Life During Wartime
Resisting Counterinsurgency
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- $27.99
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- $27.99
Publisher Description
"Together, the writers sound a sobering warning: the American government is an iron fist in a velvet glove whose purpose remains preserving the status quo and enriching the rich."— Publishers Weekly
What happens when the techniques of counterinsurgency, developed to squash small skirmishes and guerrilla wars on the border of Empire, blend into the state's apparatus for domestic policing? In Life During Wartime, fifteen authors and activists reflect on the American domestic security apparatus, detailing the increasing militarization of the police force and the re-emergence of infiltration and counter-intelligence as surveillance strategies, highlighting the ways that the techniques and the technologies of counterinsurgency have been applied on the home front, and offering strategies for resistance.
Includes contributions Kristian Williams, Will Munger, Walidah Imarisha, George Ciccariello-Maher, Beriah Empie, Elaine Brown, Geoffrey Boyce, Conor Cash, Vicente L. Rafael, Alexander Reid Ross, Evan Tucker, Layne Mullett, Sarah Small, and Luce Guillen-Givins.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Nowadays, most folks hear words like "wartime" and "counterinsurgency" and think Middle East, but editors Williams (Our Enemies in Blue), Munger, and Messersmith-Glavin, who are associated with various anarchist groups, are more interested in how these words can be applied to life in the United States. In this radical collection, insurgency is defined as popular resistance to the state, and America is the state in question. The contributors professors, political theorists, Black Panthers, anarchists, and public health advocates argue that counterinsurgency tactics developed during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are now being used to repress socially marginalized groups, including blacks, the poor, Muslims, illegal immigrants, and gangs, as well as antiwar, environmental, and animal-rights activists. Together, the writers sound a sobering warning: the American government is an iron fist in a velvet glove whose purpose remains preserving the status quo and enriching the rich. Less revolutionary readers may weary of the relentless characterization of America as a racist, militarist plutocracy protected by oppressive security forces, but it's hard to discount the evidence presented here of heavy-handed tactics (injunctions, informants, provocateurs, mass incarceration) that have Democratic and Republican politicians alike up in arms.
