I am Associate Professor of History and the Director of the Chloe Center for the Critical Study of Racism, Immigration, and Colonialism. I am the author of Blue Power: How Police Organized to Protect and Serve Themselves, to be published by Basic Books in April 2026. My first book was Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing (University of California Press, 2019). At Hopkins, I teach courses on police and prisons, war and empire, Black social movements, and social theory. In 2023, I was awarded the Johns Hopkins Alumni Association Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award by the Krieger School of Arts & Sciences. I am also affiliated with the Department of Sociology, Center for Africana Studies, and Arrighi Center for Global Studies.

My second monograph is Blue Power: How Police Organized to Protect and Serve Themselves, to be published by Basic Books in April 2026.

In America today, police enjoy unmatched power. On the streets, officers employ violence at their own discretion. Behind closed doors, they are even more powerful. In city halls, police strong-arm local leaders and nullify attempts at public oversight. And in state legislatures and Washington, DC, police lobbyists and union leaders zealously uphold a bipartisan consensus against even mild reform. Yet as recently as fifty years ago, police still served at the pleasure of democratically elected politicians, not the other way around. In Blue Power, Stuart Schrader narrates the rise of a bottom-up movement of rank-and-file officers who lifted policing above the law.

Organizers launched their campaign in the 1960s, courting a public backlash to urban uprisings and civil rights. City by city, county by county, they formed unions and other organizations and won control over working conditions, impunity from oversight, and insulation from lean budgets. By the 2000s, this movement had triumphed nationally, shoring up the power of the police to overrule the public interest in the name of law and order.

Through deep archival detective work, Blue Power reveals how police forced American democracy to back the blue.

My first monograph is Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing (University of California Press, Fall 2019). It examines the relationship between US projections of power overseas and the rise of the carceral state at home. Badges Without Borders shows that during the Cold War the United States used policing experts to modernize police in the developing world, for the purpose of preventing revolution. These experts, in turn, shaped the domestic response to Black insurgency during the 1960s, creating expansive new bureaucracies of criminal justice and aggressive policing techniques and technologies. This book demonstrates that overseas state-building in the domain of security has profound and negative effects on democracy at home.

Fall 2024

230.659 Theories of History (graduate)
362.115 Introduction to Police and Prisons (undergraduate)

Previous Courses

362.335 Unlocking Knowledge: Theorizing Prison from the Inside
362.325 Humanities Research Lab: Military-Industrial Complex in the DMV
362.315 Black Against Empire
362.314 Police and Prisons in Comparative Perspective
230.213 Social Theory
230.366 Black Social Thought and Social Movements

Book:

Schrader, Stuart. 2026. Blue Power: How Police Organized to Protect and Serve Themselves (Basic Books)

Schrader, Stuart. 2019. Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing (Oakland: University of California Press)

Articles:

Schrader, Stuart. 2022. “Global Counterinsurgency and the Police-Military Continuum: Introduction to the Special Issue” Small Wars & Insurgencies 33.4-5: 553-580.

Schrader, Stuart. 2021. “Cops at War: How World War II Transformed U.S. Policing” Modern American History 4.2: 159-179.

Schrader, Stuart. 2020. “More Than Cosmetic Changes The Challenges of Experiments with Police Demilitarization in the 1960s and 1970s” The Journal of Urban History 46.5: 1002–1025.

Schrader, Stuart. 2019. “To Protect and Serve Themselves: Police in U.S. Politics since the 1960s” Public Culture 31.3: 601-623.

Schrader, Stuart. 2016. “To Secure the Global Great Society Participation in Pacification” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism and Development 7.2: 225-253.

Roy, Ananya, Stuart Schrader, Emma Shaw Crane. 2015. “‘The Anti-Poverty Hoax’ Development, Pacification, and the Making of Community in the Global 1960s” Cities: The International Journal of Urban Policy and Planning 44: 139-145.

Chapters:

McQuade, Brendan and Stuart Schrader. 2023. “Avoiding the Security Trap: The Contributions of Terence Hopkins and World-Systems as Methodology for Critical Police Studies” in World-Systems Analysis at a Critical Juncture, Corey R. Payne, Roberto Patricio Korzeniewicz, and Beverly J. Silver, eds. (Routledge).

Schrader, Stuart. 2019. “A Carceral Empire: Placing US Prisons and Policing in the World” in Shaped by the State: Toward a New Political History of the Twentieth Century, Brent Cebul, Lily Geismer, Mason B. Williams, eds. (University of Chicago Press).

Roy, Ananya, Stuart Schrader, Emma Shaw Crane. 2015. “Gray Areas: The War on Poverty at Home and Abroad” in Territories of Poverty (University of Georgia Press).

Schrader, Stuart. 2012. “Policing Political Protest: Paradoxes of the Age of Austerity” in Is This What Democracy Looks Like? (Social Text: Periscope).

Stuart Schrader, “Cages Without Borders” Inquest, November 30, 2023
Stuart Schrader, “What We Own This City Gets Wrong about Policing,” Boston Review, June 27, 2022
NDB Connolly and Stuart Schrader, “Freedom Education” Public Books, October 4, 2021
Stuart Schrader, “The Lies Cops Tell and the Lies We Tell About Cops” The New Republic, May 27, 2021
Stuart Schrader, “Defund the Global Policeman” n+1 138 (Fall 2020)
“Cops and Counterinsurgency” The Dig, July 24, 2020
Stuart Schrader, “Trump Has Brought America’s Dirty Wars Home” The New Republic, July 21, 2020
“Here Are the 96 U.S. Cities Where Protesters Were Tear-Gassed” The New York Times, June 16, 2020
Stuart Schrader, “When Police Treat Protesters Like Insurgents, Sending in Troops Seems Logical” The Washington Post, June 5, 2020
“The Rebellion in Defense of Black Lives Is Rooted in U.S. History. So, Too, Is Trump’s Authoritarian Rule.” The Intercept, June 3, 2020
Stuart Schrader, “The Murderous Legacy of Cold War Anticommunism” Boston Review, May 19, 2020
Stuart Schrader, “Harm of the Law” Artforum May-June 2020
“Roots of Imperial Policing” Black Agenda Radio (audio interview), January 21, 2020
“Badges Without Borders” New Books Network (audio interview), November 5, 2019
Osita Nwavenu and Stuart Schrader in conversation, C-Span Book TV (video), October 17, 2019
“Accurate Census Count Critical for Baltimore Kids” Baltimore Sun, September 5, 2019
“Shaped By The State,” C-Span, April 23, 2019
Stuart Schrader, “Imperialism After Empire” Boston Review, March 29, 2019
“How Tear Gas Became a Favorite Weapon of U.S. Border Patrol, Despite Being Banned In Warfare”​ Democracy Now!, November 28, 2018
Stuart Schrader, “The Long Counterrevolution: United States-Latin America Security Cooperation” SSRC Items, September 18, 2018
Quinn Slobodian and Stuart Schrader, “The White Man, Unburdened: How Charles Murray Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Racism” The Baffler July-August 2018