Kristian Williams

The first fifty people to order my book Gang Politics will receive a free embroidered patch!

My book Gang Politics is at the printer, and expected to be in stores in June, but you can pre-order it now from AK Press.

Here’s what the publisher has to say about it:

In Gang Politics, Kristian Williams examines our society’s understanding of social and political violence, what gets romanticized, misunderstood, or muddled. He explores the complex intersections between “gangs” of all sorts—cops and criminals, Proud Boys and Antifa, Panthers and skinheads—arguing that government and criminality are intimately related, often sharing critical features. As society becomes more polarized and conflict more common, Williams’s analysis is a crucial corrective to our usual ideas about the role violence might or should play in our social struggles.

Love is the theme for the current issue of Grim, a feminist horror criticism magazine.  In it, I have an essay about Jungian archetypes and the mother characters in Gillian Flynn’s novels: Gone Girl, Sharp Objects, and Dark Places.

I wrote a short essay re-thinking the wisdom of the antifascist orthodoxy that “We go where they go,” and the over-reliance on streetfighting that results.  It is part of an ongoing discussion at Three Way Fight, looking to draw lessons from the poorly executed attack on a Proud Boys’ rally on August 22.

I’ve also written a short review of a British collection, Abolishing the Police.  The book is well worth reading.  My review explains why.  Here’s one of several striking images from the book:

And lastly, in his “Five Book Plan” for “Breaking Police Power,” Geo Maher said some very nice things about my book, Our Enemies in Blue.  It’s short enough that I’ll quote the whole thing here, somewhat bashfully, but with much gratitude:

The classic account of police power in the United States. Building on this Du Boisian foundation, Our Enemies in Blue remains to this day arguably the best single text on the history and function of American police and has rightly become a staple of radical study groups nationwide. Combining meticulous research with a movement organizer’s eye to the dynamics of political power, Williams provides an unparalleled account of the colonial and racial origins and contemporary function of American police, of the expansion and fascistic power of so-called police “unions,” and of the longstanding complicity of uniformed police with their white supremacist brothers-in-arms. What’s more, Williams lays out an abolitionist vision of what it would mean to make policing obsolete—all this in a text originally published more than fifteen years ago.