MillerComm - Justin Jackson, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
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Occupying America: War and the Infrastructure of US Power in a Globalizing World
Justin Jackson
George A Miller Visiting Scholar
Department of History, University of Massachusetts, AmherstThursday, September 17, 2026 --- 4:00 PM --- Levis Faculty Center, Room 210
The US government’s deployment of troops to Chicago, Minneapolis, and other cities, ostensibly to assist federal enforcement of immigration law, has vividly displayed its militarized infrastructure for policing one of globalization’s effects: transnational labor migration. In fact, the military occupation’s long if strange career across US history, from the British occupation of Boston to recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, suggests that occupying and globalizing have always been intertwined. Revolutionary-era Americans opposed occupation as tyranny. Yet the new United States almost immediately began resorting to military force and institutions to govern foreign and insurgent peoples, beginning with Native Americans, fugitives escaping slavery, and French and Spanish-speaking Americans. Despite its controversial politics, occupying became an indispensable technique of American power in a globalizing world, regulating growing flows of people, goods, and ideas that both weakened and strengthened US sovereignty at its peripheries. That occupying has come home to the North American heartland hints that the US government may be ever-more tempted to use the military to police and govern civilians and citizens as they confront rising crises of climate change, war, and mass migration.
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