In February 1966, Senator Robert Byrd penned an article for the Police Chief, the monthly magazine of the International Association of Chiefs of Police. A conservative Democrat from West Virginia, notorious for his staunch opposition to the Civil Rights Movement, Byrd had no experience whatsoever as a cop. But he took this chance to engage the police community during a period of apparent national and international crisis. In Vietnam, the US military was failing in its campaign against the communist-led insurgency. In the United States, authorities were bracing for another summer of black rebellions in US cities.

Fearing revolt at home and abroad, Byrd cast his sympathies with those whose job it was to maintain order: cops and soldiers. As he put it, police officers in US cities “have a great deal of sympathy with the troops in Vietnam because they fight a similar type of dirty war in which the enemy is forever striking from the shadows. The police know guerrilla warfare because they fight it day in and day out with criminals on American streets.” In the minds of Byrd and others, the line between different arenas and modes of state power vanished. Policing meant counterinsurgency. Counterinsurgency meant policing.

Stuart Schrader’s Badges Without Borders explains how and why policing and counterinsurgency morphed into each other. Focused on the peak years of the Cold War, roughly the 1950s through the early 1970s, his analysis ranges across the globe, tracing the complex connections that linked US crime-fighters to their allies abroad. Some were police chiefs or policymakers, others military officials or academics. Working across institutional divides and international borders, they honed a model of policing that sought, above all, to maintain order.