The perceived division between domestic politics and foreign policy has long inhibited scholars in various fields from studying the operation of governance projects that hybridize local and transnational elements. In Badges without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing, Stuart Schrader blazes a new trail in the policing literature by illuminating the mutually constitutive relationship between governance projects that developed under the banner of ‘police professionalization’ within the United States and beyond its borders during the decades following the Second World War. By challenging the conventional analytical bifurcation between domestic and imperial terrains of policing, this book casts new light on the political forces and institutional dynamics that have shaped the transformation of American policing throughout the second half of the twentieth century and on the profound international impact of these transformations. More generally, it provides an instructive model for historical sociological scholarship that transcends methodological nationalism and explores the recursive interactions between local, national, and transnational policy formations.

The use of military-grade weapons, helicopters, and armored personnel carriers to repress protests in American cities has sparked growing interest in the historical roots of current patterns of police militarization. Given that the early institutionalization of police forces in the United States was based on a rejection of continental European models that formally amalgamated police and military powers (such as France’s Gendarmerie Nationale and Italy’s Carabinieri), it is unsurprising that scholars have mainly situated current trends of police militarization in relation to the long history of institutionalizing the second-class civil status of racial and ethnic minorities. This perspective focuses on how the increasing deployment of militarized policing tactics that disproportionately target Black and Latinx populations adds a new layer to the racialized structures of policing that took their modern shape in the segregated landscapes of American cities. This genealogical lens has considerable explanatory power, but it remains incomplete insofar as it analyzes domestic historical developments in isolation from the transnational settings in which they were enmeshed. Building on the premise that the transformation of US policing should be understood as a transnational project, Schrader revises our understanding of the evolution of the carceral state during a formative period in which national policy making became increasingly entangled with international political conflicts.

Badges without Borders explores how reciprocal feedback loops between domestic and imperial projects of race making shaped the operational and organizational structures of American policing. It shows how the intensification of domestic civil rights struggles and the growing involvement of the United States in imperial ventures overseas stimulated the rise of new approaches to policing that straddled the domestic-foreign divide. As part of its effort to secure international dominance, the United States took it upon itself to “professionalize” policing practices around the globe. To accomplish this, it created a complex bureaucratic infrastructure dedicated to the transnational diffusion of policy templates for tackling crime and insurgency. Yet the institutionalization of these policy templates in “Third World” countries around the globe also produced boomerang effects whereby governance techniques that were first deployed in far-off lands were repatriated for domestic use. Schrader’s pioneering study of these transnational routes of policy transfer demonstrates that, along with the domestic driving forces on which the current literature on the carceral state has focused (Gottschalk Reference Gottschalk2008; Thompson Reference Thompson2010), contemporary patterns of policing in the United States were also shaped by techniques of governing racialized populations in countries in the global South. The toxic infusion of these imperial elements with the nation’s white supremacist creeds played a major role in shaping the militarized style of policing that came to characterize the current contours of the carceral state.

Building on the pioneering work of Mary Dudziak (Reference Dudziak2000), the scholarship on the relationship between Cold War imperatives and domestic racial justice struggles has highlighted the ways in which the dissolution of European imperialism increased the vulnerability of the United States to criticism about the inequities of the Jim Crow system and motivated political elites to endorse the cause of civil rights. This perspective emphasizes the ways in which the effort to reconcile the tensions between the nation’s manifested commitment to egalitarian values and its actual racial practices served to galvanize support for progressive (though largely symbolic) racial legislation. Badges without Borders highlights another dimension of Cold War civil rights politics that has received less scholarly attention despite its clear resonance with the domestic shift toward greater reliance on carceral tools of racial governance in post-1960s American politics. Schrader’s analysis shows that, rather than focusing on the apologetic containment of international criticism of its racial practices, the United States proactively devised new strategies for legitimizing the persistence of the color line. Mirroring the shift toward racialized discourses of “governing through crime” in American politics (Simon Reference Simon2006), these new strategies relied on orientalist stereotypes and white supremacist myths to legitimize the institutionalization of a globe-spanning carceral archipelago that served to stabilize racial hierarchies within a formally decolonized international order.

The book’s narrative synthesizes archival material from a wide variety of sources, including federal and state records, police textbooks and professional magazines, oral histories, and memoirs. Building on this extensive archival research, Schrader traces the professional journey of security experts who served as conduits of ideas from imperial sites of counterinsurgency to domestic venues of urban policing. For example, the story of Byron Engle, who served as the director of the Office of Public Safety (OPS), illustrates the role played by the bureaucratic elites of the national security state in circulating policy models abroad and promoting the domestic implementation of these models at home. In line with the strategic preference of the United States to rely on local proxies rather than direct rule, the police assistance programs designed by these national security experts provided local law enforcement actors overseas with professional expertise and governance technologies to promote internal security goals that resonated with US geopolitical and economic interests. In so doing, they served as institutional entrepreneurs promoting the reconfiguration of both the imperial capacities of the United States and the social control capacities of the individual states in which they operated. The open-ended nature of the concept of police power in American political thought provided US foreign policy bureaucratic elites with a useful vehicle to conflate various manifestations of racial difference, ideological conflict, crime, and political protest within an expansive agenda of US global interventionism.

Police professionalization projects introduced mechanisms of routinization, technological refinement, and statistical measurement into the organizational culture of law enforcement institutions in countries as diverse as Venezuela, Vietnam, Brazil, and Congo/Zaire. In so doing, they reflected ideological representations of the superiority of American traditions of policing and their modes of institutionalizing democratic values and rule-of-law principles. However, the extent to which such efforts succeeded in improving the efficiency and accountability of police forces in Third World countries proved to be limited. Ultimately, the OPS had fallen victim to the hyperbolized expectations produced by the liberal vision of police professionalization, and it gradually became vulnerable to criticism for its support of tyrannical regimes and their torture and assassination practices. However, despite its failure to achieve many of its stated goals, the OPS has been consequential both in its impact on the development of transnational structures of security governance and in its influence on the transformation of domestic policing practices in the United States.

One of the book’s main contributions is in utilizing insights drawn from postcolonial theory to analyze the latter form of influence. Thinkers such as Aimé Césaire, Hannah Arendt, and Michel Foucault have fruitfully utilized the concept of the boomerang effect to describe how social control technologies that empires deployed in their colonies were brought back to the imperial metropolis and put into use against marginalized populations in the domestic sphere. With an emphasis on the distinctiveness of US imperial practices vis-à-vis those employed by European colonial powers, the book offers an illuminative account of the domestic reverberations of the US global police reform initiatives. It shows how institutional forms and policy templates created under the auspices of the OPS were incorporated into the war on crime agenda of the Johnson administration and shaped the knowledge base used by the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration to stimulate policing reforms at the state and local levels.

In a fascinating case study, Schrader traces the ways in which riot-control technologies that were originally deployed by the US military in South Vietnam were gradually adopted in domestic policing contexts. He shows how the experience of the OPS in using CS gas to suppress mass demonstrations overseas came to be seen as a source of valuable insight for national and local authorities confronting the rise of urban protest movements during the turbulent years of the late 1960s. In another insightful case study, the book offers a fresh perspective on the origins of “broken windows” policing and its resonance with how counterinsurgency experts understood the challenges of governing unruly populations abroad. The shift toward more punitive targeting of minor deviant acts in American policing in the post-1980s has been extensively analyzed as a product of domestic political and intellectual trends. Considerable scholarly attention has been paid to the paradigm shifting impact of the “broken windows” approach and its fundamental premise that tightening the enforcement of misdemeanors would help to decrease serious crime in American cities (Harcourt Reference Harcourt2001). However, the transnational perspective offered by Schrader (Reference Schrader2019, 258) illuminates how these models of proactive policing reflected counterinsurgency tactics that were implemented by the OPS in foreign countries and were brought home as part of a racialized “field of vision that did not distinguish security practices used overseas from those used at home.”

Such processes of imperial feedback were largely promoted by the federal government. However, their wide reception was also a product of bottom-up initiatives to expand the repertoire of tactics used by local police forces to address the radicalization of political protest in the post-civil rights era. This insight provides a powerful illustration of the multidirectional movement of norms within transnational legal orders (Halliday and Shaffer Reference Halliday and Gregory2015, 55–60). Schrader’s account goes well beyond international relations theories that analyze the hegemonic project of “policing the globe” as an instance of “criminal lawmaking from above” (Andreas and Nadelmann Reference Andreas and Ethan2006). Instead, his rich and complex narrative seems to resonate with socio-legal theories that emphasize the importance of tracing the recursive interactions of top-down, bottom-up, and horizontal paths of norm diffusion within transnational processes of criminal lawmaking (Aaronson and Shaffer Reference Aaronson and Gregory2021).

As is clear from the discussion above, Badges without Borders makes a groundbreaking contribution to the literature on the carceral state. However, the book’s argument could have been expanded further by taking a closer look at the interactions between the US imperial project of policing the globe and multilateral security governance initiatives mobilized by other transnational actors during this period. Theoretical work mapping the repertoire of transnational governance strategies used by the United States in different periods and issue areas illuminates the conditions under which American foreign policy makers had preferred to invest in building multilateral governance structures than in the exercise of unilateral power (Krisch Reference Krisch2005; Ikenberry Reference Ikenberry2019). In this vein, it is interesting to consider how the forms of US engagement (and non-engagement) with the Interpol, and the reluctance to invest much political capital in the effort to shape Interpol’s surveillance capacities and police cooperation tasks during the Cold War period (Fooner Reference Fooner1989; Deflem Reference Deflem2004), can shed further light on the strategic considerations shaping the distinctive patterns of “governing through police reform” during these decades.

It would also be fascinating to move beyond the context of the national security state and consider how the transformation of policing practices in the United States has been shaped by the transnational dimensions of the welfare state and the regulatory state. While the national security state has provided a salient vehicle linking domestic and international policy concerns, regulatory and social welfare structures in the United States were also transformed by the growth of transnational epistemic communities and multilateral cooperation networks during the Cold War period (Tyrrell Reference Tyrrell2015). The book’s methodological approach provides an excellent model for future research examining how the transnationalization of these governance structures interacted with concurrent transformations in the policing terrain.

The history examined in Badges without Borders continues to shape contemporary events in the United States and elsewhere in profound ways. The book’s historical lessons resonate with the message of progressive activists and scholars who orient their thinking toward an abolitionist horizon. The rapidly expanding literature on the history of the carceral state demonstrates that the institutional arrangements created by the legacies of racial segregation, corrupt machine politics, and the repression of civil rights protests are so deeply ingrained in the organizational culture of American police bureaucracies that their dismantling cannot be achieved through yet another cycle of incremental liberal reform. The transnational lens adopted in this book makes a pioneering contribution to this debate by clarifying that any progressive thinking about police reform has to address the thickly interwoven connections between these domestic aspects of US racial history and the legacies of colonial oppression and authoritarian control that were incorporated into the frameworks of American policing as a result of the nation’s imperial ventures overseas. With this in mind, the success of the Black Lives Matter Movement to inspire activists and policy makers in other countries might signal a move toward a more reflexive understanding of the interconnectedness of social justice struggles that are too often perceived in methodologically nationalist terms.