Life During Wartime: Resisting Counterinsurgency
I am pleased to announce the release of a new collection from AK Press, Life During Wartime: Resisting Counterinsurgency. In it, a couple dozen activists and scholars examine the domestic application of counterinsurgency and the ways that social movements are responding. Individual chapters relate counterinsurgency to policing and mass incarceration, border control, the Green Scare, infiltration and surveillance, and similar topics.
I was one of three editors for the volume (alongside Will Munger and Lara Messersmith-Glavin). I also contributed a chapter of community policing, helped Walidah Imarisha interview former political prisoner Claude Marks, and supplied the introduction.
To help publicize the book, I will be traveling with one of the contributors (Team Colors‘ Kevin Van Meter), and where possible joining with other Life During Wartime authors as well. I will outline the basics of counterinsurgency theory and its application in domestic policing. Kevin will highlight the ways the movement responded to a specific case at the outset of the Green Scare. For each event, a public discussion will follow. Tour details are below.
As always, I hope you’ll attend one of these if you’re in the area. Or, if you’d like to bring me, or another of the Wartime contributors, to speak at your local school, church, book store, infoshop, or union hall, please write me at: info -at- kristianwilliams.com
Here are the tour dates:
August 4th, 2013 — Tucson, Arizona
2-4pm; Revolutionary Grounds (606 N 4th Ave.)
We’ll be speaking with Fatima Insolación, who will discuss border militarization and resistance.
August 5th, 2013: Tempe, Arizona
7:30-9:30pm; Boulders on Broadway (530 West Broadway)
August 6th, 2013: Los Angeles
7pm-9pm; The Public School (951 Chung King Road)
August 7th, 2013: San Francisco
7pm-9pm; Station 40 (3030B 16th St., near the corner of Mission St.)
Freedom Archives director, documentary filmmaker, and former political prisoner Claude Marks will join us to discuss the history of political repression, from COINTELPRO to present.
August 8th, 2013: Berkeley, California
6pm-9pm; La Peña Cultural Center (3105 Shattuck Ave.)
Jenny Esquivel and Evan Tucker, both from Sacramento Prisoner Support, will present alongside Kevin and myself. Jenny will discuss entrapment and political prisoners. Evan will examine some of the nefarious uses of social media.
August 9th: Sacramento, California
7:30pm-9pm; The Lavender Library (1414 21st St.)
Kevin and I will again be joined by Jenny Esquivel and Evan Tucker. (See above.)
August 18th: Portland, Oregon
7pm-9pm; The Red and Black Cafe (400 SE 12th Ave.)
This event will feature a full roster. Two editors of Life During Wartime: Resisting Counterinsurgency (Lara Messersmith-Glavin and myself) will discuss the project as a whole, and several contributors will talk about their chapters in the book. I will then go on to talk briefly about counterinsurgency and community policing. Beriah Empie and Lydia Bartholow will explain how counterinsurgency has both shaped and been shaped by the prison industrial complex. Sasha Ross will relate counterinsurgency to the Green Scare and the repression of the broader environmental movement. And Kevin Van Meter will wrap it up by discussing an early Green Scare case and its successful legal defense.