Related Papers
The other side of the COIN: counterinsurgency and community policing 1
2011 •
Kristian Williams
Life During Wartime: Resisting Counterinsurgency (AK Press)
Counterinsurgency and the Occupy Movement
2013 •
George Ciccariello-Maher
Critical Sociology
Beyond Militarization and Repression: Liberal Social Control as Pacification
2014 •
Markus Kienscherf
This article will argue that the concepts of repression and militarization are inadequate tools for a radical critique of the targeted and selective application of coercion and consent in efforts to (re)produce a liberal capitalist order. The article will first of all show how liberal social control is best understood as uneven processes of pacification targeting specific individuals, groups and populations through a combination of coercion and consent. Secondly, the article will examine historical and current efforts to control protest through the lens of pacification. The analytic of pacification will then be applied to broader trends in US social control. Last but not least, the article will show that the apparently technical distinctions that allow for the targeted application of coercion and/or consent frequently reflect and reinforce existing societal divisions along the lines of race, class and gender.
Interface: a journal for and about social movements
Interface 3/1 Repression and Social Movements
2011 •
Laurence Cox
Hunting for Humans updated draft
Miron Clay-Gilmore
This essay argues that Huey Newton's philosophical explanation of US empire fills an epistemological gap in our thinking that provides us with a basis for understanding the emergence and operational application of predictive policing, Big Data, cutting-edge surveillance programs, and semi-autonomous weapons by US military and policing apparati to maintain control over racialized populations historically and in the (still ongoing) Global War on Terror today-a phenomenon that Black Studies scholars and Black philosophers alike have yet to demonstrate the conceptual acumen to explain. Newton's ability to explain the conceptual foundation of US empire alongside his prediction of the emergence and application of AI and other Big Data technologies towards the repression of dissidents, criminals, terrorists, and other racialized groups abroad gives intercommunalism the explanatory power to lay the basis for a genealogical account of Black repression that also advances our understanding of how the US as a liberal democratic regime engages in enemy target acquisition (the construction of racialized groups as threats internally and externally) to rationalize the brutal repression of these populations by military-police agencies whose operational application of new AI and computing-surveillance technologies and semi-autonomous weapons are conditioned by the intensity of their racialized dehumanization of the enemy.
SOULS
Straight Ahead: The Life of Resistance of Dr. Mutulu Shakur
2022 •
Akinyele Umoja
Dr Mutulu Shakur is a lifelong revolutionary and New Afrikan freedom fighter recently released from 36 years captivity as a political prisoner in the U.S. federal prison system. He became a revolutionary nationalist and joined the New Afrikan Independence Movement as a teenager and was convicted for engaging in insurgent resistance against white supremacy and colonial-capitalist exploitation. This political biography details the life of Dr. Shakur as an organizer, health worker, soldier, and internationalist. It also includes his political education and organizing inside U.S. prisons, which helped transform fellow prisoners from anti-social behaviors to positive social conscious and practices.
Security Dialogue
Settler colonial counterinsurgency: Indigenous resistance and the more-than-state policing of #NoDAPL
2023 •
Bruno Seraphin
In 2016, the US-based private military contractor TigerSwan was denied a license to operate in North Dakota. Nonetheless, it coordinated a counterinsurgency (COIN) campaign employing war-on-terror tactics, brutalizing Indigenous and allied water protectors associated with the Indigenous-led movement to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline (#NoDAPL) on Standing Rock Lakota territory. This article takes COIN as an analytic to show that US settler colonialism is a multilateral, internally conflicted, and anxious mode of power. The settler state both depends upon and disavows anti-Indigenous and anti-Black violence enacted by rogue civilian individuals and organizations, a phenomenon here termed ‘more-than-state policing’. The repression of #NoDAPL was not solely a boomerang by-product of the global war on terror but rather exposes an established infrastructure of settler colonial COIN intrinsic to US normal politics, in which Indigenous resistance and sovereignty are constructed as metastasizing, viral threats to settler colonial legitimacy. As modern COIN warfare has evolved from four centuries of North American settler colonial invasion and governance, settler colonial studies are key to grasping 21st-century topics of war, imperialism, securitization, resource extraction, and climate justice.
The Global Industrial Complex: Systems of Domination
2011 •
Peter McLaren
Legal control and resistance post-Seattle
Luis Fernandez
This article examines the state of legal control of social movements since the 1999 World Trade Organization (WTO) protest in Seattle, Washington. The authors argue that state control has changed significantly in recent years. As a result, the article outlines a general framework for the study of the social control of dissent, but focusing specifically on understanding how legal mechanisms are deployed to control protest. The second part of the article shows how activists responded to these control tactics.
Radical History Review
Targeting Revolutionaries
Orisanmi Burton
This essay traces the emergence of the carceral warfare project, a clandestine campaign to infuse US prisons with the logics and techniques of counterinsurgency. First exposed by Black Liberation Army member Dhoruba bin-Wahad, the project came into being between 1970 and 1978. The article begins by discussing the theory undergirding the carceral warfare project, a reactionary idea known as “the issue exploitation thesis.” Starting in 1970, seasoned cold warriors renovated their long-standing arguments against communism for application against imprisoned Black revolutionaries. Next, the FBI’s little-known Prison Activists Surveillance Program (PRISACTS) is discussed. Focusing on the words and deeds of George Jackson and Donald Bordenkircher—two central figures positioned on opposite sides of the struggle—the essay shows how the bureau used PRISACTS to treat carceral spaces as zones of counterrevolutionary warfare. Although the FBI officially discontinued PRISACTS in 1976, the final s...
