Modernizing Repression

Police Training and Nation-Building in the American Century

Jeremy Kuzmarov

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781558499171
  9781558499164
• eBook ISBN:
  9781613761960
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

As American troops became bogged down first in Iraq and then Afghanistan, a key component of U.S. strategy was to build up local police and security forces in an attempt to establish law and order. This approach, Jeremy Kuzmarov shows, is consistent with practices honed over more than a century in developing nations within the expanding orbit of the American empire. From the conquest of the Philippines and Haiti at the turn of the twentieth century through Cold War interventions and the War on Terror, police training has been valued as a cost-effective means of suppressing radical and nationalist movements, precluding the need for direct U.S. military intervention and thereby avoiding the public opposition it often arouses.

Unlike the spectacular but ephemeral pyrotechnics of the battlefield, police training programs have had lasting consequences for countries under the American imperial umbrella, fostering new elites, creating powerful tools of social control, and stifling political reform. These programs have also backfired, breeding widespread resistance, violence, and instability—telltale signs of "blowback" that has done more to undermine than advance U.S. strategic interests abroad.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations Used in Text
• Introduction
• Part I. Taking Up the “White Man’s Burden”: Imperial Policing in the Philippines and the Caribbean
• Part II. Under the Facade of Benevolence: Police Training and the Cold War in Southeast Asia from the “Reverse Course” to Operation Phoenix
• Part III. The Cold War on the Periphery: Police Training and the Hunt for Subversives in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East
• Conclusion: The Violence Comes Full Circle-From the Cold War to the War on Terror
• Abbreviations Used in Notes
• Notes
• Index
• Back Cover