WIN Winter 2015

Six Theses on Movement-Building and the Militarization of Policing Crisis and Control by Lesley Wood Pluto Press, 2014 Reviewed by Irina Ceric Having had front row seats during its rise, long-time activists and organizers will immediately recognize the core preoccupation of Lesley Wood’s new book: the militarization of protest policing. Wood seeks to explain the…

  A World in Which Many Worlds Collide One Game at a Time: Why Sports Matter AK Press, 2014 by Matt Hern Reviewed by Joshua Stephens What with the ongoing, growing challenges to the Washington NFL team’s racist name and iconography, alongside scandals around everything from epidemic traumatic brain injuries within the sport, to the…

Another Politics: Talking Across Today’s Transformative Movements by Chris Dixon University of California Press, 2014 Reviewed by Carwil Bjork-James Over the past two decades, a certain kind of radical politics has surfaced and resurfaced, most recently within the whirlwind of activism that made up the Occupy movement. As the movement spread and encampments grew, occupiers…

The Struggle Within: Prisons, Political Prisoners, and Mass Movements in the United States By Dan Berger PM Press/Kersplebedeb, 2014 Reviewed by Josh Cerretti Dan Berger argues, in his new book The Struggle Within: Prisons, Political Prisoners, and Mass Movements in the United States, that “Working to free political prisoners goes hand in hand with exposing…

Ordinary People The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI Knopf Doubleday, 2014 by Betty Medsger Reviewed by Rosalie G. Riegle Read this book! Nothing any review can say will substitute for the stunning accumulation of evidence of our government’s surveillance presented in Betty Medsger’s The Burglary. Read and then ask the questions…

On August 9th of 2014, 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot dead by white police officer Darren Wilson, in the majority-black suburb of St. Louis, MO, Ferguson. Brown was unarmed, and according to multiple witnesses had his hands raised when Wilson fired the final shot. The salient features were emblematic of a longstanding, simmering crisis in…

  On May 4th, 2014, a new cross-movement formation called STOMP (Stop Oppressive Militarized Policing) held a community speak-out in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood. That same weekend, Boston was host to “Urban Shield” – a massive, annual SWAT training that brings to together police agencies from across Massachusetts to try out the latest militarized tactics and…

Photos by Georgios Giannopoulos “If I saw you sitting there a few years ago, I’d be afraid of you. Maybe more than you would be of me. We’re told you all carry knives and will throw molotovs at us. It’s all changed since I moved out here, the brainwash has worn off”. These words were…

Photos by Mídia Ninja On 12 April, Rio police invaded the Engenho Novo favela to enforce a court order evicting 5,000 squatters occupying the abandoned Telerj industrial complex near the legendary Maracanã football stadium. Some of the evictees resisted fiercely, confronting the invading force with sticks, stones and Molotov cocktails, setting numerous vehicles alight including…

Kristian Williams is an anarchist activist, public intellectual and has been a supporter of the struggles of oppressed peoples for decades. He wrote Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America and American Methods: Torture and the Logic of Domination and co-edited Life During Wartime: Resisting Counterinsurgency. He has dedicated the last two decades…

Shut It All Down The last six months or so has seen much of what might’ve otherwise been “movement news” beamed straight into households across the US. From Ferguson, to New York City, to Los Angeles, and all the mass mobilizations against police violence and racist impunity that have resulted – even mainstream conversations appear…