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This year opened with what writer M. Gessen described as the “state terror” phase of Trump’s presidency. Witnessing this acceleration in the federal government’s arbitrary use of violence, I wanted to write something comforting, inspiring, and anthropologically informed. Words failed me.
Instead, I reached out to law and human rights scholars Jennifer Burrell, Amelia Frank-Vitale, and Richard Wilson. Given their expertise, I asked them if they could write something to share with our membership. Richard responded that words were failing him, too. His comment reminded me that right now language may fail us, but that is okay. We should embrace the value of silence as we try to make sense of the senseless.
Growing up black in the 1960s and 1970s, I was taught to navigate arbitrary state power by my parents. One had to determine what battles were worth fighting and when to walk away. More often than not, we kept our powder dry, waiting for a time when our actions might have the greatest impact. Literature and the arts helped us develop our ethical and emotional armor while theory brought to light patterns that helped us prioritize and strategize. Because the future is shaped by our ethical approach to change in the present, we also never wavered in our pacifism or in our commitment to the humanization of all people including those who hated us.
Remembering that, I asked not for a statement but for ideas. I wanted to know how we manage the unmanageable while laying the foundation for a better future.
Carolyn Rouse: What texts or theorists do you think might help people understand this new state terror?
Richard Wilson: The anthropological literature of the last several decades explains how we got here. Since the 1980s, anthropologists have been writing about the deleterious effects of neoliberalism and the unchecked rise of economic inequality and the billionaire class (David Harvey, Angelique Haugerud). They have documented torture and the long-standing militarization of policing in Black communities (Laurence Ralph, Christen Smith). They have analyzed the discursive techniques of authoritarianism and far-right nationalism (Douglas Holmes, Katherine Verdery). The state terror we are all seeing on social media is appalling, shocking, and disorienting, but it emerges from a comprehensible history and context. Of course, this does not mean that it is inevitable or can’t be opposed; agency still matters.
Amelia Frank-Vitale: I concur with Richard’s assessment and recommendations. I would just add that one aspect of what we see happening right now is the violence of our border regime being turned on cities far from the border and people who happen to be US citizens. As such, I also think reading the work of anthropologists and others who have been theorizing the border and the violence employed to maintain it can help us understand what’s happening in Minneapolis, Portland, Chicago, Maine, and elsewhere. The work of Peter Andreas, Jason De León, Jeremy Slack, Gabriella Sánchez, Harsha Walia, and Ieva Jusionyte comes to mind, just to get us started. I would also encourage everyone to dive into the work that has explored our long history of anti-immigrant movements and policies, like Kelly Lytle Hernandez, Adam Goodman, and Anna O. Law’s about-to-be-released book, Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship: African Americans, Native Americans, and Immigrants, scheduled for release by Oxford University Press in March 2026. So often, those of us working in contexts of migration have sounded the alarm—immigrants are legally and discursively rendered “outside of,” but the tactics used against migrants will eventually be turned on non-immigrant others as well.
Jennifer Burrell: Adding to the aforementioned recommendations, now is a good time to turn to the robust literature on fear, and on violence more generally. Authors like Benjamin, Arendt, and Gramsci encourage us to think about the distinctions between power and violence as well as the rise of authoritarianism. Fanon directs our attention to the dehumanization that occurs in ongoing situations of violence. I think of Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois’s concept of the continuum of violence to help us link seemingly disparate moments to overarching and ongoing campaigns of terror and increasing militarization. The unleashing of ICE and the terror sown in Minneapolis, Portland, Chicago, Los Angeles, and the many sites now under siege by the federal government has produced what Linda Green calls fear as a way of life for so many currently in the US. Green utilized this concept of what it means to live with fear in everyday life to understand the ways in which Mayan widows navigated post-genocidal lives in paramilitarized communities in Guatemala. It allows us to grasp the spaces where agency still thrives, and to more effectively support and advocate for those who are under attack.
Carolyn Rouse: Are there examples, from your work or the work of others, of how this might end? If not, do you have any suggestions for how we might restore our democracy?
Richard Wilson: It will get worse before it gets better, and I don’t know when it ends, but I take inspiration from the many brave anthropologists who kept working despite conditions of widespread political violence in Latin America (Teresa Caldeira, Rodolfo Stavenhagen) and apartheid South Africa (Archie Mafeje, Mamphela Ramphele). Some, like David Webster and Myrna Mack, paid with their lives. As for how it ends, there are historical precedents; apartheid ended in South Africa not because of the military power of the liberation movement, but because of the strength of the political organizing in civil society. White supremacy ended because of union organizing, strikes, boycotts of companies, and mass civil unrest that made the country ungovernable. Looking ahead, accountability for the state agents terrorizing immigrant communities and committing executions on the streets of America is essential. Anthropologists have studied different forms of accountability, memorialization, and truth-telling (Kimberly Theidon, Richard Wilson) and noted that when formal mechanisms of accountability fail, violence that was previously suppressed or denied returns, circulates, and intensifies within the social body (John Borneman).
Amelia Frank-Vitale: Here I’m going to draw from my earlier career as an organizer and say that we don’t know how it will end, but what we do know is that we have to do all the things to contest what is happening, from writing and teaching, to voting against this, to going into the streets, and beyond. One project I’m currently involved in turns our ethnographic toolkit toward immigration courts. Working with a network of colleagues and students, we are documenting how due process protections for people in removal proceedings are being systematically eroded and how this erosion is accompanied by increasing levels of harm and violence. In part, this is to witness. It is also to gather evidence in the hopes that there will be future mechanisms of accountability and repair.
Jennifer Burrell: So often, this form of violence doesn’t “end” so much as it takes different forms, which is something that those of us who work on war and political conflict face repeatedly in our work. Many of our colleagues have documented, witnessed, and taken part in social movements that shift possibilities in the world. I think of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, or the collectives of family members of the disappeared in Mexico who continue to search for and find out what happened to their loved ones. As Jessica Greenberg reminds us in her recent book (2024), social movements are cyclical; sometimes, their work seems invisible and then they rise up. Personally, I need hope these days. I’ve been (re)turning to the work of critical scholars like Robin Maynard and Leanne Simpson, Saidiya Hartman, Kamari Clarke, Fred Moten, and Irma Alicia Velásquez Nimatuj. In the face of long-term violence carried out against Indigenous peoples and in the Black Atlantic, they urge us to think differently, to tell stories or revisit our anthropological ancestors (Clarke, forthcoming 2026) in new ways, to reimagine community and to assert an ethics of mutual respect, deep listening, and genuine care. It seems unlikely, from our current vantage point, that we will return to democracy as we once knew it in the US. The interventions by these scholars provide us with desperately needed possibilities for moving forward.
Carolyn Rouse: What organizations do you think are having the most impact on the ground that we should be aware of?
Richard Wilson: There are many organizations doing excellent work to protect our democratic freedoms, including the ACLU, Equal Justice Initiative, Fair Fight, and the NAACP. The AAA has a role in promoting scholarship and teaching that provides an accurate account of what is happening so as to confront the lies and gaslighting of this corrupt and mendacious ancièn regime. However, what is remarkable about the protests against ICE in Minneapolis is that they have been coordinated by ordinary people. Impromptu food kitchens have been set up to feed the families of migrants, and teachers have taken it upon themselves to drive migrant children to school. The giant protests and general strike in Minneapolis on Friday, January 23, 2026, were not organized by a single group but by a coalition of unions, faith leaders, community organizations, and immigrant‑rights activists. I sense that the social movements emerging against authoritarianism will be grassroots and not have any clear leadership, much like Black Lives Matter in 2020. This grassroots coalition model of autonomous and local organizing for protest has many advantages and may ultimately have the most impact. Ultimately, whether democracy can be restored comes down not to the formal political process, but whether ordinary Americans are going to get out on the streets and reject state terror and autocracy. The next few months are crucial.
Amelia Frank-Vitale: The legal fight is important. Kim Lane Scheppele, scholar of authoritarianism, argues that the one thing we have to do is slow down the process of institutional capture. The lawsuits by the ACLU and the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies, among others, are crucial to this. At the same time, echoing Richard, I think the grassroots coming together of community is where the heart of the challenge lies. Here, people are not only gumming up the works of the detention and deportation machine but also demonstrating that masses of people are neither in favor nor agnostic about this kind of violent, militarized approach to so-called immigration enforcement. I’ve seen lots of calls to support mutual aid groups in Minneapolis— the people handing out whistles and delivering groceries and diapers to immigrant families—and I’d encourage all of us to do that and to connect with our local versions of these ad hoc organizations, contribute time and resources and presence, and cultivate that leaderless community network that enables resistance when ICE descends.
Jennifer Burrell: Amelia and Richard have heralded the rich potential in this moment. I share this, particularly the sense that the future lies in coalition-building between national-level organizations, their local counterparts, and rising social movements. We must connect with our neighbors and communities! A few more organizations doing excellent work and building these connections are the Southern Poverty Law Center, No Kings, Critical Resistance, and Indivisible. Some of them are at the forefront of locally organized protests that have attracted millions of participants, channeling anger, frustration, and fear to larger movements where we find our power in numbers, together as ordinary people rising up for change. I also want to call out entities like Bellingcat and the New York Times Digital Investigations team who are at the forefront of harnessing geospatial imagery and other technologies to provide reliable and fact-based coverage to fight back against deep fakes and fake news.