Interview with Stuart Schrader
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Interview with Stuart Schrader Tarak Barkawi1 · Stuart Schrader2
© Springer Nature Limited 2020
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. Keywords Counterinsurgency · Policing · Race · Cold War · United States Tarak Barkawi (TB): Can you tell us about the book’s origins? You mention in the acknowledgements that some remarks in Christian Parenti’s Lockdown America inspired you? First, let me thank you, Tarak, as well as Robbie Shilliam, for facilitating this conversation, and let me also extend my deep gratitude to Paul Edgar, Jeffrey Michaels, Jeanne Morefield, and Guillermina Seri for engaging with my work in incredibly thoughtful ways. Here is the back story. In college, one stray idea had lodged itself in my head, which I picked up in a modern US history course with Bob Brigham, among the first US historians to write about the second Indochina war using Vietnamese-language sources in the 1990s. The idea I gleaned was that foreign policy and domestic policy were intertwined, particularly during the Johnson administration. I didn’t know what to do with this nugget. But I subsequently read Nikhil Pal Singh, who then became my PhD advisor at NYU, on the Black Panther Party and internal colonialism theory, as well as Parenti, Forrest Hylton, and Tracy Tullis, whose texts gave me numerous fruitful ideas and leads on sources.1 1 Forrest Hylton “Death, Destruction, and Rebirth in Brooklyn” NACLA Report on the Americas 41, no. 6 (2008): 36–41; Christian Parenti, Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis (New York: Verso, 1999); Nikhil Pal Singh, “The Black Panther Party and the ‘Underdeveloped Country’
* Tarak Barkawi [email protected] 1
London, UK
2
Baltimore, MD, USA
Vol.:(0123456789)
International Politics Reviews
In the meantime, I became interested in gentrification and urban development from an activist perspective. Living in New York City through the shift from Giuliani Time in the 1990s to the 9/11 moment and then Bloomberg’s stop-and-frisk era, it was impossible not to consider how aggressive policing shaped urban life. Yet it was only through conversations with Singh and reading scholars of empire’s reverberations like Ann Stoler that I started to become aware of how it might be possible to concretize this vague idea about a nexus of foreign and domestic policy and research it. Anyway, two decades passed from that class with Brigham until when Badges Without Borders (hereafter, BWB) came out. I had no idea where the research would take me, or even how to pursue it, when I started, but I believe I realized that original two-faced kernel, concerning the policy nexus and urban policing. TB) While
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