Jonathan Obert | Amherst College (original) (raw)
Papers by Jonathan Obert
Cambridge University Press eBooks, Sep 3, 2018
Conclusion The first decades of the twenty-first century have renewed interest in the role of vio... more Conclusion The first decades of the twenty-first century have renewed interest in the role of violence in American politics. The seemingly endless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the renaissance of the right-wing militia movement during the Obama presidency, the explosion of debate over the appropriateness and racial disparities of mass incarceration, questions of police brutality and surveillance, and the contentious protests surrounding issues like Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, and so forth, have brought to the fore once again questions of how the organization of violence have shaped core institutional activities and development. 1 These studies have begun to ask questions about the deeper interconnections between the private use of coercion and state-building, showing how, in ways often unexpected, these two faces of violence fundamentally shape each other. This book has presented an institutional genealogy of this relationship, arguing that a common pattern of violence developed in the United States in the late nineteenth century across multiple scales and in multiple settings. On the one hand, the federal, local, and municipal state expanded directly, building the powerful interconnected bureaucracy of military, National Guard, and municipal police forces that have come to represent the violent arm of the contemporary American government. On the other hand, just as profoundly,
Labor
The Wagner Act, passed by a Democratic-controlled Congress in 1935, provided unprecedented federa... more The Wagner Act, passed by a Democratic-controlled Congress in 1935, provided unprecedented federal protections for American labor unions. The Taft-Hartley Act, passed by a Republican-controlled Congress just twelve years later, effectively rolled back significant parts of Wagner. Previous research on Taft-Hartley identifies three factors that led to this anti-labor backlash. First, the American public was repulsed by the large strike wave that followed the end of World War II. Second, southern Democrats were concerned that powerful labor unions would organize African Americans and upset the South's racial hierarchy. Third, the Republican Party was increasingly embracing a conservative, probusiness ideology. This article contributes a new angle to this old debate by exploring the role of the CIO, its 1943 decision to create the country's first political action committee (PAC), and the consequences of its informal alliance with the Democratic Party. Using original data on CIO ...
Public Administration, The Lives of Guns, Sep 3, 2018
What explains the emergence of organized private enforcement in the United States? We study the f... more What explains the emergence of organized private enforcement in the United States? We study the formation of vigilance committees---that is, coercive groups organized in a manner not officially sanctioned by state law and with the purpose of establishing legal and moral claims. We argue that these committees were primarily intended to help create civic political identities in contexts of social ambiguity and institutional instability, what we call social frontiers. Relying on quantitative and qualitative analysis, we find that these committees were more likely to form in contexts where levels of ethno-nationalist heterogeneity were high and where political institutions had recently changed. Contrary to common wisdom, vigilance committees were much more than functionalist alternatives to an absent state, or local orders established by bargaining, or responses to social or economic conflict. They constituted flexible instruments to counteract environments characterized by social and political uncertainty
Social Science History, 2021
While much of the federal Department of Justice’s policing bureaucracy was in retrenchment from t... more While much of the federal Department of Justice’s policing bureaucracy was in retrenchment from the 1880s and 1890s, the Indian Territories was the site of some of the most aggressive policing in the nation’s history. Specifically, a series of reforms in US-Indian relations permitted a high level of federal involvement in policing and the management of local order. Using original demographic data on US deputy marshals and criminal gangs active in the Indian Territories, as well as an analysis of media coverage of Oklahoma crime, this article shows that this explosion of state-building was due, in part, to the ways in which kinship rules in Oklahoma allowed racially ambiguous inhabitants to be castigated as “outlaws.” This, in turn, opened up space for the federal marshal apparatus—which was primarily white—to expand its role as the purveyors of local law and order in a manner that had never been possible in the South.
Perspectives on Politics, 2020
World War II, failing to mention that in many cases the people affected were neither “enemies” no... more World War II, failing to mention that in many cases the people affected were neither “enemies” nor “aliens.” Very few of those surveilled through those programs proved to be disloyal to the United States. Two-thirds of the 117,000 people held in camps in the early 1940s on the basis of Japanese ancestry were in fact US citizens. Krajewska refers briefly to this episode but does not mention the fact that thousands of those interned renounced their US citizenship, often under duress, nor that US citizenship was later restored in most cases (Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America, 2014). Other episodes that fit within the author’s concept of identity policing are neglected. For instance, there is no discussion of the “bracero” program arranged by the US and Mexican governments to bring farm laborers for temporary work on non-negotiable contracts to the US Southwest from the 1940s to the 1960s, in a program administered by the Department of Labor and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). In that case, the INS provided permits and ID cards to 4.6million workers, deported many others, and even aided some US employers in moving their workers from illegal to legal status—an ambivalent pattern of behavior that set the mold for the marginal economic and racial position of many Mexican Americans in later years. Nor does Krajewska discuss the periodic forced repatriation of migrant workers—often along with their US-born children—whose identity as Americans may be negated by this expulsion. In short, Krajewska misses some crucial episodes of identity policing and has little to say about the fact that identity policing projects in the United States tend to focus on racialized minorities. A clearer theoretical lens might have helped Krajewska see the relevance of these acts of identification and misidentification (for a more theoretical account of the history of the passport as a tool of statebuilding, see John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State, 2000). Although not so comprehensive as claimed, this book will nevertheless be of value to students and scholars who already have the historical and theoretical background to fill in the gaps left by Krajewska. For instance, the book provides a detailed account of the REAL ID Act, passed in 2005 and now in the final stages of implementation, through which the federal government is pushing states to harmonize the security features of driver’s licenses and to create state-level databases that can be searched by other states and federal agencies. Under this act, states must keep copies of documents used to corroborate identity, and driver’s licenses must use photos that meet biometric standards for identification, although the cards and databases do not include fingerprints or retinal scans (p. 168). Krawjewska makes a convincing case that US policy makers will continue to debate identity policing, especially in response to shocks such as war or terrorism, while acknowledging that attempting to use the technologies of identity policing to predict which individuals are prone to violence may well cause privacy problems without yielding much security benefit. Krajewska also argues that the use of biometric data will be increasingly relevant. To this I would add that scholars who seek to build on Krajewska’s research should also study government access to the troves of data collected by information technology companies on our phone movements and our online habits. Surely, the concept of identity policing will only become more relevant as data accumulate and computing power grows.
International Interactions, 2019
Free trade has gradually shifted the burden of military service onto the American South. While tr... more Free trade has gradually shifted the burden of military service onto the American South. While trade shocks generally lead to local increases in US Army enlistment, there are two different regional dynamics that concentrate this effect in the South. First, trade-related job losses are disproportionately concentrated in this region, where manufacturing jobs gradually migrated during the second half of the twentieth century. Second, the South's "military tradition," a relatively youthful population, and weak labor unions, combine to translate trade shocks into larger spikes in Army enlistment than the rest of the country. This paper uses county-level data from 1996-2010 to demonstrate the importance of meso-level, regional factors for understanding the location of trade shocks, as well as how communities adjust to such economic dislocations. We find that trade-related job losses account for roughly 7% of the South's over-representation in the Army during our period of study.
Journal of Borderlands Studies, 2019
This article argues that the mismatch between the legal fictions of the boundaries separating the... more This article argues that the mismatch between the legal fictions of the boundaries separating the states of late nineteenth century North America and the reality of local trans-border life helped drive the militarization of borderlands policing. The form this militarization took, in turn, reflected administrative state development; that is, whether they were relatively unitary and centralized, like Canada, or whether they were marked by fragmentation and local autonomy, like Mexico and the US. I use the example of state gendarmeriesmounted, armed policing units combining military and law enforcement functionsto explore this claim.
Perspectives on Politics, 2018
What explains the emergence of organized private enforcement in the United States? We study the f... more What explains the emergence of organized private enforcement in the United States? We study the formation of vigilance committees—that is, coercive groups organized in a manner not officially sanctioned by state law and with the purpose of establishing legal and moral claims. We argue that these committees were primarily intended to help create civic political identities in contexts of social ambiguity and institutional instability, what we call social frontiers. Relying on quantitative and qualitative analysis, we find that these committees were more likely to form in contexts where levels of ethno-nationalist heterogeneity were high and where political institutions had recently changed. Contrary to common wisdom, vigilance committees were much more than functionalist alternatives to an absent state, or local orders established by bargaining, or responses to social or economic conflict. They constituted flexible instruments to counteract environments characterized by social and pol...
The Six-Shooter State, 2018
The Injustice Never Leaves You, 2020
Law & Social Inquiry, 2017
The coevolution of private detective agencies and municipal police bureaucracies in mid-nineteent... more The coevolution of private detective agencies and municipal police bureaucracies in mid-nineteenth-century Chicago arose from the breakdown of an older system in which the provision of law enforcement was delegated to local communities. The growth of anonymity and the presence of strangers in a city undergoing massive changes in transportation undermined this delegative system and created the perception of new public security threats. These threats were compounded by the mobilization of ethnicity in partisan politics. To address these new concerns, political and economic elites did not innovate, but turned to traditional practices like special deputization. The use of deputization allowed some law officers to sell their services as entrepreneurs to private firms, while also paving the way for a new bureaucratic police department. Networks of security providers locked in this transformation and made public and private policing alike a permanent feature of the city's institutional...
Law, Culture and the Humanities, 2017
Drawing inspiration from Lewis Mumford’s classic analysis of the “technics” of political organiza... more Drawing inspiration from Lewis Mumford’s classic analysis of the “technics” of political organization, this article explores ways in which anti-government militias and like-minded groups frame the civic role of dissent in technological terms. For militia activists, guns are tangible artifacts that uniquely align existing social practices with an important historical tradition, enhance agency, and provide interpretive finality, while militias serve to help embed that protection and defense with participation in an organic, empowering community. To members, these participatory technics provide a seemingly democratic counter to the authoritarian logic of the federal government.
Journal of Policy History, 2017
Studies in American Political Development, 2014
How are new forms of violence expertise organized and exploited? Most scholars view this as prima... more How are new forms of violence expertise organized and exploited? Most scholars view this as primarily a question of state-building; that is, violence experts use their skills in an attempt to regulate economic transactions or to extract and redistribute resources via protection rents either for themselves or at the behest of political elites. In an alternative view, this article demonstrates that historical gunfighters active in the late 19th-century American Southwest were actually market actors—the possessors of valuable skills cultivated through participation in the Civil War and diffused through gunfighting and reputation building in key marketentrepôts. Neither solely state-builders nor state-resisters, as they have traditionally been interpreted, gunfighters composed a professional class that emerged in the 1870s and 1880s and who moved frequently between wage-paying jobs, seizing economic opportunities on both sides of the law and often serving at the behest of powerful econo...
Cambridge University Press eBooks, Sep 3, 2018
Conclusion The first decades of the twenty-first century have renewed interest in the role of vio... more Conclusion The first decades of the twenty-first century have renewed interest in the role of violence in American politics. The seemingly endless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the renaissance of the right-wing militia movement during the Obama presidency, the explosion of debate over the appropriateness and racial disparities of mass incarceration, questions of police brutality and surveillance, and the contentious protests surrounding issues like Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, and so forth, have brought to the fore once again questions of how the organization of violence have shaped core institutional activities and development. 1 These studies have begun to ask questions about the deeper interconnections between the private use of coercion and state-building, showing how, in ways often unexpected, these two faces of violence fundamentally shape each other. This book has presented an institutional genealogy of this relationship, arguing that a common pattern of violence developed in the United States in the late nineteenth century across multiple scales and in multiple settings. On the one hand, the federal, local, and municipal state expanded directly, building the powerful interconnected bureaucracy of military, National Guard, and municipal police forces that have come to represent the violent arm of the contemporary American government. On the other hand, just as profoundly,
Labor
The Wagner Act, passed by a Democratic-controlled Congress in 1935, provided unprecedented federa... more The Wagner Act, passed by a Democratic-controlled Congress in 1935, provided unprecedented federal protections for American labor unions. The Taft-Hartley Act, passed by a Republican-controlled Congress just twelve years later, effectively rolled back significant parts of Wagner. Previous research on Taft-Hartley identifies three factors that led to this anti-labor backlash. First, the American public was repulsed by the large strike wave that followed the end of World War II. Second, southern Democrats were concerned that powerful labor unions would organize African Americans and upset the South's racial hierarchy. Third, the Republican Party was increasingly embracing a conservative, probusiness ideology. This article contributes a new angle to this old debate by exploring the role of the CIO, its 1943 decision to create the country's first political action committee (PAC), and the consequences of its informal alliance with the Democratic Party. Using original data on CIO ...
Public Administration, The Lives of Guns, Sep 3, 2018
What explains the emergence of organized private enforcement in the United States? We study the f... more What explains the emergence of organized private enforcement in the United States? We study the formation of vigilance committees---that is, coercive groups organized in a manner not officially sanctioned by state law and with the purpose of establishing legal and moral claims. We argue that these committees were primarily intended to help create civic political identities in contexts of social ambiguity and institutional instability, what we call social frontiers. Relying on quantitative and qualitative analysis, we find that these committees were more likely to form in contexts where levels of ethno-nationalist heterogeneity were high and where political institutions had recently changed. Contrary to common wisdom, vigilance committees were much more than functionalist alternatives to an absent state, or local orders established by bargaining, or responses to social or economic conflict. They constituted flexible instruments to counteract environments characterized by social and political uncertainty
Social Science History, 2021
While much of the federal Department of Justice’s policing bureaucracy was in retrenchment from t... more While much of the federal Department of Justice’s policing bureaucracy was in retrenchment from the 1880s and 1890s, the Indian Territories was the site of some of the most aggressive policing in the nation’s history. Specifically, a series of reforms in US-Indian relations permitted a high level of federal involvement in policing and the management of local order. Using original demographic data on US deputy marshals and criminal gangs active in the Indian Territories, as well as an analysis of media coverage of Oklahoma crime, this article shows that this explosion of state-building was due, in part, to the ways in which kinship rules in Oklahoma allowed racially ambiguous inhabitants to be castigated as “outlaws.” This, in turn, opened up space for the federal marshal apparatus—which was primarily white—to expand its role as the purveyors of local law and order in a manner that had never been possible in the South.
Perspectives on Politics, 2020
World War II, failing to mention that in many cases the people affected were neither “enemies” no... more World War II, failing to mention that in many cases the people affected were neither “enemies” nor “aliens.” Very few of those surveilled through those programs proved to be disloyal to the United States. Two-thirds of the 117,000 people held in camps in the early 1940s on the basis of Japanese ancestry were in fact US citizens. Krajewska refers briefly to this episode but does not mention the fact that thousands of those interned renounced their US citizenship, often under duress, nor that US citizenship was later restored in most cases (Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America, 2014). Other episodes that fit within the author’s concept of identity policing are neglected. For instance, there is no discussion of the “bracero” program arranged by the US and Mexican governments to bring farm laborers for temporary work on non-negotiable contracts to the US Southwest from the 1940s to the 1960s, in a program administered by the Department of Labor and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). In that case, the INS provided permits and ID cards to 4.6million workers, deported many others, and even aided some US employers in moving their workers from illegal to legal status—an ambivalent pattern of behavior that set the mold for the marginal economic and racial position of many Mexican Americans in later years. Nor does Krajewska discuss the periodic forced repatriation of migrant workers—often along with their US-born children—whose identity as Americans may be negated by this expulsion. In short, Krajewska misses some crucial episodes of identity policing and has little to say about the fact that identity policing projects in the United States tend to focus on racialized minorities. A clearer theoretical lens might have helped Krajewska see the relevance of these acts of identification and misidentification (for a more theoretical account of the history of the passport as a tool of statebuilding, see John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State, 2000). Although not so comprehensive as claimed, this book will nevertheless be of value to students and scholars who already have the historical and theoretical background to fill in the gaps left by Krajewska. For instance, the book provides a detailed account of the REAL ID Act, passed in 2005 and now in the final stages of implementation, through which the federal government is pushing states to harmonize the security features of driver’s licenses and to create state-level databases that can be searched by other states and federal agencies. Under this act, states must keep copies of documents used to corroborate identity, and driver’s licenses must use photos that meet biometric standards for identification, although the cards and databases do not include fingerprints or retinal scans (p. 168). Krawjewska makes a convincing case that US policy makers will continue to debate identity policing, especially in response to shocks such as war or terrorism, while acknowledging that attempting to use the technologies of identity policing to predict which individuals are prone to violence may well cause privacy problems without yielding much security benefit. Krajewska also argues that the use of biometric data will be increasingly relevant. To this I would add that scholars who seek to build on Krajewska’s research should also study government access to the troves of data collected by information technology companies on our phone movements and our online habits. Surely, the concept of identity policing will only become more relevant as data accumulate and computing power grows.
International Interactions, 2019
Free trade has gradually shifted the burden of military service onto the American South. While tr... more Free trade has gradually shifted the burden of military service onto the American South. While trade shocks generally lead to local increases in US Army enlistment, there are two different regional dynamics that concentrate this effect in the South. First, trade-related job losses are disproportionately concentrated in this region, where manufacturing jobs gradually migrated during the second half of the twentieth century. Second, the South's "military tradition," a relatively youthful population, and weak labor unions, combine to translate trade shocks into larger spikes in Army enlistment than the rest of the country. This paper uses county-level data from 1996-2010 to demonstrate the importance of meso-level, regional factors for understanding the location of trade shocks, as well as how communities adjust to such economic dislocations. We find that trade-related job losses account for roughly 7% of the South's over-representation in the Army during our period of study.
Journal of Borderlands Studies, 2019
This article argues that the mismatch between the legal fictions of the boundaries separating the... more This article argues that the mismatch between the legal fictions of the boundaries separating the states of late nineteenth century North America and the reality of local trans-border life helped drive the militarization of borderlands policing. The form this militarization took, in turn, reflected administrative state development; that is, whether they were relatively unitary and centralized, like Canada, or whether they were marked by fragmentation and local autonomy, like Mexico and the US. I use the example of state gendarmeriesmounted, armed policing units combining military and law enforcement functionsto explore this claim.
Perspectives on Politics, 2018
What explains the emergence of organized private enforcement in the United States? We study the f... more What explains the emergence of organized private enforcement in the United States? We study the formation of vigilance committees—that is, coercive groups organized in a manner not officially sanctioned by state law and with the purpose of establishing legal and moral claims. We argue that these committees were primarily intended to help create civic political identities in contexts of social ambiguity and institutional instability, what we call social frontiers. Relying on quantitative and qualitative analysis, we find that these committees were more likely to form in contexts where levels of ethno-nationalist heterogeneity were high and where political institutions had recently changed. Contrary to common wisdom, vigilance committees were much more than functionalist alternatives to an absent state, or local orders established by bargaining, or responses to social or economic conflict. They constituted flexible instruments to counteract environments characterized by social and pol...
The Six-Shooter State, 2018
The Injustice Never Leaves You, 2020
Law & Social Inquiry, 2017
The coevolution of private detective agencies and municipal police bureaucracies in mid-nineteent... more The coevolution of private detective agencies and municipal police bureaucracies in mid-nineteenth-century Chicago arose from the breakdown of an older system in which the provision of law enforcement was delegated to local communities. The growth of anonymity and the presence of strangers in a city undergoing massive changes in transportation undermined this delegative system and created the perception of new public security threats. These threats were compounded by the mobilization of ethnicity in partisan politics. To address these new concerns, political and economic elites did not innovate, but turned to traditional practices like special deputization. The use of deputization allowed some law officers to sell their services as entrepreneurs to private firms, while also paving the way for a new bureaucratic police department. Networks of security providers locked in this transformation and made public and private policing alike a permanent feature of the city's institutional...
Law, Culture and the Humanities, 2017
Drawing inspiration from Lewis Mumford’s classic analysis of the “technics” of political organiza... more Drawing inspiration from Lewis Mumford’s classic analysis of the “technics” of political organization, this article explores ways in which anti-government militias and like-minded groups frame the civic role of dissent in technological terms. For militia activists, guns are tangible artifacts that uniquely align existing social practices with an important historical tradition, enhance agency, and provide interpretive finality, while militias serve to help embed that protection and defense with participation in an organic, empowering community. To members, these participatory technics provide a seemingly democratic counter to the authoritarian logic of the federal government.
Journal of Policy History, 2017
Studies in American Political Development, 2014
How are new forms of violence expertise organized and exploited? Most scholars view this as prima... more How are new forms of violence expertise organized and exploited? Most scholars view this as primarily a question of state-building; that is, violence experts use their skills in an attempt to regulate economic transactions or to extract and redistribute resources via protection rents either for themselves or at the behest of political elites. In an alternative view, this article demonstrates that historical gunfighters active in the late 19th-century American Southwest were actually market actors—the possessors of valuable skills cultivated through participation in the Civil War and diffused through gunfighting and reputation building in key marketentrepôts. Neither solely state-builders nor state-resisters, as they have traditionally been interpreted, gunfighters composed a professional class that emerged in the 1870s and 1880s and who moved frequently between wage-paying jobs, seizing economic opportunities on both sides of the law and often serving at the behest of powerful econo...