Book by Stuart Schrader
University of California Press, 2019
From the Cold War through today, the U.S. has quietly assisted dozens of regimes around the world... more From the Cold War through today, the U.S. has quietly assisted dozens of regimes around the world in suppressing civil unrest and securing the conditions for the smooth operation of capitalism. Casting a new light on American empire, Badges Without Borders shows, for the first time, that the very same people charged with global counterinsurgency also militarized American policing at home.
In this groundbreaking exposé, Stuart Schrader shows how the United States projected imperial power overseas through police training and technical assistance-and how this effort reverberated to shape the policing of city streets at home. Examining diverse records, from recently declassified national security and intelligence materials to police textbooks and professional magazines, Schrader reveals how U.S. police leaders envisioned the beat to be as wide as the globe and worked to put everyday policing at the core of the Cold War project of counterinsurgency. A "smoking gun" book, Badges without Borders offers a new account of the War on Crime, "law and order" politics, and global counterinsurgency, revealing the connections between foreign and domestic racial control.
Articles by Stuart Schrader
Destroy, Build, Secure: Readings on Pacification, 2017
This chapter is from the 2017 edited volume Destroy, Build, Secure, published by Red Quill and ed... more This chapter is from the 2017 edited volume Destroy, Build, Secure, published by Red Quill and edited by Tyler Wall, Parastou Saberi, and Will Jackson.
"All the king's horses and all the king's men aren't going to put Humpty together again. Humpty has got to do that himself."
The critical theory of pacification foregrounds pacification’s twinned character. Pacification entails both destruction and construction. It yokes development and security. Without pacification’s vision of, and tendencies toward, “far-reaching action to construct a new social order,” some of the activities associated with pacification would not merit the term. They would be simply destructive, death-dealing, and deleterious. Yet even with the salutary analytic focus on the constructive component of pacification, the linkage between it and pacification’s necessarily destructive moments often remains underspecified, undertheorized, or asserted rather than empirically demonstrated. A persistent occlusion occurs when it becomes necessary to identify “who” undertakes the labor of construction beneath the mantle of pacification. Frequently, the passive phraseology of critical analysis illustrates the stumbling block: for example, “schools and clinics were constructed.” The destructive agents are readily identified: soldiers, police, intelligence assets, bullets, bombs, missiles, and drones. And, to be sure, soldiers and police often have historically undertaken construction efforts, whether under the yesteryear rubric of “civic action” or the more current one of “humanitarian assistance.” But the difficulty for critical analysis of pacification in identifying the hidden “who” of construction is no simple mistake by today’s analysts. Instead, this difficulty gets to the heart of how pacification operates. To specify how pacification is constructive is to identify who does the work of construction, on whose behalf, and in what political form. In turn, this specificity enables an understanding of how pacification comprises both destruction and construction .
Journal of Urban History, 2020
In response to civil unrest, many U.S. police forces in the 1960s and 1970s adopted more aggressi... more In response to civil unrest, many U.S. police forces in the 1960s and 1970s adopted more aggressive postures, including "militarized" uniforms and tactics. A few, however, directed reform efforts toward "demilitarization." This article focuses on the Menlo Park Police Department, in California, led by the maverick reformer Victor Cizanckas. It analyzes his attempts to change relations between the police and the public in his municipality, especially by decreasing incidents of abuse in one predominantly poor, black neighborhood. He instituted, for example, new uniforms and a nonhierarchical bureaucracy in the department. The article details how Cizanckas used emerging networks of law-enforcement professionalization to disseminate his ideas. It also analyzes the failures and challenges of these reform efforts. The article concludes that even radical police reform efforts in the period could not overcome racial inequality or a right-wing backlash against progressive ideas in policing.
Solidarity Beyond the Crisis, 2020
This is a brief article I published via the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung in July 2020 about police use... more This is a brief article I published via the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung in July 2020 about police use of tear gas during political protests and U.S. imperialism. The original website is defunct. I am republishing the article here.
Global Urban History, 2018
Global urban history takes three primary forms. One is to direct the analytic gaze beyond Euro-Am... more Global urban history takes three primary forms. One is to direct the analytic gaze beyond Euro-America, to cities that were once “off the map” of urban studies. Another is to study the interconnections among far-flung cities. Extensive commercial, cultural, and intellectual networks that underpin “globalization” have long been grounded in cities. With the increasing popularity of global and world history, it makes sense to emphasize the centrality of cities and the unique role they play in globalization. A third form is to analyze the history of an uneven global urban fabric. Works like Carl Nightingale’s Segregation or Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums analyze how the form of the urban changes as it also “globalizes.” In this post, I delve into this third mode of global urban history.
The theoretical innovation that allows us to conceive of an uneven global urban fabric itself has an intellectual history. One important genealogy draws us back to the French social theorist Henri Lefebvre, particularly his work on space and the urban in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, Jul 2016
The U.S. federal mandate of community participation, which defined the social-welfare programming... more The U.S. federal mandate of community participation, which defined the social-welfare programming of the Great Society’s War on Poverty, was recapitulated in U.S. foreign aid through Title IX of the 1966 Foreign Assistance Act. Many agencies adhered to this mandate, including, surprisingly, those concerned with counterinsurgency in South Vietnam. This article, therefore, inquires into the mechanics of pacification, demonstrating that the population whose security was at stake was responsible for its own participation in achieving security. By placing the linkage between community development and security in a transnational frame, this article shows that pacification must be considered a productive, not simply destructive, form of governance.
Harvard Design Magazine, 2016
Short article in Harvard Design Magazine connecting Jane Jacobs, Broken Windows policing, and cur... more Short article in Harvard Design Magazine connecting Jane Jacobs, Broken Windows policing, and current protests against police.
NACLA Report on the Americas, Jul 11, 2016
The first page of the article:
On the first day of a vacation in Costa Rica in April 2015, whi... more The first page of the article:
On the first day of a vacation in Costa Rica in April 2015, while driving on a sparsely populated stretch of road, a cop standing in the shade on the shoulder ordered me to pull me over. As is the routine, he asked for my identification. I showed him my New York driver’s license. He glanced at it, then looked into my rental car. My two companions smiled at him. I didn’t think I had done anything wrong, and whatever he was seeking he didn’t find. He sent us on our way. The vacation continued.
On the last night of that same trip, I stayed in a hotel alongside the Pan-American Highway. The Highway is today more a symbol of the aspiration for hemispheric economic integration than a necessity for it. In fact, I was surprised that the roadway was still under construction in the area I happened to be staying. Newly poured concrete and higher-speed travel routes continue to give shape to projects of economic development in the region, many of which began decades earlier—and often with U.S. assistance. Such projects were originally motivated by the idea that “modernization” could be measured by how close a developing country came to resembling the United States.
Today, the rhetoric of U.S.-style modernization has been largely discredited, even if the demand for up-to-date infrastructure continues. Yet when I looked at that police officer, it was clear to me that in the realm of law enforcement and security, the old dream of modernization persists. The highway may still have been in the process of something like modernization, but the cop who pulled me over was not. Rather, he was fully “modernized”: his routine followed what I would have expected at home in New York. His uniform, weapon, and radio were basically equivalent to what his counterparts would be issued in the United States.
Not long ago, the belief that overhauling police forces was crucial to modernization was a key plank of U.S. policy toward Latin America. Modern police, it was argued, would become simultaneously a symbol of development and, by safeguarding industry and eliminating subversive threats, a catalyst for it. Thanks to research pioneered by the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) in its early years, we now know that the Cold War project of updating, professionalizing, and modernizing police forces in the so-called Third World drew upon the resources and expertise of U.S. law-enforcement officials. And nowhere was this more true than in Latin America.
This essay provides an alternative history of U.S. community development by establishing a global... more This essay provides an alternative history of U.S. community development by establishing a global context for such policies. It demonstrates that the emergence of poverty as a domestic and international public policy issue in the 1960s was closely linked to anxieties about racialized violence in American cities and wars of insurgency in the global South. In doing so, it traces how programs of pacification, both at home and abroad, sought to deal with delinquent youth, to marry policing to economic development, and to grapple with poverty and insecurity. Such a global view provides new insights into American-style community development, specifically how a double system of pacification was an integral part of this approach to urban policy. By focusing on an important precursor to the War on Poverty, the Ford Foundation's Gray Areas program, the essay also highlights how the problem of poverty came to be territorialized not only in the city but specifically in a unit understood as community. However, ''community'' was a space of contestation. Community action was rapidly transformed into programs of community development, especially those animated by the ethos of self-help. But, in cities like Oakland, the first of the Gray Areas cities, and described as a ''racial tinderbox,'' the bureaucracy of poverty became the platform for radical visions and practices of self-determination, notably by the Black Panther Party. Understood in this way, community is a key site for the analysis of liberal government. In particular, urban policy mandates such as community development and community participation reveal the enduring contradictions between ideologies of self-help and struggles for self-determination.
![Research paper thumbnail of “The Anti-Poverty Hoax”: Development, Pacification, and the Making of Community in the Global 1960s [final version link]](https://a.academia-assets.com/images/blank-paper.jpg)
Cities, Aug 7, 2014
This essay provides an alternative history of U.S. community development by establishing a global... more This essay provides an alternative history of U.S. community development by establishing a global context for such policies. It demonstrates that the emergence of poverty as a domestic and international public policy issue in the 1960s was closely linked to anxieties about racialized violence in American cities and wars of insurgency in the global South. In doing so, it traces how programs of pacification, both at home and abroad, sought to deal with delinquent youth, to marry policing to economic development, and to grapple with poverty and insecurity. Such a global view provides new insights into American-style community development, specifically how a double system of pacification was an integral part of this approach to urban policy. By focusing on an important precursor to the War on Poverty, the Ford Foundation’s Gray Areas program, the essay also highlights how the problem of poverty came to be territorialized not only in the city but specifically in a unit understood as community. However, “community” was a space of contestation. Community action was rapidly transformed into programs of community development, especially those animated by the ethos of self-help. But, in cities like Oakland, the first of the Gray Areas cities, and described as a “racial tinderbox,” the bureaucracy of poverty became the platform for radical visions and practices of self-determination, notably by the Black Panther Party. Understood in this way, community is a key site for the analysis of liberal government. In particular, urban policy mandates such as community development and community participation reveal the enduring contradictions between ideologies of self-help and struggles for self-determination.
Social Text: Periscope, 2012
We received notice from the owners of Zuccotti Park," went the incantatory call on the People's M... more We received notice from the owners of Zuccotti Park," went the incantatory call on the People's Mic in the predawn darkness of October 14, 2011. We-we thousandsrepeated the phrase in unison, without hesitation. "That they are postponing their cleaning." Few repeated that phrase. Instead, we shouted and screamed, whooped and whistled, clapped and hugged. It remains unclear why the initial threat to evict Occupy Wall Street (OWS), in the name of cleaning the site, did not occur. Whatever the explanation, as we rallied and learned that no eviction would occur, it felt like anything-winning, even-was possible. Within a month, however, the outlines of how the movement's destruction would occur began to take shape. Internal squabbles and disorganization would play some role. But the chief cause would be brutal repression by militarized police forces across the United States.
Excerpt from first page:
On Saturday, 15 October 2011, thousands of protesters streamed into Tim... more Excerpt from first page:
On Saturday, 15 October 2011, thousands of protesters streamed into Times Square from all directions. A large march arrived from Washington Square, where the first NYC Student Assembly, which we helped plan, had attracted students from nearly a dozen states. Cops closed off 46th Street with metal barricades. Once the street was closed off, the space filled in with protesters. In short time, riot cops, mounted cops and motorcycle cops arrived. They had little room to maneuver because of the barriers the other cops had placed in the street. We witnessed the approach of a second band of motorcycle cops, who sped through the crowd toward the increasingly restive marchers blockaded on the east side of 7th Ave. The motorcyclists couldn’t see where they were going, and as the crowd parted the lead motorcycle cop coming east on 46th plowed into a barrier that his colleagues had placed there moments before to restrain the crowd (Figure 1). The barrier exploded into pieces of scrap metal and the motorcycle cop nearly went down.
The example is almost preposterously concrete, but this sort of thing has been happening a lot since Occupy Wall Street (OWS) began in September 2011: the state running into barriers it has itself created.
Disability Studies Quarterly, 2012
REDI—Red por los Derechos de las Personas con Discapacidad—is a radical disability-rights organiz... more REDI—Red por los Derechos de las Personas con Discapacidad—is a radical disability-rights organization based in Argentina. Until the economic crisis of 2001, REDI focused on lobbying for increased legislative protection of the disabled and enforcement of extant laws in this regard. But the crash suggested that the difficulties facing disabled populations seeking to access to employment and education are rooted in the dynamics of capitalism, which condemn large swaths of the populace to systematic unemployment. Thus, REDI adopted a practical perspective that frames disability and chronic unemployment as a class issue, with the goal of critiquing two common misconceptions: first, that disability is a medical issue to be resolved individually and, second, that those facing chronic unemployment and organizing to overcome it are fighting a different fight from disabled people. Under the slogan "fight for the right to be exploited"—believing that disabled populations, when we include people injured on the job, comprise what Marx labeled the lowest stratum of the industrial reserve army—REDI joined the piqueteros and aimed to increase consciousness that both groups could benefit from an organizational principle that saw their struggles as one. Especially since the global economic crisis of 2008, which has been especially protracted in Argentina, REDI has remained devoted to the notion that the struggle for employment is one moment in a struggle for economic and political autonomy that contests the very foundations of the capitalist social system. This interview with a member of the Steering Committee, Facundo Chavez Penillas, describes REDI's history, organizing principles and campaigns, and its class analysis of disability. Other topics include the relationship between disability-rights activism and the so-called "Pink Tide" in Latin America, as well as the Argentine experience of bridging disability-rights activism and labor activism.
American Quarterly, 2011
Review Essay
Books reviewed:
Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street. By Karen Ho.
Off th... more Review Essay
Books reviewed:
Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street. By Karen Ho.
Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor. By Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh.
First paragraph: Income inequality—the gap between rich and poor—grows apace in the United States, as it has since the 1970s. If the worrisome fact of this widening chasm is widely accepted, its proximate causes are as widely debated. Asked to illustrate the far edges of the widening income gap, a casual observer might well draw, on one end, Wall Street investment bankers and, on the other, poor, black residents of a neighborhood like Bronzeville on Chicago’s South Side. Few, however, would expect to find similarities in the everyday lives of these groups, which are apt to be considered as far apart culturally as they are economically. Yet in the two ethnographic accounts under review, each group’s social practices share remarkably similar senses and expressions of temporality."""
Interviews by Stuart Schrader
International Politics Reviews, 2020
International Politics Reviews published a review forum for Badges Without Borders: How Global Co... more International Politics Reviews published a review forum for Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing in 2019. The reviewers were Paul Edgar, Jeffrey H. Michaels, Jeanne Morefield, and Guillermina Seri. Tarak Barkawi wrote a brief introduction (included here) and interviewed me about the book and the reviews in the forum.
Abstract: In this wide ranging interview, Stuart Schrader discusses the research and writing of Badges without Borders and responds to his criticisms and questions raised in the review essays. He discusses counterinsurgency and policing; history and theory; racialization in the post-1945 US world order; the interplay between domestic and foreign in both scholarship and US policy; and the place of policing in US grand strategy.
Global History Forum
This is an article based on an interview with Stuart Schrader conducted by Timothy Nunan on behal... more This is an article based on an interview with Stuart Schrader conducted by Timothy Nunan on behalf of the Toynbee Prize Foundation. It concerns Schrader's dissertation "American Streets, Foreign Territory" and forthcoming monograph.
Book Reviews by Stuart Schrader
Legal Form, 2018
This is a review of the second edition of Sidney L. Harring's book Policing a Class Society, publ... more This is a review of the second edition of Sidney L. Harring's book Policing a Class Society, published by Haymarket Books in 2017. It originally appeared on Legal Form blog, in three parts, in January 2018.
Magazine Articles by Stuart Schrader
Global History Forum Interviews by Stuart Schrader
Uploads
Book by Stuart Schrader
In this groundbreaking exposé, Stuart Schrader shows how the United States projected imperial power overseas through police training and technical assistance-and how this effort reverberated to shape the policing of city streets at home. Examining diverse records, from recently declassified national security and intelligence materials to police textbooks and professional magazines, Schrader reveals how U.S. police leaders envisioned the beat to be as wide as the globe and worked to put everyday policing at the core of the Cold War project of counterinsurgency. A "smoking gun" book, Badges without Borders offers a new account of the War on Crime, "law and order" politics, and global counterinsurgency, revealing the connections between foreign and domestic racial control.
Articles by Stuart Schrader
"All the king's horses and all the king's men aren't going to put Humpty together again. Humpty has got to do that himself."
The critical theory of pacification foregrounds pacification’s twinned character. Pacification entails both destruction and construction. It yokes development and security. Without pacification’s vision of, and tendencies toward, “far-reaching action to construct a new social order,” some of the activities associated with pacification would not merit the term. They would be simply destructive, death-dealing, and deleterious. Yet even with the salutary analytic focus on the constructive component of pacification, the linkage between it and pacification’s necessarily destructive moments often remains underspecified, undertheorized, or asserted rather than empirically demonstrated. A persistent occlusion occurs when it becomes necessary to identify “who” undertakes the labor of construction beneath the mantle of pacification. Frequently, the passive phraseology of critical analysis illustrates the stumbling block: for example, “schools and clinics were constructed.” The destructive agents are readily identified: soldiers, police, intelligence assets, bullets, bombs, missiles, and drones. And, to be sure, soldiers and police often have historically undertaken construction efforts, whether under the yesteryear rubric of “civic action” or the more current one of “humanitarian assistance.” But the difficulty for critical analysis of pacification in identifying the hidden “who” of construction is no simple mistake by today’s analysts. Instead, this difficulty gets to the heart of how pacification operates. To specify how pacification is constructive is to identify who does the work of construction, on whose behalf, and in what political form. In turn, this specificity enables an understanding of how pacification comprises both destruction and construction .
The theoretical innovation that allows us to conceive of an uneven global urban fabric itself has an intellectual history. One important genealogy draws us back to the French social theorist Henri Lefebvre, particularly his work on space and the urban in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
On the first day of a vacation in Costa Rica in April 2015, while driving on a sparsely populated stretch of road, a cop standing in the shade on the shoulder ordered me to pull me over. As is the routine, he asked for my identification. I showed him my New York driver’s license. He glanced at it, then looked into my rental car. My two companions smiled at him. I didn’t think I had done anything wrong, and whatever he was seeking he didn’t find. He sent us on our way. The vacation continued.
On the last night of that same trip, I stayed in a hotel alongside the Pan-American Highway. The Highway is today more a symbol of the aspiration for hemispheric economic integration than a necessity for it. In fact, I was surprised that the roadway was still under construction in the area I happened to be staying. Newly poured concrete and higher-speed travel routes continue to give shape to projects of economic development in the region, many of which began decades earlier—and often with U.S. assistance. Such projects were originally motivated by the idea that “modernization” could be measured by how close a developing country came to resembling the United States.
Today, the rhetoric of U.S.-style modernization has been largely discredited, even if the demand for up-to-date infrastructure continues. Yet when I looked at that police officer, it was clear to me that in the realm of law enforcement and security, the old dream of modernization persists. The highway may still have been in the process of something like modernization, but the cop who pulled me over was not. Rather, he was fully “modernized”: his routine followed what I would have expected at home in New York. His uniform, weapon, and radio were basically equivalent to what his counterparts would be issued in the United States.
Not long ago, the belief that overhauling police forces was crucial to modernization was a key plank of U.S. policy toward Latin America. Modern police, it was argued, would become simultaneously a symbol of development and, by safeguarding industry and eliminating subversive threats, a catalyst for it. Thanks to research pioneered by the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) in its early years, we now know that the Cold War project of updating, professionalizing, and modernizing police forces in the so-called Third World drew upon the resources and expertise of U.S. law-enforcement officials. And nowhere was this more true than in Latin America.
On Saturday, 15 October 2011, thousands of protesters streamed into Times Square from all directions. A large march arrived from Washington Square, where the first NYC Student Assembly, which we helped plan, had attracted students from nearly a dozen states. Cops closed off 46th Street with metal barricades. Once the street was closed off, the space filled in with protesters. In short time, riot cops, mounted cops and motorcycle cops arrived. They had little room to maneuver because of the barriers the other cops had placed in the street. We witnessed the approach of a second band of motorcycle cops, who sped through the crowd toward the increasingly restive marchers blockaded on the east side of 7th Ave. The motorcyclists couldn’t see where they were going, and as the crowd parted the lead motorcycle cop coming east on 46th plowed into a barrier that his colleagues had placed there moments before to restrain the crowd (Figure 1). The barrier exploded into pieces of scrap metal and the motorcycle cop nearly went down.
The example is almost preposterously concrete, but this sort of thing has been happening a lot since Occupy Wall Street (OWS) began in September 2011: the state running into barriers it has itself created.
Books reviewed:
Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street. By Karen Ho.
Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor. By Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh.
First paragraph: Income inequality—the gap between rich and poor—grows apace in the United States, as it has since the 1970s. If the worrisome fact of this widening chasm is widely accepted, its proximate causes are as widely debated. Asked to illustrate the far edges of the widening income gap, a casual observer might well draw, on one end, Wall Street investment bankers and, on the other, poor, black residents of a neighborhood like Bronzeville on Chicago’s South Side. Few, however, would expect to find similarities in the everyday lives of these groups, which are apt to be considered as far apart culturally as they are economically. Yet in the two ethnographic accounts under review, each group’s social practices share remarkably similar senses and expressions of temporality."""
Interviews by Stuart Schrader
Abstract: In this wide ranging interview, Stuart Schrader discusses the research and writing of Badges without Borders and responds to his criticisms and questions raised in the review essays. He discusses counterinsurgency and policing; history and theory; racialization in the post-1945 US world order; the interplay between domestic and foreign in both scholarship and US policy; and the place of policing in US grand strategy.
Book Reviews by Stuart Schrader
Magazine Articles by Stuart Schrader
Global History Forum Interviews by Stuart Schrader
In this groundbreaking exposé, Stuart Schrader shows how the United States projected imperial power overseas through police training and technical assistance-and how this effort reverberated to shape the policing of city streets at home. Examining diverse records, from recently declassified national security and intelligence materials to police textbooks and professional magazines, Schrader reveals how U.S. police leaders envisioned the beat to be as wide as the globe and worked to put everyday policing at the core of the Cold War project of counterinsurgency. A "smoking gun" book, Badges without Borders offers a new account of the War on Crime, "law and order" politics, and global counterinsurgency, revealing the connections between foreign and domestic racial control.
"All the king's horses and all the king's men aren't going to put Humpty together again. Humpty has got to do that himself."
The critical theory of pacification foregrounds pacification’s twinned character. Pacification entails both destruction and construction. It yokes development and security. Without pacification’s vision of, and tendencies toward, “far-reaching action to construct a new social order,” some of the activities associated with pacification would not merit the term. They would be simply destructive, death-dealing, and deleterious. Yet even with the salutary analytic focus on the constructive component of pacification, the linkage between it and pacification’s necessarily destructive moments often remains underspecified, undertheorized, or asserted rather than empirically demonstrated. A persistent occlusion occurs when it becomes necessary to identify “who” undertakes the labor of construction beneath the mantle of pacification. Frequently, the passive phraseology of critical analysis illustrates the stumbling block: for example, “schools and clinics were constructed.” The destructive agents are readily identified: soldiers, police, intelligence assets, bullets, bombs, missiles, and drones. And, to be sure, soldiers and police often have historically undertaken construction efforts, whether under the yesteryear rubric of “civic action” or the more current one of “humanitarian assistance.” But the difficulty for critical analysis of pacification in identifying the hidden “who” of construction is no simple mistake by today’s analysts. Instead, this difficulty gets to the heart of how pacification operates. To specify how pacification is constructive is to identify who does the work of construction, on whose behalf, and in what political form. In turn, this specificity enables an understanding of how pacification comprises both destruction and construction .
The theoretical innovation that allows us to conceive of an uneven global urban fabric itself has an intellectual history. One important genealogy draws us back to the French social theorist Henri Lefebvre, particularly his work on space and the urban in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
On the first day of a vacation in Costa Rica in April 2015, while driving on a sparsely populated stretch of road, a cop standing in the shade on the shoulder ordered me to pull me over. As is the routine, he asked for my identification. I showed him my New York driver’s license. He glanced at it, then looked into my rental car. My two companions smiled at him. I didn’t think I had done anything wrong, and whatever he was seeking he didn’t find. He sent us on our way. The vacation continued.
On the last night of that same trip, I stayed in a hotel alongside the Pan-American Highway. The Highway is today more a symbol of the aspiration for hemispheric economic integration than a necessity for it. In fact, I was surprised that the roadway was still under construction in the area I happened to be staying. Newly poured concrete and higher-speed travel routes continue to give shape to projects of economic development in the region, many of which began decades earlier—and often with U.S. assistance. Such projects were originally motivated by the idea that “modernization” could be measured by how close a developing country came to resembling the United States.
Today, the rhetoric of U.S.-style modernization has been largely discredited, even if the demand for up-to-date infrastructure continues. Yet when I looked at that police officer, it was clear to me that in the realm of law enforcement and security, the old dream of modernization persists. The highway may still have been in the process of something like modernization, but the cop who pulled me over was not. Rather, he was fully “modernized”: his routine followed what I would have expected at home in New York. His uniform, weapon, and radio were basically equivalent to what his counterparts would be issued in the United States.
Not long ago, the belief that overhauling police forces was crucial to modernization was a key plank of U.S. policy toward Latin America. Modern police, it was argued, would become simultaneously a symbol of development and, by safeguarding industry and eliminating subversive threats, a catalyst for it. Thanks to research pioneered by the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) in its early years, we now know that the Cold War project of updating, professionalizing, and modernizing police forces in the so-called Third World drew upon the resources and expertise of U.S. law-enforcement officials. And nowhere was this more true than in Latin America.
On Saturday, 15 October 2011, thousands of protesters streamed into Times Square from all directions. A large march arrived from Washington Square, where the first NYC Student Assembly, which we helped plan, had attracted students from nearly a dozen states. Cops closed off 46th Street with metal barricades. Once the street was closed off, the space filled in with protesters. In short time, riot cops, mounted cops and motorcycle cops arrived. They had little room to maneuver because of the barriers the other cops had placed in the street. We witnessed the approach of a second band of motorcycle cops, who sped through the crowd toward the increasingly restive marchers blockaded on the east side of 7th Ave. The motorcyclists couldn’t see where they were going, and as the crowd parted the lead motorcycle cop coming east on 46th plowed into a barrier that his colleagues had placed there moments before to restrain the crowd (Figure 1). The barrier exploded into pieces of scrap metal and the motorcycle cop nearly went down.
The example is almost preposterously concrete, but this sort of thing has been happening a lot since Occupy Wall Street (OWS) began in September 2011: the state running into barriers it has itself created.
Books reviewed:
Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street. By Karen Ho.
Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor. By Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh.
First paragraph: Income inequality—the gap between rich and poor—grows apace in the United States, as it has since the 1970s. If the worrisome fact of this widening chasm is widely accepted, its proximate causes are as widely debated. Asked to illustrate the far edges of the widening income gap, a casual observer might well draw, on one end, Wall Street investment bankers and, on the other, poor, black residents of a neighborhood like Bronzeville on Chicago’s South Side. Few, however, would expect to find similarities in the everyday lives of these groups, which are apt to be considered as far apart culturally as they are economically. Yet in the two ethnographic accounts under review, each group’s social practices share remarkably similar senses and expressions of temporality."""
Abstract: In this wide ranging interview, Stuart Schrader discusses the research and writing of Badges without Borders and responds to his criticisms and questions raised in the review essays. He discusses counterinsurgency and policing; history and theory; racialization in the post-1945 US world order; the interplay between domestic and foreign in both scholarship and US policy; and the place of policing in US grand strategy.