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This article – based on data that employs interviews conducted with British Army personnel – adopts a social theory of learning in order to examine how both formal and informal learning systems have affected organizational learning within the Army in relation to the counter-insurgency campaign in Afghanistan. It argues that while the Army has adopted new, or reformed existing, formal learning systems, these have not generated a reconceptualization of how to conduct counter-insurgency warfare. It, furthermore, argues that while informal learning systems have enabled units to improve their pre-deployment preparations, these have created adaptation traps that have acted as barriers to higher-level learning. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Geographies are taking center stage in debates about new, contested forms of imperialism. Geographers have developed a powerful analysis of the spatial dynamics of imperialism, which remains somewhat rarefied, obscuring many of the ways in which people speak about imperialism in their daily lives. Taking seriously the postcolonial injunction to listen to colonized peoples and to those who stand with and for them, this article describes empirical research among activists who bring anti-imperialism to practical political projects and in so doing animate and renew this way of thinking and speaking. Interviews were conducted with members of three politicized communities, who mobilized distinct anti-imperial traditions in their opposition to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. These interviews-with Muslims, nationalist-separatists, and socialists in the United Kingdom-chart a series of interconnected, vernacular spaces of resistance. They show and suggest how, in the grounded and heterogeneous places of activist practice, and through imaginative and rhetorical geographies of resistance, the ideas and languages of imperialism are being mobilized and measured, sometimes found wanting, but ultimately animated and renewed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]