“The Target Is the People”: Representations of the Village in Modernization and U.s. National Security Doctrine

In the 1950s and 1960s, the term village served as a cardinal construct in modernization theory and counterinsurgency doctrine, signifying local resistance to the global power of the United States. Nation builders devised two strategies – community development and strategic hamlets – that reveal the attitudes and characteristics they ascribed to the village and its conceptual opposite, the city. The key innovations came from Albert Mayer, a New York real-estate developer who designed the modernist city of Chandigarh and India's village reconstruction scheme. Mayer's ideas persist in forms as diverse as Washington's country-club suburbs and the Pentagon's techniques for urban assault.