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Human Terrain

War & Peace • 1h 9m

Directed by James Der Derian, David Udris & Michael Udris • Documentary • 2010 • 84 minutes

Human Terrain is two stories in one. The first exposes a new Pentagon effort to enlist the best and the brightest in a struggle for hearts and minds. Facing long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military initiates "Human Terrain Systems," a controversial program that seeks to make cultural awareness the centerpiece of the new counterinsurgency strategy. Designed to embed social scientists with combat troops, the program swiftly comes under attack as a misguided and unethical effort to gather intelligence and target enemies. 

The other story is about a brilliant young scholar who leaves the university to join a Human Terrain team. After working as a humanitarian activist in the Western Sahara, Balkans, East Timor and elsewhere, and winning a Marshall Scholarship to study at Oxford, Michael Bhatia returns to Brown University to take up a visiting fellowship. In the course of conducting research on military cultural awareness, he is recruited by the Human Terrain program and eventually embeds with the 82nd Airborne in eastern Afghanistan. On the way to mediate an intertribal dispute, Bhatia is killed when his humvee hits a roadside bomb.

Tags
21st century, 82nd airborne, afghanistan, alex wright, andrew kennedy, anthropology and archaeology, applied anthropology, barak salmoni, bing west, brian selmeski, bullfrog films, catherine lutz, christopher hitchens, counterinsugency, cultural awareness, doc, embedding, expository, fort leavenworth, frank tramano, fred kaplan, hearts and minds, history, hugh gusterson, human terrain, human terrain systems, humvee, intelligence gathering, iraq, iraq-afghan war, jackie lyden, james der derian, jarat chopra, jay hatton, keith brown, michael bhatia, michael ritz, middle east and north africa, mojave desert, montgomery mcfate, ovid, ovid_ca, patrick kline, pentagon, peter walz, philip gourevitch, quantico, richard holbrooke, roadside bomb, roberto gonzalez, s_0015, s_0263, s_0286, s_0351, s_0371, s_0624, social issues, social science, sociology, steve fondacaro, title_defgh, title_h, us military, war and peace, william mccallister, world regions

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