After the Bush Administration announced pre-emptive action as a central component of the United States’ security strategy, many policy experts and political scientists characterized pre-emption as an innovation and perhaps an idiosyncrasy in neoconservative geopolitical strategy after September 11. However, the expansion of racial profiling and suppression of activist dissent, as well as widespread preventative detention and deportation of immigrants suggest that this policy has deeper roots, and its effects, both domestic and international, will likely endure for many years to come. This volume is dedicated to gathering evidence to explore the origins, extent, and duration of pre-emptive strategies of power and their impact on various aspects of social and political life. In doing so, we seek to examine the hypothesis that pre-emption is a long-standing, unspoken, part of US politics and culture that has taken on new significance after being sanctioned as official policy following the attacks of 2001.

We invite submissions that document recent enactments of pre-emptive policy; that track the evolution of contemporary pre-emption across a longer history; and that explore how pre-emptive logic reverberates and is represented in everyday life. Any of these can be applied not only to the United States, but also to related incidents throughout the globe. The collection is intended to serve as a case-book of evidence surveying and assessing various outcomes of pre-emption not considered in existing studies, accessible both to academics and activist-organizers working to respond to such effects.

Possible contributions include, but are not limited to, the following:

*Immigrant detentions
*Financial practices
*Military and policing strategies
*Pre-emption in popular culture
*War, nation-formation, and empire-building
*Religious thinking and pre-emption
*Progressive/Left uses of pre-emption
*Legal basis and/or restraints for pre-emption

If you are interested in contributing to this project, please respond by Friday, January 6, 2006 with a brief (approximately 500 words) abstract of your proposed contribution, accompanied by a short biography. Abstracts and biographies should be sent electronically to the editors, care of Dawn Peterson, at dep207@nyu.edu. E-mail Microsoft Word attachments only, please.

andré carrington, Andrew Cornell, Miles Grier, Dawn Peterson (Editors)
American Studies Program,
Department of Social and Cultural Analysis
New York University