ARTICLES AND OTHER PUBLICATIONS
“'OUR BACKS ARE AGAINST THE WALL': THE BLACK LIBERATION ARMY AND DOMESTIC TERRORISM IN 1970S AMERICA"
Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 36, no. 2 (2013).
This article addresses the gap in the literature on U.S. domestic terrorism and counterterrorism in the 1970s by examining a once-notorious but now largely forgotten terrorist group, the Black Liberation Army (BLA). An outgrowth of the Black Panther Party, the BLA was directly responsible for at least 20 fatalities, making it amongst the most lethal “homegrown” U.S. groups of the period. This article seeks to shed new light on the BLA by exploring its relatively short but violent trajectory. By focusing on the group's origins, operations, ideology, and structure, the BLA can be understood as part of a wider landscape of homegrown political violence. The BLA emerged during the waning phase of a protest cycle that included the civil rights, Black Power, and anti-war movements. Like other terrorist groups before and after, the BLA claimed to be acting in self-defense and on behalf of the people, presenting itself as an army resisting police occupation of minority communities. With the collapse of the extreme Left in the mid-1970s, the BLA's prospects for creating a broader revolutionary base became remote. The article also examines law-enforcement responses to the BLA and the competing ways in which the Federal Bureau of Investigation and local police (and in particular, the New York Police Department) framed and countered the BLA threat.
"‘OUR GHETTOS, TOO, NEED A LANSDALE’: AMERICAN COUNTER-INSURGENCY ABROAD AND AT HOME IN THE VIETNAM ERA,"
in Celeste Ward Gventer, David Martin Jones, M. L. R. Smith (eds), The New Counter-insurgency Era in Critical Perspective (Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2014)
In national security affairs, as in other policy spheres, boundaries between ‘foreign’ and ‘domestic’ often become blurred and unstable. The ‘Global War on Terror’ (GWOT), with its intelligence gathering on US citizens and the relentless hunt for the ‘enemy within’, illustrates the erosion of any fixed distinction between external and indigenous threats and responses. Within US policy and academic circles, the American conduct of counter-insurgency typically is framed in ‘expeditionary’ terms. Under this conception, counter-insurgency is a tool of US international security policy — it is something the US armed forces and civilian agencies do abroad, ideally in cooperation with international partners and ‘by, with, and through’ the embattled ‘host nation’ facing insurgent threats. And at its most baroque, counter-insurgency demands nothing less than political, social, and economic revolution, with the United States serving as the midwife that will bring the besieged polity into the modern world.
SUBVERSION OLD AND NEW
War on the Rocks, April 24, 2014
The term “subversion” — seldom mentioned in policy circles since the Cold War — has re-entered the lexicon. Echoing that earlier period of conflict, Washington and Moscow are accusing each other of fomenting subversion. The U.S. State Department detects a hidden Russian hand behind the so-called “green men” reportedly responsible for seizing government sites in eastern Ukraine. Russian state radio claims that a “long-running covert subversion” in Ukraine is part of a broader U.S. effort involving the CIA, NATO, and the “military-industrial complex” to assert “hegemony and control” over Eastern Europe.
No one is using the term with any precision. Subversion is used to describe any clandestine or covert activities aimed at regime destabilization — including disinformation, the creation and manipulation of ethnic tensions, and support for illegal armed groups. During the Cold War, the concept of subversion was equally baggy and flexible. Neither the West nor the Soviet Union admitted to engaging in subversive activities as such. Like terrorism, subversion was and remains a normative term. Nevertheless, the superpowers and their allies saw subversion as a useful part of their national security repertoire.
THE AMAZING TALE OF JUDITH ALICE CLARK:
TUPAC’S STEPFATHER WOWED THE ANTI-IMPERIALIST INTO BEING A GETAWAY DRIVER
Spectator USA, April 23, 2019
Judith Alice Clark certainly is no run-of-the-mill murderer. On October 20, 1981, she was part of a botched armed robbery in Rockland County, New York that left two Nyack policemen and a Brink’s security guard dead. Her release, scheduled for next month, is bringing to a close a bizarre story of homegrown violent extremism and ideological insanity that stretches back to the 1950s.
U.S. INTERNAL SECURITY ASSISTANCE TO SOUTH VIETNAM: INSURGENCY, SUBVERSION, AND PUBLIC ORDER (LONDON: ROUTLEDGE, 2005)
"This is an important and timely book"--Seth Jacobs, Cold War History
"Rosenau's impressive short study . . . .is all the more fascinating for the method it adopts. Not only is it based on extensive archival work but it also directly engages with the attitudes and ideologies attendant on the policies pursued"--David Ryan, International Affairs