“Global counterinsurgency and the police-military continuum: introduction to the special issue”

Abstract

This introduction to the special issue ”Global Counterinsurgency and the Police-Military Continuum” examines the emergence of global counterinsurgency in the twentieth century and introduces the critical concept of the police-military continuum. Through a review of the recent literature, it also provides a framework for analyzing the relationship of historical trends and contemporary developments in what is typically labeled ”police militarization.” It introduces and summarizes the fourteen original research articles in the special issue, which analyze United States, United Kingdom, Costa Rica, Haiti, India, Kenya, Malaysia, Tanganyika, and elsewhere. The introduction explains the genesis of the special issue in the aftermath of the rebellions of 2020, and it also considers new directions for research in the aftermath of the events of 6 January 2021 at the US Capitol, as well as what these events indicate about counterinsurgency’s possible future mutations.

KEYWORDS:

• Police
• military
• counterinsurgency
• police militarization
• globalization
• black lives matter

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Morris, “Donald Rumsfeld’s Fog of Memos”; and Draper, To Start a War.

2. Greg Winger, @ghwinger, Twitter post, 1 July 2021 4:41 pm, https://twitter.com/ghwinger/status/1410700006621814784?s=20; Donald Rumsfeld to Larry Di Rita, ‘History of Insurgency,’ 17 November 2003 Proquest document no. 2469722705, Donald Rumsfeld’s Snowflakes, Part I: The Pentagon and U.S. Foreign Policy, 2001–2003, Digital National Security Archive.

3. Carter, “A Catalog of Failure.”

4. Cockburn, “Iraq Was Donald Rumsfeld’s War.”

5. Ryan, “Full Spectrum Dominance.” Whereas John A. Nagl, David Petraeus, H.R. McMaster, and others all drew on historical lessons in their promotion of counterinsurgency tactics, Gian Gentile’s rebuttal argued that no amount of tactical élan could overcome a failed strategy and incoherent policy objectives, while Douglas Porch highlighted an alternate history of human rights abuses in counterinsurgency. McMaster, Dereliction of Duty; Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife; Petraeus and Amos, US Army/Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency Field Manual FM 3–24; Gentile, Wrong Turn; and Porch, Counterinsurgency.

6. I can list only a fraction of the post-9/11 work in this vein: Birtle, US Army Counterinsurgency and Contingency Operations Doctrine, 1942–1976; Dumbrell and Ryan, eds., Vietnam in Iraq; Gardner and Young, eds., Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam; Gurman, ed., Hearts and Minds; Hack, “Everyone Lived in Fear”; and Rich, “A Historical Overview of US Counter-insurgency.”

7. See, e.g. Kelly et al., eds. Anthropology and Global Counterinsurgency.

8. Fair and Ganguly, eds., Policing Insurgencies; Gventer, Jones, and Smith, eds., The New Counter-insurgency Era in Critical Perspective; Stoker and Westermann, “Expeditionary Police Advising”; and Thomas and Curless, eds., Decolonization and Conflict.

9. Schrader, Badges Without Borders; Schrader, “When Police Treat Protesters like Insurgents”; Go, “The Racist Origins of U.S. Policing”; Michaels, “Managing Global Counterinsurgency.” For a collection of analyses along these lines by a radical think tank, see The Transnational Institute’s 2021 ‘State of Power’ dossier: https://longreads.tni.org/state-of-power-2021. For a gripping, deeply reported journalistic approach, see Woods and Soderberg, I Got a Monster.

10. A recent overview is Kraska, “Police Militarization 101.”

11. On the Far Left, numerous frequently anonymous analyses appeared, often in the vein of after-action reports, covering particular uprising events and tactics. . For more synthetic views of the U.S. mobilizations, see Black, “Go Outside”; Haslett, “Magic Actions”; Shanahan and Kurti, “Prelude to a Hot American Summer.” To be clear, this special issue is not mainly concerned with insurgency but with counterinsurgency.

12. Sands, “The Shot-in-the-Eye Squad.”

13. Buford et al., “We Reviewed Police Tactics”; Schrader, “Trump Has Brought America’s Dirty Wars Home”; Myers, “Esper Encourages Governors.”

14. A recent study of protest and counterprotest explaining why police arrest left-wing protesters at higher rates is Wood, “Policing Counter-protest.”

15. Bevins, The Jakarta Method.

16. Schrader, Badges Without Borders, 38–45, 265–272; and Singh, Race and America’s Long War.

17. Brenner and Elden, “State, Space, World,” 1–41, especially 22–26, quote from 22. I am grateful to Neil Brenner for insightful conversation on this point.

18. Westad, The Global Cold War, 38. There is a risk of reproducing a diffusionist schema here; arguably, the Cold War in Latin America, for example, preceded U.S. or Soviet investment in it.

19. New work on this line of inquiry, also paying attention to the interaction of revolutionary thought and counterinsurgency theory, includes: Camp and Greenburg, “Counterinsurgency Reexamined”; Peterson, “Think Global, Fight Local”; Vázquez, “Counterinsurgency’s Ambivalent Enterprise.”

20. Harcourt, The Counterrevolution. For recent analyses of the targeting of political movements that have criticized police and how they have responded, all in the context of military influences on policing, see Baer, Beyond the Usual Beating; Felker-Kantor, Policing Los Angeles; LeBrón, Policing Life and Death.

21. Walters, “Donald Rumsfeld Was a Bloodthirsty Warrior.”

22. I have been inspired by Nikhil Pal Singh in many conversations on this topic.

23. For example, “The Spear’ podcast, ‘The Battle of Mogadishu – Part One,” 6 December 2018 Modern War Institute, https://mwi.usma.edu/podcast-spear-battle-mogadishu-part-one/.

24. For a remarkable ethnographic account of police training in Kurdistan, see Wozniak, Policing Iraq. On the challenges of studying ‘global policing’ ethnographically, see Steinberg, “Ethnographies of Global Policing.”

25. “US Army Biometric Facility Opened in West Virginia”; and Harkins, “Marine Corps Law Enforcement Battalion.”

26. Mummolo, “Militarization Fails to Enhance Police Safety”; and Gunderson et al, “Counterevidence of Crime-Reduction Effects.”

27. Sherry, The Punitive Turn in American Life.

28. Kraska, “Police Militarization 101,” 447.

29. Goldman and Nicholson, “The Boiling Frog of U.S. Police Militarization.”

30. Denman, “The Logistics of Police Power”; Howell, “Forget ‘Militarization’”; McMichael, “Pacification and Police”; Neocleous, War Power, Police Power; Seigel, “Always Already Military”; and Walrath and Linnemann, “War, Police, and the Production of Global Social Order.”

31. On pacification and ‘community-oriented policing’ in Brazil, see, e.g. Müller and Steinke, “Community Policing’s Extended Military History”; Willis and M Prado, “Process and Pattern in Institutional Reforms.” On the limits of ‘militarization’ through a comparative study of South Africa and Brazil, Stuurman, “Policing Inequality and the Inequality of Policing.” On genealogies of counterinsurgency in Turkey, see Yonucu, “Counterinsurgency in Istanbul.” On police militarization in Canada, see Madsen, “Green is the New Black.”

32. For a discussion of this point in Marx’s 1844 “On The Jewish Question,” see Neocleous, Critique of Security and more generally the articles in Mark Neocleous and the Anti-Security Collective, eds., “A Critical Theory of Police Power.”

33. There is no major discussion of pre-1945 genealogies here but see, e.g. Aune, “Indian Fighters in the Philippines”; Grenier, The First Way of War; Rid, “The Nineteenth Century Origins of Counterinsurgency Doctrine”; Wagner, “Savage Warfare”; Wall, Saberi, and Jackson, eds., Destroy, Build, Secure, especially the chapters by Parastou Saberi and Aaron Henry; and Whittingham, “Savage Warfare.”

34. Go, “The Imperial Origins of American Policing”; and McCoy, Policing America’s Empire.

35. See also the 2019 special issue of Small Wars & Insurgencies (vol. 30, no. 1) on ‘Perspectives on the American Way of War: The U.S. Experience in Irregular Conflict,’; U.S. Marine Corps, Small Wars Manual.

36. Schrader, “Cops at War”; and Sinclair and Williams, “Home and Away.”

37. Brooks, “A War within a War”; and Brooks, “Rumor, Vicious Innuendo, and False Reports.”

38. Schrader, Badges Without Borders. See also Kuzmarov, Modernizing Repression; Matthews, “The Kennedy Administration, Counterinsurgency, and Iraq’s First Ba’thist Regime”; and Seigel, Violence Work.

39. Collings-Wells, “Developing Communities”; Collings-Wells, “From Black Power to Broken Windows”; Müller and Steinke, “Community Policing’s Extended Military History”; Rutland, “From Compromise to Counter-insurgency”; Watkins, “Cops Are Cops”; Williams, Our Enemies in Blue; and Williams, Munger, and Messersmith-Glavin, eds., Life during Wartime.

40. Hiorns, “Analysis of C3 Counterinsurgency Inspired Policing”; Schrader, “Defund the Global Policeman”; and Williams, “Brutal Crimes Grip an Indian Reservation.”

41. For analyses that focus on the circulation of so-called ‘non-lethal’ weapons in the context of decolonization, see, Drohan, “Unintended Consequences”; Elhalaby, “American Tear Gas in Hashemite Iraq”; Feigenbaum, Tear Gas; and Linstrum, “Domesticating Chemical Weapons.”

42. One excellent wide-ranging review article on colonial genealogies of contemporary security practices is Axster et al., “Colonial Lives of the Carceral Archipelago”; on counterinsurgency to suppress anticommunist guerrillas in China after the revolution, see Yang, “Securing the Keystone.”

43. A recent article on the use of dogs in narcotics control paints a complementary picture: Hubbard, “Detectives, Detectors, and Drug Sniffers.”

44. One recent study points to the importance of a small Brazilian police assistance mission in Haiti, linked to MINUSTAH, for advancing counterinsurgency objectives: Finazzi, “Overlapping Agency in the Security Sector Reform of Haiti?”

45. The FBI seems to have helped provoke this incident: Grant, “Did FBI Informants Thwart?”

46. Two notable works on the U.S. context from recent years are: Belew, Bring the War Home; and Burke, Revolutionaries for the Right.

47. I am inspired here by Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism, and Mitchell, “Society, Economy, and the State Effect.”

48. Davies etal., “Multiple People Stabbed.”

49. Gertz, “Coverage of Last Night’s Rally.”

50. Seymour, “Is It Still Fascism If It’s Incompetent?”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stuart Schrader

Stuart Schrader is Associate Research Professor of Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins University, where he is also the Associate Director of the Program in Racism, Immigration, and Citizenship. He is the author of Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing (University of California Press, 2019), as well as articles in Humanity, Journal of Urban History, Modern American History, Public Culture, and other journals.