Introduction to forum

摘要

Few first books manage to be as timely and as field-redefining as Stuart Schrad-er's Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing. Covering the period 1945 to 1975, the book excavates the deep linkages between the Cold War US program of police assistance to other countries and the growth of the domestic "war on crime" in the USA. As he puts it, "Across the globe, counterinsurgency was policing. At home, policing was counterinsurgency." Schrader shows how national security bureaucrats conceived of police as the "first line of defense" against communism in newly independent states of Asia and Africa, as well as in the rapidly developing republics of Latin America. Based on extensive archival analysis at the federal level, as well as a thorough examination of the professional literatures of policing, Badges Without Borders illustrates how law-enforcement experts imagined their task of police reform and professionalization as global in scope. As Jeanne Morefield notes in her review in this forum, Schrader's book transgresses disciplinary and subfield boundaries, telling a story of the transnational exercise of racialized police power.