Life During Wartime

Resisting Counterinsurgency
Herausgeber: Williams, Kristian; Munger, William; Messersmith-Glavin, Lara

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

A chilling indictment of state repression and first-world counterinsurgency tactics, with suggestions on how to fight back.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: AK PR Inc
• Seitenzahl: 350
• Erscheinungstermin: 27. August 2013
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 228mm x 154mm x 35mm
• Gewicht: 687g
• ISBN-13: 9781849351300
• ISBN-10: 1849351309
• Artikelnr.: 36632643

Autorenporträt

Kristian Williams is the author of Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America, American Methods: Torture and the Logic of Domination, Confrontations: Selected Journalism, and Hurt: Notes on Torture in a Modern Democracy. He has written about counterinsurgency and political repression for Counterpunch, Clamor, In These Times, Z Magazine, International Socialist Review, Labor Notes, Social Anarchism, the Earth First! Journal, Eat the State, PDXS, Dollars and Sense, and (perhaps oddly) The Comics Journal -- as well as in the introduction to the 2007 edition of The New State Repression. Lara Messersmith-Glavin is the founder and managing editor of the non-fiction journal Alltopia. Her own writing has appeared in Alltopia, Perspectives on Anarchist Theory, the Spoon Cafe Journal, and MaLa, the premier English-language literary and nonfiction journal of China. Her accounts of culture shock, education, the military response to a Tibetan uprising, and the Sichuan earthquake earned her the 2008 Chinalyst.com award for Best Travel Writing. Lara is on the board of directors for the Institute for Anarchist Studies, which seeks to further anarchist thought, solidarity, and practice by funding radical writers through grants, and providing opportunities for publication through Perspectives (now both online and in print form) and the Anarchist Interventions book series (produced in collaboration with AK Press). Will Munger is a member of the Life During Wartime editorial collective and also organized the 2011 Counter Counterinsurgency Convergence.

Inhaltsangabe

Part One: The Politics of Repression
COINTELPRO to COIN
Claude Marks, interviewed by Kristian Williams and Walidah Imarisha
Marks discusses the continuities and the developments in repression from
the Cointelpro era to today.
Repression, Civil Liberties, Right-Wingers, and Liberals
by Chip Berlet
Berlet contrasts the state's approach to addressing challenges from the
right with its response to opposition from the left. He then considers the
political implications for left movements when the state attacks the right.
Canada's Counterinsurgency Strategy Against Indigenous Peoples
by Zig Zag
Zig Zag shows how its history of colonialism has shaped the Canadian
government's strategy of repression.
Part Two: Counterinsurgency and Domestic Policing
The Other Side of the COIN: Counterinsurgency and Community Policing
by Kristian Williams
Williams describes the historical transfer of counterinsurgency theory,
strategy, and technique, from the U.S. military to the domestic police and
back again. He ends by pointing to the implications for social movements as
they encounter and resist repression.
Social War in the Salad Bowl: Counterinsurgency in Salinas
by Will Munger
Will Munger presents a contemporary case study of police counterinsurgency,
drawn from his thesis research on the collaboration between the Naval
Postgraduate School and the Salinas Police Department.
Gang Injunctions and the Control of Neighborhood Life
by Rachel Herzig
This chapter considers the history of gang injunctions and the effects of
their implementation in communities of color. It then details the campaign
against the introduction of injunctions in Oakland, California.
Part Three: Security Culture: Recognizing and Subverting Repression
Recognizing Informants and Avoiding Entrapment
by Jenny Esquivel
Esquivel recounts documented cases of infiltration and entrapment, drawing
lessons for social movements.
Who needs the NSA when we have social media?
by Evan Tucker
Tucker explains how the state and private businesses use of social media to
monitor, track, and disrupt their opponents.
Data Security
by Josef Schneider
This short paper explains the basic principles of computer security and
suggests some simple ways to diminish its effectiveness. 
Part Four: Political Offenses and Legal Defenses: Case Studies
The Curious Case of Conor Cash
by Conor Cash and Kevin Van Meter
Conor Cash is one of the only "Green Scare" defendants who is not in jail
and there are a number of important reasons for this beyond his innocence.
Cash and Van Meter provide a chronology of the case, describe the
surrounding environment, and detail the support strategy. They identify
lessons for current political organizing in general and political prisoner
support work in particular. 
Repression to Resistance: How Fighting State Repression Can Make Us
Stronger Layne Mullett, Sarah Small, and Luce Guillen-Givins
This paper is an exploration of how fighting government repression and
supporting political prisoners can and does open doors for us to advance
and connect our movements while we support our comrades. The authors
discuss how their own experience organizing around the RNC-8 case led to
alliances with other people fighting repression, in particular the Puerto
Rican independence movement's struggle to free their political prisoners.
Part Five: Political Prisoners, Politicizing Prisons
White Supremacy and the Prison Crisis: Connecting the Dots
by Beriah Empie
This paper offers a framework for tackling white supremacy within radical
currents. It briefly covers the history of white supremacy and explains the
ways the prison industrial complex is central to the maintenance of a
racist culture.
Political Prisoners and Prisoner Support
by Jenny Esquivel
This chapter outlines both the political necessity and the practical
challenges of organizing in support of political prisoners, tracing the
steps of a campaign from arrest to trial to long-term incarceration and
eventual release.
On Memory and Resistance
by Elaine Brown
This excerpt from Brown's keynote speech connects the history of the black
freedom movement with her work in supporting the 2010 Georgia prison
strike, the largest prison strike in US history.
Part Six: Social Science and Social War
Geography, Counter-insurgency and the "G-Bomb": the Case of México Indígena
by Geoffrey Boyce and Conor Cash
In 2005, geographers from the University of Kansas began a "collaborative
mapping" project with indigenous peoples in Oaxaca, Mexico. Dubbed "Mexica
Indigena", this project was presented as a means of defending traditional
land claims. Instead, Mexica Indigena was the pilot for a Foreign Military
Studies Office program meant to augment counterinsurgency efforts in the
Dominican Republic, Haiti, Colombia, and elsewhere. This paper explores the
implications for military/academic collaboration, professional ethics, and
the colonial legacy of geography and anthropology.
Targeting Translation: Counterinsurgency and the Weaponization of Language
by Vicente L. Rafael
Rafael focuses on two prevalent tropes in the discourse of
counterinsurgency: the "weaponization" and "targeting" of foreign
languages. How is the counterinsurgent notion of languages as "weapons" and
"targets" linked to the strategic imperative of deploying translation as a
means for colonization? What are the limits and contradictions to the
targeting of speech?
Part Seven: Counter-COIN
Countering Counterinsurgency: Strategies, Situations and Tactics
by John Kelly
Kelly argues that counterinsurgency doctrines preemptively define local
situations in transvalued, global terms. He examines the antidemocratic
roots of the "insurgency" concept, and then tracks the fall, rise, and
current status of "insurgency" and "counterinsurgency" metaphors in
military theory and practice. Citing examples from his own research in
Thailand, Burma, and Northeast India, he outlines the stark consequences of
such transvaluation.
Counter-Recruitment as Counter-Counterinsurgency
by Mario Hardy
Hardy places opposition to military recruitment within a framework of
broader resistance.
Just Us: Transforming Justice by Building Communities
by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Gumbs examines crime as a problem for resistance movements, both in terms
of its corrosive effects on solidarity and as a source of legitimacy for
the state. She then describes some of the ways social movements have
addressed this problem, and the politics implicit in interventions outside
of the existing justice system.
Capture/Rupture: Insurrectionary Counter to Counterinsurgency
by David Cunningham
Cunningham argues that empire responds to all social conflict with methods
of counterinsurgency; and he advocates countering the state with the
insurrectionary potentialities that exist in our day-to-day struggles.