This Enemy Institution: (Black) Study and the Insurrection Imperative - Incite at Columbia University

Please join us for a guided discussion with pre-circulated readings led by Dr. Dylan Rodriguez on counterinsurgency.

This Enemy Institution is a guided discussion that explores how deep intellectual study can initiate insurrection against counterinsurgency in the 21st century.

When the regimes of civil/human rights, liberal freedom, (social) justice, and “humanity” ostensibly “fail,” the archive of Civilizational warfare expands. This is happening in real-time: there is an acceleration of counterinsurgency projects, formed in a contentious scramble across state and extra-state venues, incorporating universities, humanitarian and philanthropic organizations, and capitalized social justice movements. The deadly inadequacies and alleged institutional betrayals of rights/freedom/justice/humanitarian (and related) regimes thus indicate neither political failure nor systemic dysfunction—appraisals that indicate a reformist imperative—but instead reveal the expansion of a 21st century Counterinsurgency Machine. Logics of neutralization, extermination, discipline, and empowerment shape this ensemble, which targets anti-Civilizational streams of liberationist activity and thriving. To analyze and confront this machine is to coordinate, study, and strategically theorize an insurrection imperative.

Readings for the guided discussion will be circulated by email to event registrants.

Afterwards, join us for cookies, snacks, and refreshments in the church garden.

This Enemy Institution is the first event in the Center for the Study of Social Difference’s yearlong program Countering the Carceral State, which explores interconnections between the crises of disciplinary enforcement central to American power at home and abroad.

Dylan Rodríguez is a parent, teacher, scholar, organizer and collaborator. He is employed as a Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Riverside where he has worked since 2001. Dylan was elected President of the American Studies Association in 2020-2021 and in 2020 was named to the inaugural class of Freedom Scholars. Since 2021, he has served as Co-Director of the Center for Ideas and Society, where he created the Decolonizing Humanism(?) programming stream. Since the late-1990s, Dylan has participated as a founding member of organizations like Critical Resistance, Abolition Collective, Critical Ethnic Studies Association, Cops Off Campus, Scholars for Social Justice, and the UCR Department of Black Study, among others. His most recent book is White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logic of Racial Genocide (Fordham University Press, 2021), which won the 2022 Frantz Fanon Book Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association.

Reading List (links will be provided via email):

Robert L. Allen, “Personal Reflections on the Road to Black Awakening in Capitalist America,” p. 118-122. (5 pages)

Dylan Rodríguez, Forced Passages, Chapter 1, “Domestic War Zones and the Extremities of Power: Conceptualizing the U.S. Prison Regime,” p. 39-74. (35 pages)

Dylan Rodríguez, “On University Abolition,” pp. 367-374. (8 pages)

United States Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Publication 3-24: Counterinsurgency (2018), “Executive Summary,” p. Ix-xxi. (12 pages)

The Heritage Foundation, Mandate for Leadership, 2025: The Conservative Promise, (a.k.a. “Project 2025”), 2023:

- Kevin D. Roberts, “Foreword: A Promise to America,” p. 29-46;

- “Section One: Taking the Reins of Government,” introduction, p. 47-49;

- Lindsey M. Burke, “Ch. 11, Department of Education,” “Mission” and “Overview,” (25 pages)