Badges Without Borders

"Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing explains how the Cold War U.S. effort to professionalize police in other countries reverberated domestically, leading to the rise of the carceral state. The book traces the history of the Office of Public Safety, the U.S. government's overseas police assistance arm tasked with countering communist insurgency in over 50 countries, and illustrates how it called upon the leading U.S. policing experts. It shows that the Office of Public Safety was a key instrument of Cold War U.S. empire, a configuration of…