S tuart S chrader . Badges without Borders

In 1963, the United States Office of Public Safety (OPS) produced First Line of Defense, a film to train police officers from around the world attending the OPS academy in Washington, DC. Filmed in the Panama Canal Zone, First Line of Defense depicted the unrest that would accompany communist insurgency bent on destabilizing newly independent nations across the globe. But, as the attendees learned, well-trained professional police forces could prevent such unrest and subversion. This lesson, as Stuart Schrader’s groundbreaking Badges without Borders shows, rested on a vision of counterinsurgency as policing that would be used to repress freedom movements and maintain racialized control both at home and abroad during the Cold War. Schrader demands we view the police through a framework of empire. In doing so, Badges without Borders makes an indispensable contribution to the scholarship of the carceral state and policing that will also be of interest...

Criminology · Empire · Globe · Political science · Scholarship · Sociology · State (computer science) · Subversion · Unrest · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Law · Psychology · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies