Introduction to forum
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Introduction to forum Tarak Barkawi1
© Springer Nature Limited 2020
Few first books manage to be as timely and as field-redefining as Stuart Schrader’s Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing. Covering the period 1945 to 1975, the book excavates the deep linkages between the Cold War US program of police assistance to other countries and the growth of the domestic “war on crime” in the USA. As he puts it, “Across the globe, counterinsurgency was policing. At home, policing was counterinsurgency.” Schrader shows how national security bureaucrats conceived of police as the “first line of defense” against communism in newly independent states of Asia and Africa, as well as in the rapidly developing republics of Latin America. Based on extensive archival analysis at the federal level, as well as a thorough examination of the professional literatures of policing, Badges Without Borders illustrates how lawenforcement experts imagined their task of police reform and professionalization as global in scope. As Jeanne Morefield notes in her review in this forum, Schrader’s book transgresses disciplinary and subfield boundaries, telling a story of the transnational exercise of racialized police power. Badges Without Borders situates US policing in modernization theory and racial liberalism, a global project for a superpower seeking influence in a decolonizing world. For US national security thinkers, policing would be integral to the project of capitalist development, but it was to be compatible with a managed form of democracy and constrained political independence. Policing would prevent the outbreak of subversion and revolution; it was counterinsurgent in orientation. The book covers the bureaucratic infrastructure of police assistance, the centralization of counterinsurgency resources in the Kennedy administration, and the transfer of models of overseas police assistance to domestic anticrime efforts. It looks at US police assistance in practice in Guatemala, South Vietnam, and the Dominican Republic. The political upheaval set in train by the Black freedom movements in the USA intersected with overseas counterinsurgency. The upshot for domestic US policing was riot control training, chemical weapons like CS gas for crowd control, and militarized SWAT teams, all of which have been much in evidence in the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. In tracing the international peregrinations of law-enforcement * Tarak Barkawi [email protected] 1
London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK Vol.:(0123456789)
International Politics Reviews
experts, technologies, and institutions, the book signals for historians, IR scholars, sociologists, and others the possibility of thinking about the growth of the US carceral state in transnational fashion, while also considering anew how empire reverberates at home. Trained in an American Studies program, Schrader’s methods are those of an archival historian, while his conceptual resources come from race and cultural studie
