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War and national security

War & Security

The Making of the American Gulag

During the Cold War, the “police apparatus” was held up as a prime example of Soviet repression. Yet in its efforts to fight subversives, the United States ended up with its own carceral state. 

Stuart Schrader

Law & Justice

U.S. Judges Admit Enhanced Interrogation Is Torture

They also acknowledged, for the first time, that the grounds for torturing Abu Zubaydah—who was detained in the wake of September 11 and is still languishing in Guantánamo—were mistaken.

Joseph Margulies

Arts in Society

The Country Without a Post Office

As news leaks of India’s forced communications blackout in Kashmir, the work of poet Agha Shahid Ali is tragically timely—both its depiction of Kashmiri suffering and the poet’s attempt to imagine a better future for his home.

Manan Kapoor

Politics, Race

The Armed and Anxious White Psyche

Contemporary gun violence is not so much terrorism as tradition. It is deeply intertwined with the white supremacist foundations of the United States.

Mark Tseng-Putterman

War & Security

Sleeping Through the Alarm

With virtually no democratic oversight and over 6,500 missiles in the United States alone, the use of nuclear weapons is almost inevitable. So why is it so hard to think about nuclear war?

Elaine Scarry, Rachel Ablow

Reading Lists

The Impending Nuclear Crisis

The doomsday clock is inching towards midnight. A reading list for a time of new nuclear threats. 

Rosie Gillies, Boston Review

War & Security

Banking on the Cold War

The Cold War says more about how U.S. elites imagined their “freedom” than it does about enabling other people to be free.

Nikhil Pal Singh

Global Justice

Mass Starvation Is a Crime—It's Time We Treated It That Way

The famine in Yemen is not simply “man-made.” Particular men are responsible, and they should be brought to justice.

Alex de Waal

Politics

American Extremism Has Always Flowed from the Border

Donald Trump says there is “a crisis of the soul” at the border. He is right, though not in the way he thinks.

Greg Grandin

War & Security

Trump’s Foreign Policy Isn’t the Problem

It reflects, like a funhouse mirror, a twisted image of U.S. imperialism.

Jeanne Morefield

Reading Lists

Is Citizenship Meaningless?

A reading list on surveillance, security, and citizenship-for-sale.

Rosie Gillies, Boston Review

Law & Justice

Citizenship v. The Surveillance State

We have surrendered the cherished value of “innocent until proven guilty” for the security logic that we are all “risky until proven safe.”

Matthew Longo

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