Life During Wartime: Resisting Counterinsurgency

COIN functions as the underlying logic that intersects with a number of key political realities currently: community policing / police brutality and the prison industrial complex, Global War on Terror, boarder militarization, the NSA / Snowden scandal and government spying, and repression of social movements.

This talk will explore the domestic application of counterinsurgency strategy and community policing methods, which are predominantly directed at poor communities of color in the US.

Kristian Williams will provide an overview of policing and the domestic application of COIN. COIN has its origins in police / FBI operations against social movements in the 1960s and 70s as well as various post-Vietnam conflicts. Drawing on various pieces in the collection and his prior work (in Our Enemies in Blue), Williams will describe how a military logic has been used by police forces and other state apparati over the past three decades. By extension of Williams’s talk, Kevin Van Meter will explore the currently campaign of repression directed at radical environmentalists, animal rights activists, and others, referred to as the “Green Scare”. Drawing on a particular case from 2001-2004, Van Meter will describe this cycle of government repression and the efforts of activists to combat it.


Jenny Esquivel has worked with Sacramento Prisoner Support since 2006. She has gone on tour multiple times speaking about Eric McDavid’s case, en- trapment, and political prisoners. She is a co-author of the book Government Repression, Prisoner Support (P&L Press, 2012).

Evan Tucker has done support work for political prisoners and is a co-author
of the book Government Repression, Prisoner Support (P & L Press, 2012).

Kevin Van Meter is a member of the Team Colors Collective and has just re- located to Minneapolis, Minnesota, to complete his doctorate in Geography. Van Meter, with Team Colors, co-edited the collection Uses of a Whirlwind (AK Press, 2010) and co-authored Winds from below (Team Colors / Eberhardt Press, 2010). Van Meter’s collaborative and single-authored work has appeared in various radical publications.

Kristian Williams is a member of the Committee Against Political Repression, in Portland, Oregon. He is also the author of Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America (Soft Skull, 2004; South End, 2007), American Methods: Torture and the Logic of Domination (South End, 2006), and Hurt: Notes on Torture in a Modern Democracy (Microcosm, 2012). In 2009 he received a grant from the Institute for Anarchist Studies to support his research on Oscar Wilde’s anarchism.