Abstract
Confrontation on Borneo tests a thesis on counterinsurgency: winning hearts and minds succeeds if object place/people win over the hearts and minds of subject counterinsurgency soldiers. This psychological transformation depends on fixed objects that counterinsurgency cannot easily change: the counterinsurgency destination and the counterinsurgents’ place of origin that formed soldiers’ unconscious selves. Soldiers encountered on Borneo a transformative, attractive, alien destination that changed their behavior. Soldiers then ratified unconscious behavior by asserting that the cause was their innate decency and official hearts and minds policy. But Borneo had formed the unconscious self that gave form to hearts and minds. This article argues that altered states of being shape counterinsurgency.
Adams Center 2023 Cold War Essay Contest Winner
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Cite this article
Matthew Hughes, “Soldiers’ and Dayak Sense of Self and Other on Borneo during Confrontation between Britain and Indonesia, 1962–66,” The Journal of Military History 88, no. 4 (October 2024): 1028–1061.