THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.2, ISSUE#10, DEC/2013-FEB/2014
Kristian Williams has authored several important emancipatory works including Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America, American Methods: Torture and the Logic of Domination, and Hurt: Notes on Torture in a Modern Democracy. Most recently, he was one of the editors of Life During Wartime: Resisting Counterinsurgency
Brotherwise Dispatch - At the heart of counterinsurgency doctrine is a vulgar replication of the techniques and culture of insurgency by established power, in an effort to smother the very possibility of rebellion amongst an oppressed population. As Trinquier, chief imperial theorist of the Battle of Algiers stated, “One must operate like a partisan whenever there are partisans.” How do you see this playing out in relation to the evolving culture of contemporary policing strategies, particularly within the socio-historical context of the response of established power to the vast social unrest of the 60’s and 70s?
Kristian Williams - As part of the Community Policing efforts that began in the 70s, police departments started experimenting with neighborhood offices, community liaisons, partnerships with community groups, and the like. At the same time they were re-structuring, with designated neighborhood teams so that there would be consistency in a given area and cops could become familiar with the community. As a result, authority was increasingly localized and low-level commanders, or even patrol officers, had greater responsibility for the way things went on their turf. As part of the same project, the cops were also starting to work with neighborhood groups and in some places did things like going door to door asking people what their concerns were. In effect, they started treating policing as a kind of community organizing project.
At the same time and building the bridge, so to speak, from the other direction, there have also been efforts to shape the opposition into forms that are more easily engaged by the state -- that is, into institutionalized bodies that can be regulated, adopted as partners, and co-opted by governments. Internationally, that usually takes the form of Non-Governmental Organizations which, while nominally independent of the government, often receive funding from USAID or similar programs. That funding, of course, follows the government's policy objectives and has a way of shaping the NGOs' priorities. The US military, too, is careful to cooperate with NGOs working in their Area of Operations to find (or create) shared goals. Something similar happens domestically with liberal non-profits, which the police are only too happy to adopt as community partners. One clear example is the institutionalization of domestic violence shelters. They still do important work, but now with city funding and in partnership with the police; the radical feminist politics and the critique of the criminal justice system, which animated these projects when they started, have been entirely drained away. Here we see the state re-constituing its opposition into a type of organization that can be more easily incorporated into the state's own network of power.
BD - How would you describe the working relationship between ‘Community Policing’ and the growing omnipresence of paramilitary formations as part of a normalized counterinsurgent culture of domestic ‘law enforcement’?
KW - Militarization and community policing both arose in response to the crisis of the 1960s, and often in the same departments more or less simultaneously. For example, people may remember that the LAPD created the SWAT team, specifically to confront the Black Panthers, but it is usually forgotten that they also invented the DARE program, with cops talking to school kids, and were early adopters of the Neighborhood Watch.
In Our Enemies in Blue, I argued that there isn't really a contradiction between militarization and community policing. Instead, they're complementary aspects of a domestic counterinsurgency program. The SWAT team and the like represent the hard, coercive side; and the community policing programs represent the "hearts and minds" aspect, as well as the process of co-optation and an opportunity for the cops to gather intelligence through routine, friendly contact.
BD - What function does torture serve within the context of domestic and international counterinsurgency as employed by Empire-as-western imperialist power?
KW- It's complicated. Success in counterinsurgency depends on finding just the right combination of coercion and concessions to legitimize state power while also militarily defeating the opposition. Torture is very effective as a tool of coercion, but it is almost inevitably delegitimizing. So, the authorities might decide to use it to coerce individuals and terrorize select populations, but if news of the torture spreads too far it can undercut support for the government and increase sympathy for the resistance. The trick is to make sure the torture is well enough known, or at least suspected, so that people will be afraid of it, while also maintaining plausible deniability. As it happens, there are several ways of doing that. One is to use techniques that, while excruciatingly painful, don't leave marks on the victim's body. Another is to outsource it to death squads or other paramilitaries, nominally independent of the government. A third is to officially prohibit torture, while also creating an institutional culture that makes it practically inevitable; when news of it does leak out, the authorities can just prosecute select low-level functionaries, and salvage some of their credibility. (We can think of that as the Abu Ghraib option.) All of those dynamics exist, in one way or another, both in US operations overseas and in the criminal justice context domestically.
One thing I should stress is, despite the popular mythology, torture is a stupid way to try to collect intelligence. Once a person breaks he will say literally anything, true or not, to make the pain stop. But besides that, the pain itself interferes with memory and communication. Skillful interrogators are nearly unanimous on the fact that there are better ways to get quality information. But torture is good for coercion, and for terrorism. That's the real reason it is used, and the "interrogation" is often just a pretext, or a justification to ease the conscience of those responsible.
BD - In your latest book, Life During Wartime: Resisting Counterinsurgency, you recognize a tension which exists between the basic premise of advanced neo-liberal capitalism and the aims of counterinsurgency doctrine. What is the nature of that tension and what happens when the only factor which keeps them both in check, namely “popular resistance”, is either non-existent, marginalized or reduced to mere protest-as-ritual event?
KW - The dilemma is this: Counterinsurgency is at least as much about concessions and co-optation as it is about coercion. It works largely by institutionalizing opposition, so that it takes a non-confrontational form and can be accommodated by the authorities. The neoliberal program, on the other hand, withdraws those concessions and closes the institutional channels that allow grievances to be aired and addressed with minimal disruption. So the two efforts obviously clash.
Moreover, there are contradictions (to use the Marxist phrase) internal to both. Neoliberalism is an ideology of minimal state intervention, but it requires massive intervention to impose its austerity measures. Counterinsurgency takes its primary aim to be legitimacy for the existing authorities, but it is often employed in the defense of social systems that are fundamentally unjust and thus very difficult to legitimize.
In the introduction to Life During Wartime, I point out that the limit to each, counterinsurgency and neoliberalism, is popular resistance. Neoliberalism tends to engender its own resistance simply by immiserating the majority of the population. People wisely recognize that unless they fight back, they'll see their lives deteriorate -- longer hours, less pay, unsafe conditions, zero public services (and thus greatly reduced life prospects for the working class), as well as practically unregulated pollution. In other words: capitalism in its purest form.
Counterinsurgency theorists are smart enough to recognize that, under conditions of inequality, resistance to authority is itself a permanent part of society. The strategy then is to limit the resistance to manageable forms. That means that parts of a resistance movement will be co-opted and incorporated into the power structure; and other parts will be destroyed through disruption, incarceration, or military action. But both are neutralized. Resistance doesn't disappear in this scheme; instead it is viewed as a problem to be managed. Where that works, it means that the basic system of power remains in place, though the cost of stability is that the people at the top probably can't do quite everything that they would like. On the other hand, the authorities may even enjoy greater legitimacy because resistance exists in some limited way; it shows that the masters are "enlightened" and "tolerant."BD - Your take on the counterinsurgent use of “progressive non-profits to channel and control political opposition, moving it in safe, institutional and reformist directions, rather than more radical or militant action” really hit home in the example you gave of the State sanctioned police murder of Oscar Grant and the waves of social unrest which followed. Would you mind illuminating how it all went down for our readers who have yet to check out your book: Life During Wartime: Resisting Counterinsurgency?
KW - Well, I don't want to go too far into it, or I'll just end up reproducing my chapter from the book. But the short version is that many Bay Area nonprofits, including some Black churches, did a lot of work to suppress the militancy of their constituencies. They didn't just discourage rioting, but denounced those who took part in it. They purposely created and promoted non-disruptive actions to draw people away from the rowdier protests. They actively policed the people at their own events, at one point using a line of marshals to try to disperse the crowd. And they did all of that in consultation with the political authorities and the police. Naturally the public rationale for this sort of thing is that liberal leaders wanted to prevent violence. As I note in the chapter, however, they were only really concerned with preventing the violence of unrest; the violence of policing became a secondary concern, if that. In fact, I argue that by de-legitimizing resistance their handling of the crisis made police violence *more* likely. On the whole, it's pretty disgraceful.
This has been another one of our BROTHERWISE FIVE interview series, during which The BROTHERWISE DISPATCH interrogates intellectuals, artists and activists with five probing questions to the delight of our readers.
On behalf of Kristian Williams and The BROTHERWISE DISPATCH,
Peace.
-A. Shahid Stover
(this interview of Kristian Williams for The BROTHERWISE DISPATCH was conducted by A. Shahid Stover through email correspondence from November 19th – December 30th of 2013)
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