Counterinsurgency in Green and Grey
The following text was written to provoke reflection and dialogue for the inaugural session of the AGAPE research group’s second iteration. It draws critical parallels between the domestic counterinsurgency strategies of post-World War II America and the enduring legacy of colonial military policing in postcolonial nations. By interrogating how tactics of control—originally deployed in imperial conquests—have been repurposed both within U.S. borders and by postcolonial regimes, the text explores the erosion of community self-defense and the transformation of resistance into passive documentation.
Police officers in Portland, Oregon used sharpshooters to maim people, swept protesters away in unmarked cars, and brutally attacked journalists, legal observers, and medics during Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.
Counterinsurgency in the Green Zone
In the mid-20th century, the United States turned its imperial tactics inward. The tools of war honed in its colonies—Vietnam, the Philippines, Haiti—were brought home to control Black communities. Helicopters hovered over neighborhoods. SWAT teams stormed homes. Armored vehicles rolled through streets. The logic of counterinsurgency declared Black neighborhoods as war zones, their residents insurgents. Policing was no longer about protection; it was the domestic continuation of war.
It was in this moment of siege that the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense arose. Young Black men and women, tired of the state’s unchecked violence, declared that their communities would no longer be prey. They armed themselves, patrolled their streets, and called it copwatching. This was not passive observation. It was force meeting force, a direct challenge to the police’s monopoly on violence. With rifles slung over their shoulders and law books in hand, they stood between their neighbors and the violence of the state.
The Panthers understood what policing had become. It was not about public safety but about maintaining control. Police operated as an occupying army, treating Black people not as citizens but as threats. Copwatching was a refusal to accept this reality. It was an act of defiance, an assertion of dignity in the face of systemic dehumanization. It said, “We will not let you brutalize us in silence.”
But the state could not tolerate such defiance. The Panthers were labeled enemies of the state, branded as a threat to national security. The FBI’s COINTELPRO infiltrated their ranks, spreading disinformation and paranoia. Police raided their offices, killing leaders in their homes. By the 1980s, the Panthers were dismantled, their movement crushed under the weight of relentless surveillance, infiltration, and assassination. Their patrols ceased. Their presence was erased. And the police grew more powerful, their weapons and tactics even more militarized.
What was lost with the Panthers was not just an organization but a way of resisting. Today, when a Black man is killed by police, there are no patrols to intervene. There are no armed community members to stand in the way. Instead, we raise our phones. We film. We document the dying.
The videos—of Eric Garner choking on his own breath, of George Floyd pleading beneath an officer’s knee—spread across the world. But these recordings do not stop the violence. They turn it into a spectacle. We are no longer actors in this tragedy but witnesses. And after the spectacle, the court cases begin.
Families are awarded settlements—millions of dollars paid out for the lives stolen. But these payouts are not justice. They are transactions. They follow a grim logic, one rooted in a deeper history. The settlements echo the insurance claims filed for enslaved Africans thrown overboard during the Zong massacre of 1781. In that case, 132 enslaved men, women, and children were cast into the sea so the ship’s owners could collect on their insurance. The court did not debate whether their deaths were murder. Instead, it argued whether they were a legitimate loss of property. The enslaved were not seen as human beings but as assets to be accounted for. Their value lay not in their lives but in their worth on a ledger.
This same logic pervades today’s settlements. The state does not acknowledge the humanity of the dead. The payouts are not about reckoning with the violence but about closing the books. The dead are transformed into financial liabilities, their deaths processed and paid for as the cost of maintaining order. This is the laundering of Black grief: the conversion of pain into currency, death into something the state can afford.
As Steve Martinot and Jared Sexton write in “The Avant-garde of White Supremacy”:
“After the exposure of the LAPD’s videotaped beating of Rodney King, after the rebellions of 1992, police violence only became more rampant and more brazen across the country. After the ‘Justice for Diallo’ movement in NYC, the police murders multiplied, and police arrogance increased. It was as if the anti-racist campaigns (or uprisings) against police violence were co-opted by the police to augment their violence, rather than effectively closing it down as they had explicitly intended. In the wake of countless exposés, the prison industrial complex has only expanded; the reportage on the racist operations of capital punishment and the legal system more generally have become absorbed in the acceleration of execution rates. Why do things get worse after each hard-fought revelation? Where do we locate the genius of the system? Something is left out of the account; it runs through our fingers, escaping our grasp.”
The crushing of the Panthers ensured this transformation. Copwatching, once an act of defiance and counterforce, is now an act of acquiescence. We film the lynching, not to stop it, but to preserve it. The police continue their violence, uninterrupted, while we stand on the sidelines, reduced to spectators of our own destruction.
This is what remains. The dead are still thrown overboard. The courtrooms still argue over their value. And we, who once resisted, now simply watch. Worse still, the power to authenticate the lynching does not lie with Black witnesses but with the recording device and its footage of the lynching. This reveals continuity with the era of de jure slavery, as Saidiya Hartman observes:
“Since the veracity of Black testimony is in doubt, the crimes of slavery must not only be confirmed by unquestionable authorities and other white observers but also must be made visible, whether by revealing the scarred back of the slave—in short, making the body speak—or through authenticating devices, or, better yet, by enabling reader and audience member to experience vicariously the ‘tragical scenes of cruelty.’”
The demand for more tools to produce evidence of police misconduct is, in fact, a demand for more means to enable the public to experience vicariously the “tragical scenes of cruelty.”
What is preserved is not truth, but spectacle. And what is denied are reparations.
Protesters run to take cover outside the Kenyan Parliament after storming the building. Luis Tato/AFP/Getty Images
Counterinsurgency in the Grey Zone
In the mid-20th century, as colonial powers fell and their empires unraveled, victorious anti-colonial movements acquired more than independence—they also inherited the techniques of domination their colonizers had refined. The same military policing tactics used to crush uprisings in the colonies—forced relocations, curfews, surveillance, and collective punishment—remained embedded in the administrative machinery of newly independent states. The colonizers had left, but their tools stayed behind, redeployed by postcolonial regimes to maintain their grip on power.
The irony was stark. Those who had fought to dismantle colonial rule now wielded its instruments against their own people. In Kenya, the Mau Mau rebellion had been brutally suppressed with mass internment and scorched-earth tactics. After independence, some of the same structures were used to silence political dissent and crush labor strikes. In India, where Gandhian nonviolence had once resisted British rule, the post-independence state employed police and paramilitary forces to suppress peasant revolts and secessionist movements. Across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the colonial toolkit was turned inward, not simply as a continuation of imperialism but as a desperate strategy for survival.
This desperation was not without cause. The most radical leaders of postcolonial regimes—those who sought to fully dismantle the colonial order—faced relentless subversion from the West. The CIA and other Western intelligence organizations infiltrated their movements, spreading disinformation, funding opposition factions, and orchestrating coups to remove them from power. Leaders like Patrice Lumumba in the Congo and Salvador Allende in Chile became victims of Western-backed destabilization campaigns. Knowing the fate of their peers, many radical leaders turned to the colonial military-policing apparatuses they had inherited, using these tools to maintain power in the face of Western subversion. Surveillance, infiltration, and suppression became their defenses against assassination and regime change.
When these efforts failed and Western subversion succeeded, the regimes that replaced them—backed by the same imperial powers—doubled down on colonial systems of control. After the CIA-backed coup against Sukarno in Indonesia, for instance, the Suharto regime carried out mass killings and employed colonial-era tactics to secure its rule. Across the postcolonial world, Western-backed regimes perfected the use of colonial military policing to suppress their populations and ensure loyalty to imperial interests.
These tactics were not adopted out of malice alone but out of a perverse logic. New states, born into a global system that continued to favor the old colonial powers, found themselves dependent on the very mechanisms of control they had fought to overthrow. Colonial methods of coercion—designed to extract resources and suppress rebellion—were now deemed essential for managing populations and stabilizing fragile governments. The colonized had become their own overseers, while Western powers ensured the colonial order lived on in new forms.
The corrupt, repressive administrators of the postcolonies were direct descendants of the corrupt Western administrators of the colonies. Just as colonial administrations weaponized policing to preserve imperial hierarchies, postcolonial states—both radical and Western-backed—used it to enforce the same stratified order. Tanks rolled through city streets. Helicopters circled overhead. Paramilitaries patrolled rural villages. The enemies of the state were no longer foreign occupiers but their own citizens—workers, activists, and dissidents demanding more from independence than a flag and a constitution.
Resistance to these tactics persisted, but it too underwent a transformation. Under colonial rule, rebellion often meant confronting force with force—through guerrilla warfare, strikes, and mass uprisings. After independence, however, as states grew more powerful and militarized, legitimate resistance became less about counterforce and more about bearing witness. Activists shifted their focus to documenting human rights abuses, gathering evidence of state violence to present to international organizations or courts. Cameras replaced rifles. The lens became the weapon, the footage a plea for intervention.
This shift mirrored the transformation of resistance within the metropoles of empire. Just as the Black Panther Party had been crushed in the United States, extinguishing the practice of armed community self-defense, so too were the militant wings of anti-colonial movements demobilized and suppressed in the postcolonial world. And just as copwatching in the U.S. devolved into passive documentation, resistance to state violence in postcolonial nations became a project of recording atrocities for international audiences.
The footage and reports, like the videos of police killings in the U.S., circulated widely, sparking outrage but rarely disrupting the systems they exposed. Instead, they became part of the spectacle—a new currency of indignation that rarely led to meaningful change.
Here, too, the question of authenticity looms. Just as Black testimony under slavery was doubted, the testimony of the oppressed in postcolonial states is rarely trusted without corroboration from UN observers, Western media outlets, or Western-based human rights organizations. In the postcolonial world, as in the metropole, the “tragical scenes of cruelty” are authenticated through objectifying evidence—photographs, videos, and reports written in the language of international law. What is preserved is not truth but spectacle. The dead are recorded, their suffering documented, but the systems of violence remain intact.
This is what remains. The tools of colonial domination—now wielded by postcolonial states—persist. Legitimate resistance to these tools has been transformed into documentation, not confrontation. And the people, who once fought force with force, now capture their suffering for an “international community” that prefers to watch and only intervenes when it enables them to play the savior and project power to their own benefit.
