by Joy James
Pluto Press
8/20/2025, paperback
SKU: 9780745351544
As we step into an era of rising fascism and normalized genocide, Confronting Counterinsurgency is an invaluable contribution to the fightback.
Joy James brings together the voices of frontline activists, artists, and organizers from movements against militarism and state violence in the USA, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Palestine, Brazil, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and within prison walls. The book examines the role of institutions, universities and nonprofit organizations in the suppression of radical movements. Analyzing historical and contemporary colonialism, slavery, and militarized policing--such as Cop Cities, ICE, and the redesigned School of Americas--Confronting Counterinsurgency is a crucial tool for radicalizing and uniting our movements to fight for a better world.
Reviews:
"Makes plain the relations between the U.S. as a militarized carceral police state, the imprisonment of our resistance, and the genocidal wars our technocracy imparts to the world in Gaza and beyond. This is a work of radical care and love, a study guide for the urgency of the moment where we must fight, to live, and to struggle." --Dian Million, author of Therapeutic Nations, Healing in an Age of Indigenous Human Rights
"Spanning geographies and different approaches to organizing, these essays consistently demonstrate that the struggle for abolition is a global Black struggle. Abolition breaches the gates of reformist logics of all sorts to articulate a radical account of community-making and to offer us a different account of what living better collectively together can be." --Rinaldo Walcott, author of On Property: Policing, Prisons and the Call for Abolition
"A powerful collection that reminds us that the progress we build toward liberation must be constantly defended. Rooted in a radical sense of love, care, and self critique, this collection brings together necessary conversations and analyses surrounding our movements." --Momodou Taal, The Malcolm Effect Podcast
About the Author:
Joy James is a political philosopher who works with organizers. Her books include In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love; New Bones Abolition: Captive Maternal Agency and the (After)Life of Erica Garner; and Contextualizing Angela Davis: The Agency and Identity of an Icon. Her edited volumes with Pluto include Beyond Cop Cities: Dismantling State and Corporate-Funded Armies and Prisons and ENGAGE: Indigenous, Black, Afro-Indigenous Futures.
