Stuart Schrader

Stuart Schrader

Associate Research Professor, Center for Africana Studies, Associate Director, Program in Racism, Immigration, & Citizenship

Contact Information

Research Interests: Racial inequality in criminal justice, war and empire, historical-comparative methods, social theory

Education: PhD, New York University

I am Associate Research Professor in the Center for Africana Studies and the Associate Director of the Program in Racism, Immigration, and Citizenship. I am the author of Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing(University of California Press, 2019). At Hopkins, I teach courses on police and prisons, Black social movements, and social theory. I am one of the four faculty leaders of Inheritance Baltimore: Humanities and Arts Education for Black Liberation, a multiyear project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. In 2023, I was awarded the Johns Hopkins Alumni Association Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award by the Krieger School of Arts & Sciences.

My first monograph is Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing (University of California Press, Fall 2019). It examines the relationship between US projections of power overseas and the rise of the carceral state at home. Badges Without Borders shows that during the Cold War the United States used policing experts to modernize police in the developing world, for the purpose of preventing revolution. These experts, in turn, shaped the domestic response to Black insurgency during the 1960s, creating expansive new bureaucracies of criminal justice and aggressive policing techniques and technologies. This book demonstrates that overseas state-building in the domain of security has profound and negative effects on democracy at home.

Additionally, I have begun a new project on the political activities of police in the United States since the 1960s, via professional organizations and unions. I am examining how changes to everyday routines of policing and development of new managerial techniques have resulted in police cohering into a semiautonomous political force that acts in self-interested ways to make demands on elected officials, particularly in moments of racialized political crisis.

362.335 Unlocking Knowledge: Theorizing Prison from the Inside

362.314 Police and Prisons in Comparative Perspective

362.315 Black Against Empire

362.115 Introduction to Police and Prisons

230.213 Social Theory

230.366 Black Social Thought and Social Movements

Book:

Schrader, Stuart. 2019. Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing (Oakland: University of California Press)

Articles:

Schrader, Stuart. 2022. "Global Counterinsurgency and the Police-Military Continuum: Introduction to the Special Issue" Small Wars & Insurgencies 33.4-5: 553-580. 

Schrader, Stuart. 2021. "Cops at War: How World War II Transformed U.S. Policing" Modern American History 4.2: 159-179.

Schrader, Stuart. 2019. “To Protect and Serve Themselves: Police in U.S. Politics since the 1960sPublic Culture 31.3: 601-623.

Schrader, Stuart. 2017. “More Than Cosmetic Changes The Challenges of Experiments with Police Demilitarization in the 1960s and 1970sThe Journal of Urban History

Schrader, Stuart. 2016. “To Secure the Global Great Society Participation in PacificationHumanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism and Development 7.2: 225-253. 

Roy, Ananya, Stuart Schrader, Emma Shaw Crane. 2015. “‘The Anti-Poverty Hoax’ Development, Pacification, and the Making of Community in the Global 1960sCities: The International Journal of Urban Policy and Planning 44: 139-145.

Chapters:

Schrader, Stuart. 2019. “A Carceral Empire: Placing US Prisons and Policing in the World” in Shaped by the State: Toward a New Political History of the Twentieth Century, Brent Cebul, Lily Geismer, Mason B. Williams, eds. (University of Chicago Press).

Roy, Ananya, Stuart Schrader, Emma Shaw Crane. 2015. “Gray Areas: The War on Poverty at Home and Abroad” in Territories of Poverty (University of Georgia Press).

Schrader, Stuart. 2012. “Policing Political Protest: Paradoxes of the Age of Austerity” in Is This What Democracy Looks Like? (Social Text: Periscope). 

Stuart Schrader, “What We Own This City Gets Wrong about Policing” Boston Review,” June 27, 2022

Stuart Schrader, “The Lies Cops Tell and the Lies We Tell About Cops” The New Republic, May 27, 2021

Stuart Schrader, “Defund the Global Policeman” n+1 138 (Fall 2020)

Cops and Counterinsurgency” The Dig, July 24, 2020

Stuart Schrader, “Trump Has Brought America’s Dirty Wars Home” The New Republic, July 21, 2020

Here Are the 96 U.S. Cities Where Protesters Were Tear-Gassed. The New York Times, June 16, 2020

Stuart Schrader, When Police Treat Protesters Like Insurgents, Sending in Troops Seems Logical. The Washington Post, June 5, 2020

The Rebellion in Defense of Black Lives Is Rooted in U.S. History. So, Too, Is Trump’s Authoritarian Rule. The Intercept, June 3, 2020

Stuart Schrader, “The Murderous Legacy of Cold War AnticommunismBoston Review, May 19, 2020

Stuart Schrader, “Harm of the LawArtforum May-June 2020

Roots of Imperial PolicingBlack Agenda Radio (audio interview), January 21, 2020

Badges Without BordersNew Books Network (audio interview), November 5, 2019

Osita Nwavenu and Stuart Schrader in conversation, C-Span Book TV (video), October 17, 2019

Accurate Census Count Critical for Baltimore Kids” Baltimore Sun, September 5, 2019

Shaped By The State,” C-Span, April 23, 2019

Stuart Schrader, “Imperialism After EmpireBoston Review, March 29, 2019

“How Tear Gas Became a Favorite Weapon of U.S. Border Patrol, Despite Being Banned In Warfare”​, Democracy Now!, November 28, 2018

​Stuart Schrader, “The Long Counterrevolution: United States-Latin America Security CooperationSSRC Items, September 18, 2018

Quinn Slobodian and Stuart Schrader, “The White Man, Unburdened: How Charles Murray Learned to Stop Worrying and Love RacismThe Baffler July-August 2018

Stuart Schrader, “Henri Lefebvre, Mao Zedong, and the Global Urban ConceptGlobal Urban History May 2018

Stuart Schrader, “Review of Sidney Harring’s Policing a Class SocietyLegal Form January 2018