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Culture and Politics in the Cold War and Beyond
Modernizing Repression: Police Training and Nation-Building in the American Century
As American troops became bogged down first in Iraq and then Afghanistan, a key component of U.S. strategy was to build up local police and security forces in an attempt to establish law and order. This approach, Jeremy Kuzmarov shows, is consistent with practices honed over more than a century in developing nations within the expanding orbit of the American empire. From the conquest of the Philippines and Haiti at the turn of the twentieth century through Cold War interventions and the War on Terror, police training has been valued as a cost-effective means of suppressing radical and nationalist movements, precluding the need for direct U.S. military intervention and thereby avoiding the public opposition it often arouses.
Unlike the spectacular but ephemeral pyrotechnics of the battlefield, police training programs have had lasting consequences for countries under the American imperial umbrella, fostering new elites, creating powerful tools of social control, and stifling political reform. These programs have also backfired, breeding widespread resistance, violence, and instability―telltale signs of "blowback" that has done more to undermine than advance U.S. strategic interests abroad.
Unlike the spectacular but ephemeral pyrotechnics of the battlefield, police training programs have had lasting consequences for countries under the American imperial umbrella, fostering new elites, creating powerful tools of social control, and stifling political reform. These programs have also backfired, breeding widespread resistance, violence, and instability―telltale signs of "blowback" that has done more to undermine than advance U.S. strategic interests abroad.
400 pages, Paperback
First published March 31, 2012
93 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
February 10, 2020
Modernizing Repression argues that during the Cold War, the US exported policing techniques to the global south, under the guise of "progressive" modernization of police bureaucracy, but really in order to crush "subversives" and dissidents who were advocating for "much needed" social reform. This exporting contributed to the brutalization of these societies and the strengthening of autocrats. It is basically a story of a shadow para-governmental para-military force, operating our of local municipalities but with federal support, to export a global anti-leftist agenda. Kuzmarov ties the specific exported reforms back to Progressive-era policing reforms in the United States, including new technologies like fingerprinting, two way radio, Bertillon procedures, etc. "Because police trained by the United States frequently served as the enforcement arm of undemocratic regimes valued by Americans for promoting free trade and anticommunism and oriented toward internal security and social control, the new equipment frequently aided an intensification of state repression, in effect modernizing it" (9). Kuzmarov is spot-on that modernization theory, particularly in its later "military" phase, was essential for providing a narrative that justified the export of American policing technique in order to inoculate developing countries against what Walt Rostow called "the disease of the transition" to modernity, namely communism.
On a critical note, Kuzmarov underplays (a) how much agency recipient governments had to take the toys and techniques they were offered and deploy them for their own political purposes; and (b) the global circulation of repressive policing techniques, e.g. what happened wasn't merely a "diffusion" of "modernizing" technique from America to the less-policed parts of the world, but rather an entangled process whereby the learnings about what sorts of repression worked abroad was frequently brought home to deal with "backward" populations at home as well. Indeed, many of "progressive" reforms he speaks of were in fact (a) pioneered in the global south, specifically the Philippines, as Alfred McCoy has documented, and then imported back to the United States, and (b) very much geared at anti-radicalism at home -- though the Palmer Raids and future FBI Director J Edgar Hoover's start in the "Radical Division" (e.g. anti-radical) of the Justice Department warrant only a passing mention.
In the end, the real story of US influence on global policing is if anything even more sinister than the one Kuzmarov tells: the techniques of anti-radical policing were deeply imbricated with the techniques of counterinsurgency in the global south, with practitioners, technology, and methods flowing constantly between both theaters. Both of them were geared at repressing usually non-white others who sought to overturn the existing power structure, and to keep them bottled up within their narrow political confines, ideally merely fragmented and frustrated, but if necessary, imprisoned or killed. The ghetto at home was thus the domestic analog to the peasant (or, later, urban) radical abroad, and the methods used to manage the threat these posed to the existing power structure was the same. Kuzmarov focuses on the savagely repressive aspects of this system, which is fair enough, but in the end spends not enough time talking about how effective these techniques have been at maintaining existing people in power. It may have been evil, but it worked.
On a critical note, Kuzmarov underplays (a) how much agency recipient governments had to take the toys and techniques they were offered and deploy them for their own political purposes; and (b) the global circulation of repressive policing techniques, e.g. what happened wasn't merely a "diffusion" of "modernizing" technique from America to the less-policed parts of the world, but rather an entangled process whereby the learnings about what sorts of repression worked abroad was frequently brought home to deal with "backward" populations at home as well. Indeed, many of "progressive" reforms he speaks of were in fact (a) pioneered in the global south, specifically the Philippines, as Alfred McCoy has documented, and then imported back to the United States, and (b) very much geared at anti-radicalism at home -- though the Palmer Raids and future FBI Director J Edgar Hoover's start in the "Radical Division" (e.g. anti-radical) of the Justice Department warrant only a passing mention.
In the end, the real story of US influence on global policing is if anything even more sinister than the one Kuzmarov tells: the techniques of anti-radical policing were deeply imbricated with the techniques of counterinsurgency in the global south, with practitioners, technology, and methods flowing constantly between both theaters. Both of them were geared at repressing usually non-white others who sought to overturn the existing power structure, and to keep them bottled up within their narrow political confines, ideally merely fragmented and frustrated, but if necessary, imprisoned or killed. The ghetto at home was thus the domestic analog to the peasant (or, later, urban) radical abroad, and the methods used to manage the threat these posed to the existing power structure was the same. Kuzmarov focuses on the savagely repressive aspects of this system, which is fair enough, but in the end spends not enough time talking about how effective these techniques have been at maintaining existing people in power. It may have been evil, but it worked.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 20, 2013
The bitter, bitter story of American intervention that resulted in the set-up of police states in the Phillipines, Indonesia, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, Congo, Burundi, Tanzania, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Guatemala, Brazil, Bolivia and Chile. If you are under 30, this book will radicalize you; skip it and enjoy the universe while it is still a mystery. Otherwise you owe it to yourself to be informed of this horrifying and disturbing account, based on recently released documents, of the unthinkable butchery that took place under the funding and direction of the US Agency for International Development, Office of Public Safety, and International Police Academy. A clear and scrupulously documented account which also includes a clear picture of the revolving door through which police officials have through the years passed between big city police departments and clandestine paramilitary circles.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews