Brendan McQuade
University of Southern Maine, Criminology, Faculty Member
- Binghamton University, Sociology, Alumnusadd
- Sociology, Historical Sociology, Political Sociology, Cultural Sociology, World Systems Analysis, Security Studies, and 30 moreIntelligence Studies, Critical Criminology, Surveillance, Police, Homeland Security, Counterinsurgency, Political Violence and Terrorism, Punishment and Prisons, American History, Social Movements, Intellectuals, Marxism, Critical Security Studies, Neoliberalism, Surveillance Studies, Colonialism, Policing Studies, World-Ecology, Militarization & Power, Political Economy, Police and Policing, Insurgency/Counterinsurgency(COIN), World-Systems Analysis, Capitalism, Criminology, Mass Incarceration, Prison Industrial Complex, State Theory, Penology, and Anti-Securityedit
- I am an assistant professor of criminology at the University of Southern Maine. I was previously an assistant profes... moreI am an assistant professor of criminology at the University of Southern Maine. I was previously an assistant professor in the sociology/anthropology department at SUNY-Cortland and visiting assistant professor in the international studies department at DePaul University. I finished my PhD in sociology from Binghamton University (SUNY) in 2015. I specialize in the critique of security and historical sociology.
The University of California Press published my book "Pacifying the Homeland: Intelligence Fusion and Mass Supervision" in August 2019. This project provides a window into the secretive world of criminal intelligence and counterterrorism at fusion centers. Although the organizational complexity that surrounds fusion centers complicates their operations, I find that they buttress an emergent regime of mass supervision, helping to manage social suffering in an era of austerity and decarceration.
My research and teaching interests encompass social regulation, political violence and state formation, and the study of historical capitalism. I have published on counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, policing, social movements, and intellectuals, expertise and knowledge production.edit
This paper reveals the secrets of BlueLeaks, a massive archive of documents hacked from police agencies, and intelligence centers in the United States. A September 2019 Intelligence Assessment by the Virginia Fusion Center cites... more
This paper reveals the secrets of BlueLeaks, a massive archive of documents hacked from police agencies, and intelligence centers in the United States. A September 2019 Intelligence Assessment by the Virginia Fusion Center cites counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen to evaluate the 'insurgency tactics and strategies' of environmentalists. What is remarkable about the document is not the domestic application of counterinsurgency but how it reveals the biases of security. Read from an anti-security perspective, this document becomes a cipher to decode the political content of the BlueLeaks archive that is obscured by the deep acceptance of 'security' as an apolitical, unqualified social good. The analysis is grounded in document and network analysis of BlueLeaks documents from the New England region. It finds that practices commonly understood as 'counterinsurgency' span and animate the continuum of pacification. The secret of BlueLeaks is the secret of security: a ceaseless low-intensity class war that envelops and encompasses the continuum of pacification, protects property, administers poverty, depoliticizes social harms, and elicits participation in pacification.
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Textbook presentations of U.S. policing name the present as new stage of professionalization: the homeland security era, where the application of “big data” promises “smarter” policing. Within this framework of gradual progress, liberal... more
Textbook presentations of U.S. policing name the present as new stage of professionalization: the homeland security era, where the application of “big data” promises “smarter” policing. Within this framework of gradual progress, liberal police scholarship has become the official criticism of big data policing to organize a project of liberal reform. Of course, this scholarship is being in written in the context of both militant social movements within the United States and the terminal decline of U.S. global hegemony. To clarify the stakes of this moment, this paper connects the Marxist anti-security perspective and anti-racist critiques of surveillance and big data policing from within the Black radical tradition. It argues that the emergence of big data policing is the latest development in on-going processes of pacification that have expanded, organized, and reproduced the colonial/modern world-system over the longue durée. The paper extends and elaborates conceptualizations of hegemonic cycles in relation to work on the maturation of intelligence tradecraft, focusing on two interrelated developments: (1) two information revolutions that reorganized social relations and (2) the police-wars that shaped the rise and decline of the United States as a world hegemonic power. It concludes that big data policing is the latest outgrowth of the imperial epistemology that organized and continues animate the work of pacification and obscure the politics of anti-systemic struggle.
Research Interests: Information Technology, Historical Sociology, Marxism, World Systems Analysis, Security, and 13 moreSurveillance Studies, Police, Hegemony, Surveillance, Coloniality, Abolitionism, Prison Abolition, Big Data, Coloniality of Power, US hegemony, Anti-Security, Pacification, and Modernity/coloniality/decoloniality
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The contemporary debate about “abolition” and its relation to wider anti-capitalist and anti-racist struggles can be read as reproducing the tired opposition between reform and revolution, between gradual incrementalism and immediate... more
The contemporary debate about “abolition” and its relation to wider anti-capitalist and anti-racist struggles can be read as reproducing the tired opposition between reform and revolution, between gradual incrementalism and immediate disruptive action. This false dichotomy can be resolved by returning the holistic and historical analysis of “abolition democracy” offered by W.E.B. Du Bois’ in his classic work Black Reconstruction. Du Bois offers an alternative mandate for abolitionist praxis: one which highlights the interplay of disruptive direct action and incremental change within a historically informed understanding of a particular social struggle. Understood in these terms, abolition becomes a critically important and neglected component of the revolutionary tradition: abolition is the foil of bourgeois security.
Research Interests: Social Movements, Historical Sociology, Marxism, Race and Racism, Anarchism, and 15 moreClass, American Civil War, Social movements and revolution, Socialism, Abolitionism, Prison Abolition, Anti-Security, W.E.B. Du Bois, Critique of Security, Historical and Comparative Sociology, Afropessimism, Kurdistana Rojava, Rojava, Rojava Revolution, and Black Reconstruction
Research Interests: Social Movements, Historical Sociology, World Systems Analysis, Fascism, Social Movements (Political Science), and 12 moreHegemony, Comparative and historical sociology, Gramsci and Cultural Hegemony, Passive Revolution, World-Systems Theory, Hegemony and Counter-Hegemony, Immanuel Wallerstein, Historical and Comparative Sociology, Counterrevolution, Revolution and Counterrevolution, Arno J. Mayer, and Antisystemic Movements
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Intelligence expertise presents a theoretical puzzle that challenges ideal-typical understandings of professional fields. Intelligence is not a strongly autonomous field where experts control the production and accreditation of knowledge.... more
Intelligence expertise presents a theoretical puzzle that challenges ideal-typical understandings of professional fields. Intelligence is not a strongly autonomous field where experts control the production and accreditation of knowledge. Yet, intelligence is not a field in decline. This paper explores this puzzle through the example of fusion centers, a national network of 78 interagency intelligence centers recognized by the Department of Homeland Security. It draws from over a year of fieldwork and interviews with 75 people who work in fusion centers in New York and New Jersey. It finds that the jurisdictional rivalries within fusion centers produce a dialectic tension: Efforts to secure professional autonomy are frustrated by forces that marshal intelligence expertise as a resource in larger battles in the bureaucratic field. This dialectic produces continual battles over institutional resources and a deeper definitional struggle over the nature of intelligence. Theoretically, this paper suggests that intelligence expertise is located in Bspaces between fields.^ While some have positioned Bspaces between fields^ as a transitional stage in the formation or decline of a field, intelligence expertise constitutes a unique form of expert knowledge that persists in the interstices between more established fields. As a result of this liminal and ambiguous position, intelligence expertise does not produce Brational^ knowledge on its own terms. Instead, it produces Bpolitical^ knowledge shaped by the shifting dynamics of the bureaucratic field. In April 2009, an intelligence assessment from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) created controversy. The report predicted an increase in Right wing extremist activity and identified four causes: prolonged economic downturn, the election of a black president, renewed debates over gun control, and the return of military veterans to civilian life (DHS 2009). Conservative commentators sensationalized the report. Rush Limbaugh claimed it
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In the last decade, the United States has invested considerable resources into an expanded intelligence apparatus that extends from the hyper-secretive federal intelligence community down to the more mundane world of municipal police.... more
In the last decade, the United States has invested considerable resources into an expanded intelligence apparatus that extends from the hyper-secretive federal intelligence community down to the more mundane world of municipal police. This paper investigates the effects of the post-9/11 surveillance surge on state and local policing. It presents original research on interagency intelligence centers New York and New Jersey and deploys Pfaffenberger’s “technological drama” as a process animating the neoliberal constitution of what Bourdieu calls the “bureaucratic field.” Despite seemingly dramatic changes, there exists powerful continuity in the profession of policing. Before or after Snowden, the day-to-day reality of criminal intelligence remains shaped by the immediate demands of investigations and the small politics of interagency rivalries, insulating policing from dramatic reforms and swift change. What reformers see as dysfunction is better understood as a technological drama in the bureaucratic field that paradoxically provides a degree of autonomy and slows the pace of change. This paper builds on and contributes to the tendency within surveillance studies that emphasizes the ways in which human agents and organizational cultures mediate surveillance.
Research Interests: Field Theory, Intelligence Studies, Security Studies, Critical Security Studies, Surveillance Studies, and 12 moreState Theory, Policing Studies, Neoliberalism, Pierre Bourdieu, Sociology of Professions, Policing, Police and Policing, Assemblage Theory, Loic Wacquant, Intelligence-led Policing, management accountability and CompStat, and Science and Technology Studies
George Orwell is one the best known and highly regarded writers of the twentieth century. In his adjective form— Orwellian—he has become a “Sartrean ‘singular universal,’ an individual whose “singular” experiences express the “universal”... more
George Orwell is one the best known and highly regarded writers of the twentieth century. In his adjective form— Orwellian—he has become a “Sartrean ‘singular universal,’ an individual whose “singular” experiences express the “universal” character of a historical moment. Orwell is a literary representation of the unease felt in the disenchanted, alienated, anomic world of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This towering cultural legacy obscures a more complex and interesting legacy. This world-system biography explains his contemporary relevance by retracing the road from Mandalay to Wigan that transformed Eric Blair, a disappointing-Etonianturned- imperial-policeman, into George Orwell, a contradictory and complex socialist and, later, literary icon. Orwell’s contradictory class position—between both ruling class and working class and nation and empire—and resultantly tense relationship to nationalism, empire, and the Left makes his work a particularly powerful exposition of the tension between comsopolitianism and radicalism, between the abstract concerns of intellectuals and the complex demands of local political action. Viewed in full, Orwell represents the “traumatic kernel” of our age of cynicism: the historic failure and inability of the left to find a revolutionary path forward between the “timid reformism” of social democrats and “comfortable martyrdom” of anachronistic and self-satisfied radicals.
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The recent upsurge of class struggle seemingly confirms the cognitive capitalism hypothesis and, particularly, the political predictions of Hardt and Negri. Using world-systems analysis as a heuristic device to facilitate comparison of... more
The recent upsurge of class struggle seemingly confirms the cognitive capitalism hypothesis and, particularly, the political predictions of Hardt and Negri. Using world-systems analysis as a heuristic device to facilitate comparison of Egypt's Arab Spring Revolt and Occupy Wall Street reveals complexities that belie these conclusions. The “cognitariat” and “multitude” are not uncomplicated revolutionary actors but fragmented and politically ambiguous forces. Revolutionary subjectivity is not a structural fact to be read off material conditions but remains a political project to be realized through collective struggle. Meanwhile, the ideological and practical appropriation of antiauthoritarian and antistatist impulses by neoliberal forces poses the question of the passive revolution, wherein the hegemonic center blunts and overtakes revolutionary movements by incorporating some of their elements. Cognitive capitalism does not appreciate these complexities, and this undermined the full development of the contemporary cycle of struggles.
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The militarisation of US–African relations has attracted considerable attention in recent years. Left largely unexplored, however, is the question of how this process has involved US-based scholars. This essay examines this process with... more
The militarisation of US–African relations has attracted considerable attention in recent years. Left largely unexplored, however, is the question of how this process has involved
US-based scholars. This essay examines this process with particular attention to the rapid expansion of military and intelligence research on and in Africa, and, in particular,
military and intelligence funding of US Africanists’ research including at the major African Studies centres. While the classification of much federal research limits conclusions, it is apparent that military and intelligence priorities are coming to
significantly shape the present and future of much research and training.
US-based scholars. This essay examines this process with particular attention to the rapid expansion of military and intelligence research on and in Africa, and, in particular,
military and intelligence funding of US Africanists’ research including at the major African Studies centres. While the classification of much federal research limits conclusions, it is apparent that military and intelligence priorities are coming to
significantly shape the present and future of much research and training.
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This article explains a shift in American culture and politics through an examination of the ‘Vietnam Trope’, a culture structure that conditioned debates on the use of US military power. Specifically, the trope indexes competing... more
This article explains a shift in American culture and politics through an examination of the ‘Vietnam Trope’, a culture structure that conditioned debates on the use of US military power. Specifically, the trope indexes competing explanations in hermeneutically dissimilar narratives: (1) a liberal/neoconservative iteration depicting a progressive foreign policy and (2) a realist/radical articulation that doubts the ability of the US power to shape the world. The ‘Vietnam’ trope captured and organized the anxieties of American military officials and policymakers who confronted a world transformed by ‘the Vietnam War’ and the events of ‘the Sixties’. In the 1980s and 1990s, the trope provided the cultural logic that facilitated the eventual rehabilitation of US military power so that, by the new millennium, preemptive war and protracted global counterinsurgency became possible. Bringing the cultural methods of trope analysis to the historical sociology of hegemony, this article shows that cultural structures are both responses to specific historical moments and the systems of meaning that help shape future outcomes. Empirically, this trope analysis is based on a reading of the shifting uses of the expression ‘Vietnam Syndrome’ in the New York Times and an analysis of the evolution of historical scholarship on ‘the Second Indochina War’.
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The rise of counterterrorism as policy rubric and the subsequent reorganization of both foreign and domestic policy within the United States under that aegis cannot be fully understood outside struggles to maintain US imperium in a... more
The rise of counterterrorism as policy rubric and the subsequent reorganization of both foreign and domestic policy within the United States under that aegis cannot be fully understood outside struggles to maintain US imperium in a changing world. Specifically, this paper focuses on the (neo)colonial role prisons of the US-advised Republic of Vietnam as a site of knowledge formation, including both the counter-hegemonizing Vietnamese revolutionary nationalism and colonizing world-discourses of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism. Empirically, I use the Douglas Valentine document and oral history collection to illuminate the consequences of a key policy debate concerning detainees during the period of the Phoenix Program and Vietnamization (1967-1973). At this moment, penal practices formalized as counterinsurgency were recast as counterterrorism, one the principal mobilizing discourses of neoliberal counterrevolution. “Domestically,” this transformation is most profound in the area of law and policing. Here, I focus on first the rise of SWAT teams and intelligence branches in police departments before closing with comments on the PATRIOT Act and the Department of Homeland Security.
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Research Interests: Social Movements, European Studies, Social Sciences, Political Parties, Political Extremism/Radicalism/Populism, and 14 morePopulism, History of Political Parties, Social Movements (Political Science), European Union, Social movements and revolution, European Union Politics, Austerity Measures, Radical Right-wing Populist Parties, Politics of Austerity, Anti-Austerity, Political Parties and Party Politics, Antiglobalization Social Movements, Left Wing Parties, and Anti austerity Protests
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Research Interests: Discourse Analysis, Political Sociology, Information Technology, Military Intelligence, Historical Sociology, and 12 moreCultural Sociology, Sex and Gender, Class, State Formation, Race and Ethnicity, Colonialism, Policing Studies, Intelligence and Espionage, Empire, Counterinsurgency, Race, and Imperialism
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A commentary on the need for bail reform in New York State
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The victory at Standing Rock in the face of state repression is a testament to the power of direct action.
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There’s nothing progressive about community policing — it deepens criminalization and expands police power.
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President Obama touts Camden as a model of police demilitarization. But the city has taken counterinsurgency surveillance to a new level.
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The United States has poured over a billion dollars into a network of interagency intelligence centers called “fusion centers.” These centers were ostensibly set up to prevent terrorism, but politicians, the press, and policy advocates... more
The United States has poured over a billion dollars into a network of interagency intelligence centers called “fusion centers.” These centers were ostensibly set up to prevent terrorism, but politicians, the press, and policy advocates have criticized them for failing on this account. So why do these security systems persist? Pacifying the Homeland travels inside the secret world of intelligence fusion, looks beyond the apparent failure of fusion centers, and reveals a broader shift away from mass incarceration and toward a more surveillance- and police-intensive system of social regulation.
Provided with unprecedented access to domestic intelligence centers, Brendan McQuade uncovers how the institutionalization of intelligence fusion enables decarceration without fully addressing the underlying social problems at the root of mass incarceration. The result is a startling analysis that contributes to the debates on surveillance, mass incarceration, and policing and challenges readers to see surveillance, policing, mass incarceration, and the security state in an entirely new light.
Provided with unprecedented access to domestic intelligence centers, Brendan McQuade uncovers how the institutionalization of intelligence fusion enables decarceration without fully addressing the underlying social problems at the root of mass incarceration. The result is a startling analysis that contributes to the debates on surveillance, mass incarceration, and policing and challenges readers to see surveillance, policing, mass incarceration, and the security state in an entirely new light.