Traveling Dissent: Activists, Borders, and the U.S. National Security State

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2019During the cold war, U.S. officials developed an expansive national security state that linked socialist, communist, and decolonizing states with “domestic,” and often racialized, left-wing political movements. Attending to how the state after 1945 attempted to manage the unprecedented circulation of bodies, commodities, and ideas through technological advancements, particularly in air travel, I demonstrate how “internal” and “foreign” security were mutually constituted projects. As travel became an important instrument of U.S. foreign policy, officials viewed travel by anti-war and anti-racist activists, particularly to non-capitalist countries, as threatening to U.S. security and an imagined community of global capitalism. The construction of these activists’ travels as subversive, I contend, informed the development of laws and surveillance technologies aimed at both disrupting transnational social movements and strengthening the nation-state’s borders when distinctions between the “foreign” and the “domestic” appeared to quickly erode. The free movement of U.S. citizens deemed acceptable to the U.S. state was largely premised on procedures intended to demobilize those considered threatening and outside the political community. Mechanisms of travel control helped to constitute and reconsolidate global racial hierarchies and U.S. empire through the construction of particular mobilities as racialized and subversive, and states as threatening and illegitimate due to their opposition to U.S. capitalism. By situating the history of post-1945 transnational, leftist social movements in the context of the national security state’s development, I demonstrate that these struggles over mobility were crucial sites in which officials, activists, and the larger public debated the boundaries of state power, the global role of the U.S., and the meanings of security, a debate which continues to define our contemporary political moment. This project analyzes different methods by which the state attempted to control travel outside of the U.S., including passports, geographic travel restrictions, and surveillance at airports and other mechanisms that constituted a cold war mobility regime. I explore how travel to the Soviet Union and China in the 1950s, Cuba in the 1960s, and a spate of hijackings to Cuba in the late 1960s and early 1970s prompted the development of new mechanisms to control exit and international mobility. By focusing on the conflict between transnational activists and the state over mobility, including attempts by activists to circumvent restrictions on their movement, I demonstrate how institutions largely not considered as part of the national security state, such as the Passport Office and the Bureau of Security and Consular Affairs, were crucial in shaping a U.S.-led international system and policing the country’s borders. In sum, “Traveling Dissent” demonstrates how transnational social movements shaped and challenged the national security state and how a mobile public came to be understood as a threat to the state requiring constant surveillance