This year’s International Students For Liberty Conference (ISFLC) features some big names, like former Congressman Ron Paul and Fox News’s Andrew Napolitano. But there’s more to the conference than big name political figures. This year’s ISFLC also features top notch academics, international activists, exciting organizations, scintillating socials, and plenty of other hidden treasures.
One of the best ISFLC speakers you may not have heard of is Abigail R. Hall. She is a a Research Fellow at The Independent Institute, the JIN Fellow in Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, the Thomas W. Smith Fellow with the Institute for Humane Studies, a Weaver Family Fellow, and a graduating Ph.D. student at George Mason University. She is also an impressive up-and-coming economist who has published fascinating research on the political economy of the US government’s militarism at home and abroad.
One fascinating paper by Hall concerns how military interventions abroad enable tyranny at home. As Hall and her co-author Chris Coyne argue, “Coercive government actions that target another country often act like a boomerang, turning around and knocking down freedoms and liberties in the ‘throwing’ nation.” They call this the “boomerang effect.”
Hall and Coyne identify “four related channels through which advancements in state-produced social control abroad may boomerang back to the intervening country.” First, foreign interventions tend to enable domestic centralization of power. Military mobilization and other foreign interventions are carried out by the national government rather than state and local governments, and thus shift power towards the centralized state. Second, foreign interventions tend to influence the human capital of those who carry out the intervention. Individuals gain skills and knowledge through their work. Coercive foreign intervention requires social control to induce compliance from the foreign population. Furthermore, governments are typically less constrained in their operations abroad than their domestic operations. This allows those involved in foreign interventions to experiment with new forms of social control. They then learn the skills associated with these new technique for social control. In other words, “the associated techniques and skills become, whether knowingly or unknowingly, part of the human capital of those who are involved in the intervention, making them specialists in supplying state-produced social control.”
This leads to the third channel, wherein “The innovators and implementers involved in coercive foreign interventions—both civilians and members of the military—eventually reallocate their human capital to other administrative activities.” These innovators may become active in the domestic government or in private military, defense, and security companies. In their new domestic jobs, they begin to use the skills and innovations in social control that they learned abroad. As a result, “the distinction between the state-produced social control used abroad and state-produced social control used domestically becomes blurred.”
The fourth channel Hall and Coyne identify involves physical capital developed for the coercive foreign intervention. Governments often develop technological innovations to facilitate social control throughout an intervention. These innovations in technologies of social control, such as new weapons or surveillance techniques, may eventually be employed domestically as well. One contemporary example is the use of drones, which Hall has done impressive research on.
One example of the boomerang effect that Hall and Coyne examine is the militarization of American police. In particular, they discuss the rise of paramilitary SWAT teams and strike forces. They note that the first SWAT team was created by the LAPD, specifically by LAPD chief Daryl Gates and former marine John Nelson. During the Vietnam War, John Nelson served in a Force Recon team, a small unit that initiated combat far more frequently than other marine forces. Nelson based his proposal for the SWAT team on the Recon team. Daryl Gates had likewise served in a foreign intervention, in the Pacific theater in WWII. Gates and Nelson both developed their human capital in coercive foreign interventions, then reallocated this human capital to domestic policing, where they created the SWAT team.
Abby Hall’s talk at ISFLC will discuss police militarization. If you are interested in police militarization, civil liberties, state violence, or how the economic way of thinking can help us understand these issues, you won’t want to miss this.