The Thistle and the Drone awarded 2013 IndieFab Award in Political Science

Professor Akbar Ahmed’s previous book The Thistle and the Drone has been awarded the 2013 IndieFab Award for Political Science.

In The Thistle and the Drone, Professor Ahmed draws on 40 case studies of tribal societies in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and other nations across the Muslim world to reveal a tremendously important yet largely unrecognized adverse effect of campaigns on the war against terror. Ahmed argues that in the aftermath of 9/11, the use of drones as a leading military counterinsurgency weapon has morphed into a campaign against tribal peoples that has actually exacerbated the already-broken relationship between central governments and the tribal societies on their periphery. Although al Qaeda has been decimated, the U.S. is drifting into a global war against tribal societies on the periphery of nations.