Discussion with the author Kristian Williams

Topic: Population Control: Police, Gangs and Government 

Date: 6 February 2024

Transcribed using AI (and checked for mistakes) from the live audio recording of the online discussion. Be advised that mistakes may occur in the text.

Komuna delegated moderator:  So, first of all, Kristian, thank you a lot for finding time to come here. I did stumble upon your book and that’s how I actually had this idea of talking to you. I will let you present yourself rather than me presenting. But I just wanted to say that this, also for people here and online, that this discussion is done under this month-long theme that we’re going to have on policing and surveillance of society. In a sense that even our city Prishtina is now moving towards implementing this AI camera system. And we are really not a rich country or a city, or that big to have this AI. But still, it kind of opened up this… We want to open up this discussion of how that contributes to society surveillance and society control. And we kind of thought that Kristian’s work that is mostly on community policing—which is not on surveillance—but still, it’s quite an interesting body of work when it comes to community policing and towards the security and the militarization and, how to say, militarization of the police and tactics and whatever. But I think Kristian will discuss a bit more. But maybe we can start, Kristian, on you telling us who you are and maybe a little bit of your body of work before we dwell into something more concrete.

Kristian: Sure. I’m an activist building in the Pacific Northwest in the United States and a writer. And most of my work in both areas has been around policing for about 30 years. I’m probably best known for my first book, “Our Enemies in Blue,” which was a history of the police in the United States. More recently, I wrote a short book called Gang Politics. And one of the things that both of those have in common is that they look at policing through a counterinsurgency perspective. So I think what I’m going to talk about mostly today is the theory of the framework of counterinsurgency. And then I’ll talk about that for about 20 minutes, and then we’ll have the rest of the time to consider exactly how that relates to policing. And I understand there will be some cultural and institutional differences between where I am and where you are, so I’ll be interested to hear about what does and doesn’t make sense from your perspective.

Komuna delegated moderator: So maybe before you delve into your presentation, maybe you can provide a short background on the situation in the United States. Because as you said the situation is quite different here and there. And what we know from the United States is just two things—be it from the movies when you see these good cops doing these cop things, or you have this other one that you would see from Black Lives Matter protests. So you would have this idea that the state is really strong there. Whereas I think also in your book you’re talking about a lot of nuances, and how it’s not that strict law-abiding control, but there’s a lot of gray area where the police works. So maybe just explain the whole situation in the US.

Kristian: Sure.

Kristian: The United States is odd. In that the largest portion, the supermajority of police work, is done by local agencies. There are national bodies like the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, but they aren’t responsible for the day-to-day on-the-ground policing, anywhere except on the borders.

And so policing can look very, in principle, policing can look very differently from one city to the next city. What we’ve seen over the last 100 years, but over the last 50 years especially, is local police agencies increasingly converging on time. Sharing the same kind of strategies. Sharing the same kind of equipment. Sharing the same kinds of approaches.

And that’s been deliberately developed by the federal government, through things like creating model policies or through their funding, and then tying the funding to having certain kinds of procedures. And also just giving equipment and training for free to local agencies.

And if you think about it, if you’re sort of a police chief in a small city, and you’re already worried about your budget, and then suddenly the federal government shows up and says, hey, we’ll give you literally tens of millions of dollars of equipment and training, you’re probably going to take it without second finance.

And so especially, especially since the 1960s, when the U.S. had several crises occurring simultaneously—one of them being the resistance to the war of Vietnam, and one of them being the American civil rights—the police have increasingly become militarized. And increasingly become more and more alike in different cities.

Although there are still differences in policies, that are sort of differences and sort of local culture, I guess you could say. And the argument I make in the latter part of “Our Enemies in Blue” is that those changes, the changes that we’re seeing, they were specifically a result of the unrest of the 1960s. And the approach that the police have taken has been directed toward preventing similar kinds of unrest from the bell.

And this often gets talked about in terms of two trends. One being militarization—that being, you know, the military equipment, the military strategy, all that kind of stuff. And the other being community policing, which is more having a presence in neighborhoods, creating friendly relationships with residents, working with non-profits and non-governmental organizations and community groups, and drawing all of sort of civil society into the policing project.

And the argument I make in “Our Enemies in Blue,” which will probably make more sense in a little while here, is that if you look at those two things together, what you see is a coherent program of counter-insurgency.

So what we’re going to talk about today is mostly the theory of counter-insurgency, and how it relates to other sort of state projects. And then we can, at the end, go back and tie down the lines of policing again.

Komuna delegated moderator: Perhaps you can, maybe, start and tell us what counter-insurgency is for those who do not know.

Kristian: Okay. So I’ll just start with the military’s definition.

Counter-insurgency, or COIN as it’s sometimes shortened, is defined by the U.S. Army Field Manual FM-324 on counter-insurgency. It begins with—well, they begin by defining insurgency. Let me start with that.

An insurgency is an organized movement aimed at the overthrow of the constituted government through use of subversion and conflict. Stated another way, an insurgency is an organized, protracted, politico-military struggle designed to weaken the control of legitimacy of established government, occupying power, or other political authority, while increasing insurgency control.

They then go on to define counter-insurgency as military, paramilitary, political, economic, psychological, and civic action taken by government to defeat an insurgency.

Counter-insurgency then refers to both a type of war and a style of warfare. The term describes a kind of military operation outside of conventional army vs. army warfighting and is sometimes called low-intensity or asymmetrical combat. But counter-insurgency also describes a particular perspective on how such operations want to be managed.

This sort of warfare is characterized by emphasis on intelligence, security and peace-speaking operations, population control, propaganda, and efforts to gain trust in people.

This last point is the crucial one. As the U.S. Army Field Manual declares, legitimacy is the main objective. What distinguishes counter-insurgency from other theories of repression, I believe, is the self-conscious acknowledgement that the state needs legitimacy to stabilize its rule, and that under the conditions of an insurgency, its legitimacy is slipping.

In other words, from the perspective of counter-insurgency, resistance is not simply a matter of the population, or parts of it, refusing to cooperate with the state’s agenda. Resistance comes as a consequence of the state failing to meet the needs of the population.

So counter-insurgency is all about preserving or reclaiming the state’s authority. Violence and controlling territory are inherent to that project. But the key is really legitimacy, meaning the consent of the government and the support of society. That is what will separate the learners from the losers.

As one RAND Corporation report put it, the key in counter-insurgency is not to monopolize force but to monopolize legitimate force.

I’m going to come back to the RAND Corporation over and over again in this talk. It’s an independent, non-profit think tank that’s almost entirely funded by the Defense Department. The idea being that they could have their research and theory done in a place that was going to be somewhat insulated from political pressure with changes of administration and that sort of thing.

So when I talk about the RAND Corporation, they’re not the government, but they’re also very close in tie to military doctrine.

So the strictly military aspects of counter-insurgency will, of course, be necessary. But so are softer, more subtle efforts to bolster public support for the government. Both types of activities have to be understood in terms of political power.

Now, one caveat here is that the emphasis on the state may be a little bit misleading. Increasingly, the state relies on private entities to do the work of repression.

The most controversial aspect of this trend is surely the U.S. government’s use of military contractors—that is, mercenaries—for security and combat operations.

But the government is also, with greater and greater frequency, relying on private companies to collect and store, and sometimes analyze, vast quantities of data on individuals and human taste and interest. And this is convenient for them because it allows them to avoid restrictions on private government surveillance and any requirements concerning the disclosure of the information.

More subtly, the state has at least sometimes advanced its agenda by partnering with non-profit and non-governmental organizations, even those nominally aligned with its critics. By this process, known as co-optation, the state gives certain types of opponents access, representation, or direct support, and by tacit exchange, gains influence that it can help to capture, channel, or contain political opposition.

The result is that, however imperfectly, the state exercises control not only over the institutions of civil society, but also through them. These privatized efforts are easy to incorporate into the strategy of counter-insurgency.

If we think of the state as a network of institutions rather than a single unified organization, authority may extend outward through this network from some nominal center. But power is, to a very large extent, both constituted by and exercised through the network itself. And the constituent parts in turn make demands to help shape the agenda of the whole.

So to put all of this in a bit of context: In the U.S., during the period of prosperity following World War II, the main means for achieving control of the workforce was negotiation, along with the ameliorating implements of the welfare state. These social benefits, of course, weren’t gifts from some generous ruling class, but they were won through years of struggle aimed at preserving stability.

Since the 1970s, however, these sorts of institutional arrangements have been in sharp decline.

Christian Parenti [1] has argued forcefully that the late 20th-century prison expansion and the simultaneous militarization of domestic police forces are the result of shifts in the strategy of capitalism.

This question of history presents—and I think this remains an open question—it draws into the question of the relationship between counter-insurgency and neoliberalism. Both terms have been associated with Latin American dirty wars.

But counter-insurgency is largely about expanding government services and offering concessions, while neoliberalism reduces services and imposes austerity.

Now famously, in Iraq, this contradiction produced a dispute between the Defense Department and the Coalition Provisional Authority. Paul Bremer, with his nearly dictatorial powers, advocated privatizing Iraq’s state-owned enterprises, while Deputy Undersecretary of Defense Paul Brinkley wanted the occupying authorities to get the state-owned businesses running again in order to provide public goods, services, and jobs to the population.

So is the role of counter-insurgency to clean up the mess that neoliberalism makes? Or is counter-insurgency used to carve out space in which market conditions can be imposed to create the requisite stability for neoliberal reforms? And how different are these formulations, either conceptually or practically?

Several hypotheses come to mind. The difference might be ideological, reflecting different assumptions about society, the economy, and the state. Or perhaps neoliberalism is the offensive program and counter-insurgency is the defensive program.

Or maybe—and this is the account I am in favor of—counter-insurgency prioritizes the state’s interest and stability, and neoliberalism prioritizes capitalism and capitalism’s interest in maximizing profits. And the choice between the two will be determined by the precise degree to which the state is able to act autonomously.

One rather tantalizing possibility is that the contradiction between neoliberalism and counter-insurgency is less important than the contributions inherent to each of them.

Kristian: Neoliberalism is premised on a rejection of state intervention, yet it requires a repressive state to overcome popular opposition to its program, especially its austerity measures.

Counterinsurgency identifies legitimacy as its main objective, but it is often employed as a means to securing units that are fundamentally illegitimate, such as maintaining corrupt, exploiting, or repressive regimes.

Interestingly, whichever mode is dominant at the moment, the ultimate limit they each face remains the same: that being popular resistance.

According to the RAND Corporation, revolutions—and thus counterrevolutions—go through three stages.

There’s first a protoinsurgency stage; secondly, a small-scale insurgency; and third, a major insurgency.

In the first, in the protoinsurgency stage, the movement is—and I’m quoting here from a RAND report—small, narrowly focused, vulnerable, and incapable of widespread or large-scale violence.

Protoinsurgency may be barely noticeable, not seen as having the potential to inspire insurgency, or dismissed as comical—as in a kind of special crackpot.

Therefore, during the protoinsurgency, the most important aspect of counterinsurgency is to understand the group, its goals, its ability to tap popular grievances, and its potential.

In turn, shaping the protoinsurgency’s environment, especially by improving governance in the eyes of the population, may deny wider support.

In the second stage, a small-scale insurgency, the movement begins to attract followers beyond its original core, and it may commit more open acts against the state—not yet with the future of replacing it, but to demonstrate its capabilities to be taken seriously by the population and recruit.

For the government, therefore—and I’m quoting again from the RAND report—shaping political and economic conditions to head off popular support from the insurgency is imperative.

Direct military intervention is not recommended at this stage.

As long as the insurgency is still small, action against it can and should remain a police and intelligence responsibility.

If the movement survives, it may develop into a major insurgency.

While it is so essential that the state collect information about that movement and intervene to shape social conditions, at this point, forceful action against the insurgents by regular military units may be unavoidable.

Both the overt use of force and covert surveillance, infiltration, and disruption will increase.

Emergency powers may be granted, civil liberties suspended, the life of the overall population increasingly restricted.

Of course, the aim of any counterinsurgency campaign is a return to normal—that is, to the lowest level of manageable conflict.

In effect, this is a return to the protoinsurgency stage.

Opposition is either channeled into safe institutional forms or suppressed through normal policing and intelligence action.

The British military strategist Frank Kitson summarizes the overall process—quoting from him here:

“In practical terms, the most promising line of approach lies in separating the mass of those engaged in the revolutionary campaign from the leadership by the judicious promise of concessions, at the same time imposing a period of calm by the use of government forces.”

“Having once succeeded in providing freedom of space by these means, it is most important to do three further things quickly:

The first is to implement the promised concessions.

The second is to discover and neutralize the genuine subversion element.

The third is to associate as many prominent members of the population—especially those who have been engaged in non-violent action—with the government.”

Of course, no one pretends that victory comes easily, and many critics within the armed forces point to the experiences of Vietnam and Algeria as proof that counterinsurgency simply cannot work.

Counterinsurgency advocates, then, have been at pains to show that victory is at least possible and that counterinsurgency represents the government’s best hope.

One RAND study headed by Christopher Paul analyzed 30 counterinsurgency operations and found that the government lost in 22 of the conflicts—or 73%—and prevailed in 8—27%.

Furthermore, researchers found that in every case, the competence of the counterinsurgency effort was the best predictor of success or failure.

A predominance of good COIN practices is correlated with victory, and a predominance of bad COIN practices is correlated with defeat.

A separate RAND study, though, written by Martin Libicki, examined 89 insurgencies spanning the years 1934 to 2008.

It found that in 28 cases, the government was victorious; in 25, the government was defeated; 20 had a mixed result; and 16 were ongoing by the time of the study.

Bracketing the current conflicts, we see that the government won about 37% of the time, lost 34%, and ended with mixed results in 27% of the cases.

In contrast to those in the Paul report, Libicki’s conclusions are more tentative and varied, pointing to factors beyond the competence of state forces—including the tactics and organization of insurgent forces, social factors such as democracy, urbanization, industrialization, international support for each side, and public opinion.

Both of these studies, however, only measure the outcomes of insurgencies that have already escalated beyond a certain threshold.

They thus ignore the much larger number of protoinsurgencies that never reach the second or third stage.

One implication is that as insurgency proceeds to the later stages, the chances that it will succeed increase markedly.

Reflecting on his efforts in Kenya, Cyprus, and Northern Ireland, as Frank Kitson observed—and again I’m quoting:

“Looking in retrospect at any counter-subversion or counter-insurgency campaign, it is easy to see that the first step should have been to prevent the enemy from gaining an influence over the civil population, and in particular to disrupt his efforts at establishing his political organization.”

In practice, this is difficult to achieve because for a long time the government may be unaware that a significant threat exists, and in any case, in a so-called free country, it is regarded as the opposite of freedom to restrain the spread of a political idea.

Concerns with liberty aside, that is exactly what Kitson recommended: restrict the spread of ideas, prevent the radicals from achieving influence, and disrupt their efforts to establish oppositional organizations. The RAND Corporation likewise advocates early preemptive action, short of direct military force. The problem remains: at the first stage, subversion is not obvious, and the state may not know that a threat exists. Worse, the real threat must be understood as extending beyond the insurgents themselves—the militants, the radicals, and the subversives—to include the population they appeal to, the grievances they address, and the social conditions that produce those grievances.

To meet the challenges of counterinsurgency, the security forces have had to shift their understanding of intelligence work. Since the cause of the conflict is not just the subversive conspiracy, but necessarily connects to the broader features of society, the state’s agents cannot simply ferret out the active cadre but need to aim at a broad understanding of the social system. The U.S. Army and Marine Corps Field Manual on counterinsurgency, FM 3-24, incorporates this perspective, arguing that strategists—I’m quoting—”require insight into cultures, perceptions, values, beliefs, interests, and decision-making processes of individuals and groups.”

This sort of intelligence work is concerned with questions that are primarily sociological, and so a great deal of FM 3-24 is concerned with explicating basic social science terms like group, coercive force, and social capital. In fact, the entirety of Appendix B is devoted to explaining social network analysis and other analytic tools. It offers this picture of how such analysis is practiced according to the field: a social network is not just a description of who is in the insurgent organization—it is a picture of the population, how it’s put together, how members interact with one another. To draw an accurate picture of a network, units need to identify ties among its members. Strong bonds formed over time by family, friendship, or organizational association characterize these ties. Units gather information on these ties by analyzing historical documents and records, interviewing individuals, and studying photos and books.

The security forces can no longer focus narrowly on the hunt for subversives or terrorists but must also collect information on the population as a whole. This changes not only the type of information they’re seeking but also the means they use to collect it. A RAND report on information warfare and counterinsurgency emphasizes: according to the report, even during a security operation, the information needed for counterinsurgency is as much or more about context, population, and perceptions as it is about the hostile force. Only a small fraction of the information needed would likely be secret information gathered by secret means from secret sources.

As one RAND report explains, counterinsurgency requires that security forces collect both information on specific individuals and information in which the actions or opinions of thousands, perhaps even millions of people, are highlighted. Why collect such information, the researchers ask, and the answer they provide is quite illuminating. Properly analyzed, the information can be used for five types of activities: number one, police and military operations such as sweeps, roadblocks, or arrests; number two, assessment of the progress of the counterinsurgency campaign; number three, the provision of public services—whether security and safety services or social services; number four, identifying the insurgents; and number five, the coercion of individuals for the purpose of winning cooperation and recruiting informants.

The report states: information about individuals may be necessary to persuade each one to help the government rather than help the insurgents. This last point shows something of the recursive relationship between intelligence and coercion. In an insurgency, both sides rely on the cooperation of the populace. Therefore, they compete for it, in part through coercive means. As RAND researcher Martin Libicki writes, those committed to either side should weigh the possibility that the act of informing or even interacting with one side may bring the wrath of the other side. Whoever is best able to make good on this threat will, Libicki argues, receive the best information. As he puts it: “The balance of coercion dictates the balance of intelligence.”

With the emergence of the counterinsurgency model, the state has ceased to be subversive in isolation from the society surrounding them. Increasingly, it has directed its attention, its intelligence gathering, its coercive force, and its alliance building toward the population as a whole. Repression, in other words, is not something that happens solely or even mainly to activists, and it is not something that occurs only in times of crisis or in response to a direct threat. Also, it is not something that necessarily happens in secret.

It is worth pausing here to note that while both sides may use clandestine or illegal methods, there is nothing inherently conspiratorial in either insurgency or counterinsurgency. One of the breakthroughs of the counterinsurgency approach was a shift away from J. Edgar Hoover-style conspiracy theories. Our understanding of counterinsurgency likewise cannot be rooted in conspiracy thinking. Insurgency and counterinsurgency are not the result of invisible actors in secret plots—they are the predictable result of broad and observable social forces, especially those related to inequality. The secret conspiratorial aspects are operational decisions made pursuant to a broader strategy, not the strategy itself.

One of the remarkable things about counterinsurgency is how much it occurs in public view—in fact, how much it relies on the public’s cooperation. Repression comprises all of these methods: routine and extraordinary, coercive and collaborative, covert and spectacular—used to regulate the conflict inherent in stratified society. Our task is to decipher the politics implicit in these efforts, to discern the ways that they preserve state power, neutralize resistance, and maintain social inequality.

Our further task is to respond. As repression is primarily a political process, any adequate response must take at least in part a political form. It will not be enough to put a case before a jury or to adopt strict secrecy in the name of some cloak-and-dagger notion of security culture. Such things must be done at times, but both these responses—though in very different ways—treat repression chiefly as a legal and thus technical problem. They are also entirely defensive. While such devices may protect the individual or small group with greater or lesser efficacy, they do not generally touch—or even attempt to touch—the overall system of repression, to say nothing of the social inequalities that that system maintains.

Whatever defensive measures may be necessary, an effective response to the repression must also involve an offensive component—an attack against the apparatus of repression which will, if successful, leave the state weaker and the social movement stronger. This outcome, of course, should be deemed from the start. It is in a sense misleading to speak solely in terms of responding to repression. Repression exists already—it intervenes preemptively; it forms part of the context in which we act. Oppositional movements cannot avoid repression—the challenge instead must be overcoming it.

So, when facing counterinsurgency, we need to learn to think like insurgents. We have to recognize and embrace political strategy implicitly. Every insurgency is different, and a single insurgency may take very different forms from one year to the next or one street to the next. There are no set paths or ready formulas, which is not the same thing as saying that there are no strategies. But our strategies have to correspond with the reality we face—not with an idealized version of some past revolution or some future utopia. And we cannot elevate our own favored tactics, whether pacifist or insurrectionist, into articles of faith.

The antidote to repression is, simply put, more resistance. But this cannot be a matter of simply escalating militancy. Crucially, it has to involve broadening the movement’s base of support. We have to remember that an insurgency is not just a series of tactical exchanges. For the state, it is instead a contest for the allegiance of the population. For the rebels, no less than for the authorities, legitimacy is the main objective.

So that concludes our sermon.

Komuna delegated moderator: I would like to actually relate to something you said quite in the beginning. You said that it’s not—the state does not attempt to monopolize the force, but to legitimize this force. And this comes back to this, to your book—about your book, which you’re referring to—this Gang Politics, which is specifically saying that you take an example of the existence of different groups, which can be like the Proud Boys in the United States, or you could have Antifa, some of our gangs like Bloods and Crips.

So the state, to some degree, could even allow them to exist because, for them, there is no threat in the sense of them having a force—unless that force actually becomes politicized, and it can compete for this, which you just said, on this public perception and public support of them.

Can you maybe just talk more about this monopolizing force and legitimate force? I think it will be interesting also to compare them with groups that exist in America—like gangs and political groups like Antifa, and of course the big, maybe the most famous, the Black Panthers.

Kristian: Yeah, so of course, I was quoting there from a RAND Corporation report called War by Other Means. And clearly they’re working with Max Weber’s definition of the state as the set of institutions that monopolize the legitimate force within a given territory, right? And they’re pointing out that people tend to overemphasize the monopoly and underemphasize the legitimacy. And that in fact, as long as they monopolize the legitimate force, the state can tolerate a certain amount of collateral violence in the rest of society.

Sometimes the real danger posed by criminal violence becomes the alibi for the state to expand its power in various ways. And in that sense, it’s helpful to it. You know, because—well, if you’re running a protection racket, it depends on there being something that you’re protecting people from. Which means you don’t want to eliminate the threat, but instead, the state wants to be seen doing something to control the threat without necessarily making the threat go away.

In other times, the violence of the rest of society—the disorder that it creates—becomes a threat to the state’s legitimacy itself. And then it has different reasons to move against it. Other times, though, the state will allow a certain amount of conflict, almost acting in proxy to the state itself. And we see some of that more recently, prior to January 6th, with some of the probably under-the-radar right-wing violence in the US.

Historically, we see it with white supremacist organizations such as the Klan, which often had very tight relationships with local police departments and could act in an illegal way to supplement the legal framework of white supremacy. And so the relationship between the state and violence is often much more complex than even as activists we tend to think about it.

Komuna delegated moderator: [Redacted], you raised your hand. You can go ahead.

Member of the audience – online: Thank you for the talk. There was something—nice point—that you brought up that I had in part of the… but really truthful to think about in the future. I want to continue this theme of legitimacy and… sorry, I’m kind of thinking while I’m talking.

Would you say that rather than legitimacy itself, the goal or aim is more of the experience of legitimacy, the idea of legitimacy? Because it is a bit ontological, right? Like—the law is a law because it’s a law. If it isn’t a law, it wouldn’t be the law.

So—and you know, talking back to this idea of… I’m not sure where I read it, but I used it in a random talk with someone—about propaganda and how the goal is not to legitimize the rule, but to make truth inconsequential in relation to the propaganda that is spread.

But I guess what I want to say—to ask—is the idea that… might say… but the apparatus—not the apparatus—is the autonomous agent, and the nooks and cranks, the state, and the different institutions are only vehicles that autonomous… they properly belong to.

So yeah, that question is: Is legitimacy what’s after, or the idea of? Because the apparatus—the state, imperial apparatus—comes beyond any legitimacy. Because propaganda is very clearly propaganda. And the more that it is clear that it is propaganda in the public eye, the more effective it is. More effective because, by it being uncovered as propaganda—and inconsequentially so—it doesn’t change. The state can do that once. And by the government, I mean the whole accented… it makes it inconsequential.

Kristian: A lot to unpack. Let me— I think I have four things to say. Let’s see if I can remember them all.

Okay, first of all, I think you’re right that there is not really a meaningful difference between legitimacy and the appearance of legitimacy. Like, legitimacy really just comes down to what people are going to accept. And so if the population thinks that something is legitimate, then it is.

And so there is also— and this leads to the point that you raised about propaganda, which is: if the propaganda persuades us— like, at one level, the propaganda can aim to persuade the population that the government is good and doing good things, right? Another aim of propaganda is to persuade the individual members of the population that everybody thinks that the government is good and doing good things, right?

And so the idea is to create this kind of common sense, so that anyone who isn’t buying the first-order line that the government is good and doing good things nevertheless feels like they are a minority of one. Right? They feel like they are the only person who feels like that because what they are seeing expressed over and over again is that everybody agrees that the government is doing good things, right?

And so the way propaganda and creating legitimacy works on sort of two levels at that point.

Now, an important distinction that I probably should have made clearer at the beginning is that legitimacy and legality are fundamentally different. And there should be— in a coherently functioning society— there should be a strong relationship between them, right? Because the law should generally be seen as legitimate and therefore people obey it without only having to rely on coercion, etc.

However, it is possible for something to be seen as legitimate while also knowing that it is illegal. And usually this will result in some sort of… like, there will be a reckoning for this at some point, right?

I mean, one of the things that is slowly changing in the United States around drug laws is that at one point, drug prohibition was accepted by the population— was very legitimate, it was understood as legitimate. Over time, that legitimacy has been eroded, largely by the excesses of the enforcement, right? Like the millions of people in prison, the militarized police, the no-knock raids— the excesses of it and the regular reliance on violence has proved to erode the legitimacy of drug prohibition, such that it’s now largely not seen as legitimate, even in some fairly conservative circles.

However, the law has yet to catch up to that. And so there’s this disconnect and therefore political conflict around exactly the exit strategy from drug prohibition.

Okay, the last thing I want to say that you mentioned— and this relates to that to some degree— is how there’s a complicated and contentious body of work about how much the state is autonomous from capitalism and how much capitalism controls the state.

There’s a lot to be said on both sides. I tend to think that the state is semi-autonomous from capitalism. It has its own interests, it makes its own demands, it sometimes does things that the ruling class as a whole does not like. But it is that semi-autonomy that makes the state useful for capitalism.

Because if it only did, you know, moment to moment what was benefiting— what was immediately and directly benefiting particular rich people, it would not have the legitimacy that it needs to continue ruling. And it also would probably make some short-term gambits that turned out in the long term to be destructive. I mean, more so than it does.

So I think that it’s important that we not think that the state is completely free to do anything that it wants. But I think it’s also important to recognize that it responds to pressures besides just the immediate needs of a handful of billionaires. 

Komuna delegated moderator: When you were talking about legitimacy, and then you were actually mentioning this neoliberalism as the more offensive part, whereas the counterinsurgency as the more defensive part… But at least in my opinion, it would be like bending of the string—like how much can you bend the string on one side before breaking. And that is kind of bound between neoliberalism and maybe counterinsurgency for me to play out.

Because we have seen, and Kosovo is one of those examples, where neoliberal reforms were not opposed at all. But neoliberal reforms were followed at the same time with a lot of investment in infrastructure. Maybe Kosovo is a bit specific because neoliberal reform came with this idea of freeing yourself from socialist Yugoslavia—specifically from the repression of the ’90s from the Serbian regime. So people were eager in this change of system, which gave it a bit of legitimacy in the eyes of people.

But I think that if the neoliberals come with really harsh reality, people would actually have a backlash too. Although it actually did—because although Kosovo is not a big country, it’s like 1.8 million, they were in ’99 something like that—the privatization of the whole economy has left approximately 40 to 80 thousand of people unemployed. Which means that there would be 20 or 30 percent of the employable force that were left without jobs. So in this sense, it was harsh.

But on the other hand, you did have a lot of investment through aid, some infrastructure, a lot of them in this wide employment. So maybe in this sense, could this international aid that was provided to examples like Kosovo—but probably to Iraq and Afghanistan and a lot of countries—could be seen as a counterinsurgency tactic in this way?

And if such, what is the dynamic between the two? Because kind of they seem like they go hand in hand—neoliberal capitalism with international aid. Also like creating all these think tanks which are pro-Western or at least pro-capitalist in a sense. Having this buy-in from the community, having this frame of mind when it comes to thinking of security and population, which is quite Western-like.

And Kosovo is actually also starting implementing this type of reforms—specifically legal reforms with police and judiciary—which were funded mostly by US government. So even this community police, like community security councils made of civilians, was kind of drawn from experience of United States and it’s actually being implemented in Prishtina.

Maybe just talk about this neoliberalism and counterinsurgency—how would they actually interact? Because it seems like a fairly complex relationship.

Kristian: It’s a complex relationship, and the nature of counterinsurgency is that the strategies and programs that counterinsurgency forces adopt need to be very carefully tailored to the immediate local circumstances. Which means that it looks different in different places, which makes it hard to generalize about, right? But I think your instinct is exactly right—that the purpose of the foreign aid and the investments and all that stuff is to make palatable the neoliberal reforms.

It has this repressive function of building the legitimacy of the existing order and meeting the needs of the population well enough that the structural adjustments can move ahead. So it is itself a way of providing stability.

The military literature talks about this expressly. They have a counter-security strategy called Clear, Hold, Build. Clear means eliminate the insurgents—remove the opposition. Hold means provide security. And Build means both literally rebuild infrastructure and also invest in the community—the kinds of programs you are talking about. Build support, build relationships among the immediate population.

There is a direct relationship between the military strategy of Clear, Hold, Build and community policing as it happens within a country. In the U.S., the Justice Department has a program called Weed and Seed. The Weed means that they send in paramilitary police to round up and suppress gang activity. The Seed means that they move in with social workers and community programs and investments—basically tax breaks or subsidies for businesses to invest in that area, to create jobs, services, etc. And it’s essentially the same. It’s just a domestic application of a Clear, Hold, Build strategy.

When I first wrote Iron Fist in a Velvet Glove and the first edition came out in 2004, I had made the argument that community policing plus militarization equals counterinsurgency. And I was a little unsure about that formulation. I mean, it’s where the evidence took me in terms of how militarization and community policing had evolved alongside each other. But I was, you know, a little afraid that it would make me sound like a crazy person.

But over the next ten years—between the first edition and second edition—while the U.S. was trying to manage its occupation of Iraq, the military literature started making that connection explicit. It started citing community policing literature in military doctrine, started sending Marines to train with police forces to see how community policing was done before going and occupying towns in Iraq and Afghanistan. They started embedding military advisors in local police departments to apply counterinsurgency to anti-gang campaigns so they could test out their theories before applying them again in Iraq and Afghanistan.

So there is a close loop between the military application of counterinsurgency and the community policing and similar programs domestically. The analogy for the overseas humanitarian aid, NGOs, and that sort of thing—the role they often fight in military conflict, which again military literature is explicit about in terms of using those sorts of programs to create stability and build legitimacy—has a very similar analog in counterinsurgency, i’m sorry, in community policing efforts in terms of the role of nonprofits, the role of community groups, and the police efforts to build relationships there that basically turn what could otherwise be sources of resistance into adjuncts to the police department.

Komuna delegated moderator: Also, I would relate to this moment that you said—kind of both state and insurgent groups are kind of working in the same field, so trying to gain support and legitimacy among people. So I was thinking maybe of the groups like Black Panther that existed in United States, that did provide community service like free lunches or holidays like kitchens for people, schooling, and at the same time, the policing of protection of the community.

But also, you do mention in your book specifically this tendency of revolutionary groups tending to be a bit criminal, and the criminal groups tended to be a bit political. Not to say revolutionary, but you make a really clear distinction in how they actually operate and what their end goal is.

Maybe if you can maybe elaborate this, related also to how this counterinsurgency also works within locally and domestically for United States.

Kristian: Right. So yeah, there is a—I mean, maybe the main argument that I make in Gang Politics is that, well, borrowing from the work of a sociologist named Charles Tilly [2], he made the observation that states and mafias and pirates and gangs are all sort of on a similar continuum. They all try to use violence to obtain resources, and that states are, from a certain point of view, just extremely successful criminal enterprises.

That has, I think, some implications for revolutionary groups. On the one hand, moralists by definition are not going to hold themselves to following the law, at least in every instance, right? Because the whole point is to overthrow the existing order. That’s probably not going to be achieved by legal means.

So the state then tends to criminalize them, tends to treat them just as criminal actors. There is a sense in which that is—will be—true, in that they will be behaving unlawfully. And there’s another sense in which that should not be true, because their main objective should not be self-interested accumulation of resources or self-interested power for their own sake. The point is to kind of do away with that whole way of thinking, right?

However, that means there is going to be certain structural similarities between—like a family resemblance—between certain kinds of criminal organizations and political organizations. And the political organizations, especially as they become increasingly militant or clandestine, will more closely resemble criminal organizations.

And the criminal organizations will often engage in—well, they also depend on the tolerance of the communities in which they operate. So they will engage in legitimacy-building operations. So it’s not unusual for particularly powerful gangs to also have associated nonprofits and associated community groups that they fund as a way of sort of maintaining the loyalty of—

I mean, also, some of this is well-meant—that they want to provide for the people in the community—but it is also cynical, that they want to keep those people sort of on their side.

Now I think the way that—it’s going to distinguish one distinction between a revolutionary group like the Panthers and a criminal group like, for example, the Black Stone Rangers, is going to be whether the political effort or the sort of—for lack of a better term—like commercial effort, is going to be the economic campaign effort that takes priority.

And for the Black Stone Rangers, nothing that interferes with their business could be tolerated for very long. For the Panthers, the only point of accumulating resources was to distribute it back into the community. The point there was the politics. They needed a certain material support, but they needed it for the politics.

I think another distinction here is that the more gang-like a revolutionary group becomes, also the more it will come to resemble the state, and the less revolutionary it will be. And so though there are pressures around clandestinity and militancy that will tend to press revolutionary organizations into something like a gang-like form, there is also a way that that needs to be resisted in terms of not also adopting that same kind of—not adopting the same reliance on violence and not adopting the same, again, self-interested use of the project.

Komuna delegated moderator: Thank you. If anybody wants to add something or a question?

[The recording stops here to ensure the privacy of the discussion]

Notes:

[1] American investigative journalist, academic, and author of the books on the topic of surveillance 

[2] an American sociologist, political scientist, and historian who wrote on the relationship between politics and society and one of the US’s preeminent sociologists and historians