Jeremy Kuzmarov’s Modernizing Repression sits at a fascinating link in the scholarship on the history of the application of power overseas by the United States. There remains a vast bulk of scholarship about customary topics of U.S. foreign relations, such as military intervention and occupation, diplomatic negotiations, and bilateral and multilateral treaties. The volume of scholarship on less traditional topics, whether of the effects of cultural exchange, development aid, and transnational organizations and movements develops in parallel each year, albeit at a much slower rate. However, there remains a split in the field, categorized by the terminology of ‘‘hard’’ and ‘‘soft’’ power. The application of soft power, according to Kuzmarov, …show more content…
Advocating separation fromo both soft and hard powers. He argues that the aggressive policing actions that so dominated the twentieth century are an antithesis to long lasting peace. This is especially true in the current Information Age. The brutal and swift oppression of dissent is not as effective when the evidence of the dissent cannot be destroyed. The advent of the internet and social media has drastically debilitated the use of soft powers. The events of the Arab Spring from several years ago and the current events in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria are also evidence of this reality. Kuzmarov summarizes that in order to have long lasting policing effects, the public trust must not be broken. This takes away the use of hard power in creating a stable …show more content…
Kuzmarov reconnoiters one of the ways U.S. policymakers claimed they supported nation building in places with which the United States had an imperial relationship: training, developing, and financially supporting national police forces. Nation building and modernization undertakings are frequently careful exercises of soft power, but national police, while not a traditional topic for diplomatic history, clearly possesses the hard power of coercion. Kuzmarov finds important continuities over the period from 1898 to the present in the rationale U.S. officials gave for supporting the creation of a powerful national police in each of the countries as well as in the method to training and the readiness to expense commitment to the legal process and prisoner rights if considered necessary to maintain order. In almost every case, the national police trained and often funded by the United States violated standards of justice, especially for political radicals and ethnic minorities, often resulting in torture, unjust imprisonment, abysmal conditions in prisons, and complicity of police in repression of political dissent. His consideration to these permanencies does much to explain the distressed history of both democracy in, and U.S. relations with, these