MillerComm 2027 | "Occupying America: War and the Infrastructure of US Power in a Globalizing World" | Justin Jackson (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)

The US government's deployment of troops to US 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 restoring 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 and its peripheries. That occupying has come home to the North American heartland hints that the US government may be ever-more tempted to see the military to police and govern civilians and citizens as they confront rising crises of climate change, war, and mass migration. 

Justin Jackson is a George A. Miller Visiting Scholar from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He will be working with the Center of Advanced Studies and the Department of History at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign this year. He will be co-organizing an April 2027 conference titled "The Infrastructure of Empire, and the Empire of Infrastructure". This conference will be sponsored by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the University of Birmingham (United Kingdom).

Link to Justin Jackson's Website: justinfjackson.com