declassified material on the armed revolutionary organization, the Black Liberation Army (BLA). He is the recipient of the University of Pittsburgh’s, The Chancellor’s Distinguished Public Service Award, and The Dr. Larry E. Davis Excellence in Community Engaged Scholarship Award. Dr. Gaskew is a United States Air Force combat veteran and a former member of the U.S. Department of Justice, Organized Crime Task Force.

Miron J. Clay-Gilmore, Ph.D., is a father, husband, and veteran of the U.S. Marines. He is the Founder and Director of the Clay-Gilmore Institute for Philosophy, Technology, and Counterinsurgency (CG-IPTC) and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Ethics and the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society at the University of Toronto. He is also the first Black philosopher to earn a Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh.

Dr. Clay-Gilmore’s research explores how artificial intelligence, big data, and predictive policing operate within broader regimes of counterinsurgency and state violence. His work examines the racialized logics that underpin algorithmic governance, tracing how technologies of surveillance and automation reproduce social hierarchies, militarized control, and the ongoing criminalization of racialized populations. By situating contemporary AI systems within longer genealogies of Western militarism and colonial administration, his scholarship reveals how the management of life and death—what he terms the technologization of counterinsurgency—defines the moral and political boundaries of modern societies.

Through the CG-IPTC, Dr. Clay-Gilmore leads a pioneering interdisciplinary initiative that integrates philosophical inquiry, data analysis, and public education to interrogate the ethical and political consequences of emerging technologies. The Institute develops research clusters, public-facing media, and digital infrastructures that expose the interconnections between technological innovation, governance, and racialized violence.

His publications have appeared in AI and Ethics, Res Philosophica, American Philosophical Quarterly, and The Journal of African American Studies. Across these works, Dr. Clay-Gilmore bridges Africana philosophy, social and political thought, and the philosophy of technology to illuminate how power, race, and computation shape the contemporary human condition.

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^[i] Sarah Shoker, Military-Age Males in Counterinsurgency and Drown Warfare (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 67.

^[ii] Paul B. Rich and Isabelle Duyvesteyn, “The Study of Insurgency and Counterinsurgency,” in The Routledge Handbook of Insurgency and Counterinsurgency, edited by Paul B. Rich and Isabelle Duyvesteyn, (Routledge, 2012), 1.

^[iii] Douglas Porch, Counterinsurgency: Exposing the Myths of the New Way of War (Cambridge University Press, 2013), 43.

^[iv] Peter Mansoor, “Army,” in Understanding Counterinsurgency: Doctrine, Operations and Challenges, ed. Thomas Rid and Thomas Keaney (Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2010), 85.

^[v] See: https://ppls.ed.ac.uk/philosophy/news/philosophy-phd-graduate-makes-history

^[vi] Miron J. Clay-Gilmore, “Thinking for the Bound and Dead: Towards a Truly Universal Theory of Victory,” (PhD Diss., University of Edinburgh, 2023), 229-230.

^[vii] Leonard Harris, “Necro-Being,” In A Philosophy of Struggle: The Leonard Harris Reader: Philosophia Nata Ex Conatu, ed. Lee A. McBride III (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), 69.

^[viii] Harris, “Necro-Being,” 69.

^[ix] Ibid, 86.

^[x] Ibid, 91.

^[xi] Miron J. Clay-Gilmore “Notes from Inside the Killing Machine – On Racism, Non-Being, and (Counter-Insurgency) Warfare,” Philosophy and Global Affairs vol 6., no. 1. (forthcoming), 16.

^[xii] Clay-Gilmore “Notes from Inside the Killing Machine,” 19.

^[xiii] In a now-deleted post on X.com dated June 11^th, 2024, Kerry Sinanan not only demonstrated her ignorance of the field’s claims but also discouraged people from engaging with BMS. Her message read: “Definitely avoid the Black Male Studies critiques and be guided by those who remind us to focus on the forces of oppression rather than on the identities of those oppressed because that’s where neo liberalism sneaks in. It becomes about identity, not radical resistance.” By July 7^th, 2025, Kerry Sinanan was publicly branding herself as a counterinsurgency scholar in an interview about ‘Counterinsurgent Aesthetics’ (a topic she’s never written a peer-reviewed scholarly publication on) on Jared Ball’s ‘iMiXWHATiLIKE!’ podcast/YouTube channel. After being confronted with evidence of Sinanan’s rebranding of her scholarship and co-optation of terms related to the intervention of BMS scholarship, Ball refused to acknowledge the existence of said critique (even after being provided with more than one scholarly source). For his part, Jairo I. Fúnez-Flores is a Curriculum Studies Ph.D. whose dissertation was an ethnographic account of the oppositional cultures among university students in Honduras who has recently rebranded himself as a counterinsurgency expert through a Substack as early as April 30^th of this year. Like Sinanan, there appear to be no peer-reviewed scholarly publications or publicly available writings authored by Fúnez-Flores on the topic before this year. For Ball and Sinanan’s interview, see:

; To read Fúnez-Flores’s Substack, see: https://substack.com/@insurgentthoughts/posts.