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From coast to coast, groups of people are springing up to protect members of their communities as Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agents threaten them with violent enforcement.

In Portland, Oregon, community volunteers have delivered food boxes to migrant families scared to leave their homes. In Portland, Maine, nearly a thousand people turned out for a virtual American Civil Liberties Union “Know Your Rights” training event. And in Minneapolis and St. Paul, volunteers have formed networks to give warning with whistles and phone apps when ICE is prowling the streets.

As someone who for two decades has studied nonviolent movements in war zones, I see many parallels between these movements abroad and those that have been organized recently across the U.S. The communities I have studied – from Colombia to the Philippines to Syria – teach lessons about surviving in the midst of danger that Americans have been discovering instinctively over the past year.

These experiences show that protection of their neighbors is possible. Violence can bring feelings of fear, isolation and powerlessness, but unity can overcome fear, and nonviolence and discipline are key for denying the powerful pretexts for further escalation and harm.

But at the same time, the deaths of Americans Renée Good and Alex Pretti, who were part of a nonviolent movement and were killed by immigration agents in Minneapolis, make it clear that acting to protect neighbors requires courage, and prospects are not always certain.

Here are the core lessons I have learned from the people and the groups I have researched.

1. Organizing is the first step

Community organizing is the act of building social ties, setting decision-making procedures, sharing information and coordinating activities.

In Colombia, I found that it was the more organized communities with vibrant local councils that were better able to protect themselves by avoiding or opposing violence when caught between heavily armed insurgents, paramilitaries and state forces. These organizations provide reassurance to the more hesitant and encourage more people to join in.

America has a strong civic culture and history of organizing, dating back to the Civil Rights Movement and long before, and Minnesota is known for its strong social cohesion. It’s no wonder so many Minnesotans, as well as Chicagoans, Angelenos and other Americans have organized to aid their neighbors and press for justice.

Make no mistake, the act of organizing itself is powerful. I found that insights from the combatants of armed conflicts shed light on this. A former insurgent I interviewed in Colombia quoted to me an adage of Aristotle and Shakespeare: “A single swallow doesn’t make a summer” – meaning there’s safety in numbers.

A mass of people on its own can shift the calculus and behavior of those with weapons and deter them. It’s why there are now many visuals of ICE agents leaving the scene when outnumbered by community members.

2. Adopting nonviolent strategies

Organizing also enables communities to adopt nonviolent methods for accountability and protection without ratcheting up conflict.

These strategies are less political or partisan, since there is usually consensus around promoting safety, which makes it difficult for political figures to oppose. While recent polling on presidential approval and immigration policy still shows a partisan split, ICE is widely unpopular, and a large majority opposes its aggressive tactics.

Americans have taken up many of these nonviolent strategies. They have established early warning networks just as communities did in the Democratic Republic of Congo to guard against attacks by the Lord’s Resistance Army rebel group.

Whether with whistles or WhatsApp, such networks of protectors are sharing information with each other to identify threats and come to each other’s aid.

3. Setting up safe zones

Communities in places such as the Philippines have also set up safe zones or “peace zones” to publicize their desire to keep violence away from their residents. This is akin to the declaration of “sanctuary cities” in the U.S. for the issue of immigration.

Communities may also apply different kinds of pressure on armed aggressors. While protest is the most visible approach, dialogue is also possible. Pressure can take the form of persuasion as well as shaming to make trigger-happy agents think twice about what they’re doing and use restraint.

In the U.S., protectors have shown great creativity when it comes to exerting pressure. Grandmas and priests are visible symbols who have influence through their moral and spiritual status. The use of humor and farce – such as protesters dressed in frog suits – can help to de-escalate tensions.

It may not always seem like it, but reputations and concerns about accountability matter, even to bullies. That’s why ICE agents don’t want to be seen enacting violence. Hence the face masks, the snatching of protesters’ phones and the misleading statements by officials about violent encounters.

4. Finding the facts

In the “fog of war,” the powerful may try to twist the facts and mislead and stigmatize communities and individuals to create pretexts for even greater uses of force.

In Colombia and Afghanistan, armed groups falsely accused individuals of being enemy collaborators. Communities addressed this by conducting their own investigations of those accused, after which community elders could vouch for them.

In the U.S., Americans are recording cellphone videos and collecting community evidence to counter official lies, such as accusations of domestic terrorism – and for future efforts to pursue accountability.

Standing up for others

Finally, what’s known as “accompaniment” is also important.

For example, international humanitarian staff and volunteers have gone to communities in places such as Colombia, Guatemala and South Sudan to let armed groups know that outsiders are watching them and acting as unarmed bodyguards for human rights defenders.

In the U.S., volunteers, citizens and religious leaders have used their less vulnerable social statuses to stand up for noncitizens who are under threat, even positioning themselves between immigration agents and those who may be at risk. People from around the country have also sent messages and traveled in solidarity to the cities and states where operations have been carried out.

Yet that can have consequences even for those who believe themselves less likely to be attacked. An ICE agent on Sept. 19, 2025, shot a clergyman in the head with a pepper ball while he was protesting at an ICE detention facility in Chicago.

Acting to protect oneself, other people and communities can involve risks. But civil society has power, too, and many communities in war zones in other countries have outlasted their oppressors. Americans are learning and doing what civilians in war zones worldwide have done for decades, while also writing their own story in the process.

Oliver Kaplan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

When I worked for the Environmental Protection Agency in the 2010s as an Obama administration appointee, I helped write and review dozens of regulations under the Clean Air Act. They included some groundbreaking rules, such as setting national air quality standards for ozone and fine particulate matter.

For each rule, we considered the costs to industry if the rule went into effect – and also the benefits to people’s health.

Study after study had demonstrated that being exposed to increased air pollution leads to more asthma attacks, more cardiovascular disease and people dying sooner than they would have otherwise. The flip side is obvious: Lower air pollution means fewer asthma attacks, fewer heart problems and longer lives.

To use this information in making decisions, we needed to have a way to compare the costs of additional pollution controls to industry, and ultimately, to consumers, against the benefits to public health. A balanced approach meant putting a dollar value on health benefits and weighing them against the seemingly more easily, though not always accurately, predicted costs of complying with the regulations.

We were able to make these decisions because environmental economists since the 1980s have developed and continually improved robust methodologies to quantify the costs to society of air pollution’s effect on human health, such as workdays lost and hospital visits.

Now, however, the Trump administration is dropping one whole side of that cost-benefit equation. The EPA wrote in January 2026 that it will stop quantifying the health benefits when assessing the monetary impact of new pollution regulations and regulation changes involving pollutants that contribute to ozone, or smog, and fine particulate matter, known as PM2.5.

The result leaves government decision-makers without a way to clearly compare regulatory costs to health benefits. It will almost certainly lead to an increase in harmful pollution that America has made so much progress reducing over the decades.

Cost-benefit rules go back to Ronald Reagan

The requirement that agencies conduct a thorough cost-benefit analysis dates back to President Ronald Reagan’s efforts to cut regulatory costs in the 1980s.

In 1981, Reagan issued an executive order requiring cost-benefit analysis for every economically significant regulation. He wrote that, to the extent permitted by law, “Regulatory action shall not be undertaken unless the potential benefits to society for the regulation outweigh the potential costs to society.”

In 1993, President Bill Clinton issued another executive order, EO 12866, which to this day governs federal agency rulemaking. It states: “In deciding whether and how to regulate, agencies should assess all costs and benefits of available regulatory alternatives. … Costs and benefits shall be understood to include both quantifiable measures (to the fullest extent that these can be usefully estimated) and qualitative measures of costs and benefits that are difficult to quantify, but nevertheless essential to consider.”

Quantifying human health benefits

In response to these directives, environmental economists have generated rigorous, peer-reviewed and data-driven methods and studies to inform both sides of the cost-benefit equation over the past four decades.

Estimating costs seems like it would be relatively straightforward, even if not always precisely on the money. Industry provides the EPA with predictions of costs for control technology and construction. Public review processes allow other experts to opine on those estimates and offer additional information.

For a system as complex as the power grid, however, it’s a lot more complicated. Starting in the 1990s, the EPA developed the Integrated Planning Model, a complex, systemwide model used to evaluate the cost and emissions impacts of proposed policies affecting power plants. That model has been improved and updated, and has repeatedly undergone peer review in the years since.

On the health benefits side, in 2003, EPA economists developed the Environmental Benefits Mapping and Analysis Program, which uses a wide range of air quality data to assess changes in health effects and estimates the monetized value of avoiding those health effects.

For example, when the EPA was developing carbon pollution standards for power plants in 2024, it estimated that the rule would cost industry US$0.98 billion a year while delivering $6.3 billion in annual health benefits. The benefit calculation includes the value of avoiding approximately 1,200 premature deaths; 870 hospital and emergency room visits; 1,900 cases of asthma onset; 360,000 cases of asthma symptoms; 48,000 school absence days; and 57,000 lost work days.

The EPA has used these toolsets and others for many regulatory decisions, such as determining how protective air quality standards should be or how much mercury coal-fired power plants should be permitted to emit. Its reports have documented continual refinement of modeling tools and use of more comprehensive data for calculating both costs and benefits.

Not every health benefit can be monetized, as the EPA often acknowledges in its regulatory impacts assessments. But we know from years of studies that lower levels of ozone and fine particles in the air we breathe mean fewer heart attacks, asthma cases and greater longevity.

The Trump EPA’s deregulation sledgehammer

The U.S. EPA upended the practice of monetizing health costs in January 2026. In a few paragraphs of a final rulemaking about emissions from combustion turbines, the EPA stated that it would no longer quantify the health benefits associated with reduced exposure to ozone and PM2.5.

The agency said that it does not deny that exposure to air pollution adversely affects human health, including shortening people’s lives. But, it says, it now believes the analytical methods used to quantify health benefits from reduced air pollution are not sufficiently supported by the underlying science and have provided a false sense of precision.

As a result, the EPA decided it will no longer include any quantification of benefits, though it will consider qualitative effects.

Understanding the qualitative effects is useful. But for the purposes of an actual rule, what matters is what gets quantified.

The new decision hands a sledgehammer to deregulators because in the world of cost-benefit analysis, if an impact isn’t monetized, it doesn’t exist.

What does this mean?

Under this new approach, the EPA will be able to justify more air pollution and less public health protection when it issues Clean Air Act rules.

Analysis of new or revised rules under the Clean Air Act will explain how much it would cost industry to comply with control requirements, and how much that might increase the cost of electricity, for example. But they will not balance those costs against the very real benefits to people associated with fewer hospital or doctor visits, less medication, fewer missed school or workdays, and longer life.

Costs will easily outweigh benefits in this new format, and it will be easy for officials to justify ending regulations that help improve public health across America.

I know the idea of putting a dollar value on extra years of human life can be uncomfortable. But without it, the cost for industry to comply with the regulation – for reducing power plant emissions that can make people sick, for example – is the only number that will count.

Janet McCabe worked in the U.S. EPA Office of Air and Radiation from 2009 to 2017 and was EPA’s deputy administrator from 2021 to 2024. She is a volunteer with the Environmental Protection Network.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Only 33 of Colorado’s 64 counties have an emergency shelter program specifically for survivors of domestic violence. In the greater Denver area, which includes Adams, Arapahoe, Broomfield, Denver, Douglas and Jefferson counties, there are only five shelter programs for survivors.

I study the policies and programs that serve survivors of domestic violence. In 2020, I created the most up-to-date registry of domestic violence shelter programs in the U.S. These programs are hugely impactful for their clients, but not every survivor in need is able to find an open shelter bed. In fact, most U.S. counties lack a specific shelter for victims of domestic violence.

One in three women in the United States experience intimate partner violence in their lifetime. Every day, thousands of survivors are not able to get the housing assistance they need at existing programs due to funding and resource limitations, according to the annual Domestic Violence Counts Report.

Domestic violence survivors regularly cite safe and secure housing as one of their most pressing needs. Women who experience intimate partner violence are four times as likely to be housing unstable as women who have not been abused by a partner.

Yet, housing-insecure survivors face a startling lack of options for safe places to turn. One of the most well-known and longest-standing service options are what are known as emergency domestic violence shelters. These front-line service providers can house survivors safely for between 30 and 60 days. In addition to emergency housing, shelter programs often offer complementary services such as counseling and legal aid. But these shelters are limited, and so is affordable housing.

Limited housing for survivors

The biggest arm of the federal social safety net for long-term housing is the Housing Choice Voucher, often called Section 8. These vouchers help low-income, disabled and elderly beneficiaries to rent housing up to a predefined fair market amount.

With a voucher, households pay about 30% of their income in rent, and the voucher covers the remainder. For domestic violence survivors who need long-term housing, subsidized housing vouchers can provide support beyond a short-term shelter stay. Long-term housing helps set up survivors for successful and affordable independent living.

In many U.S. communities, however, demand for vouchers is far greater than supply. Roughly half of people who ultimately receive a voucher wait at least two years to get one. In Colorado, the average wait time was 14 months as of 2024. Most public housing authorities in Colorado open their waitlists for only a few days each year, leaving potential applicants waiting months just to get in line.

Even when service providers such as shelter advocates or housing navigators have access to money, it can be difficult to spend on behalf of their clients. High housing costs and landlord bias against survivors can make it challenging to place survivors in long-term housing that survivors can afford in the long run, even when they do have a Housing Choice Voucher.

In Denver, the fair market rent defined by the Department of Housing and Urban Development for a two-bedroom apartment is US$2,089. In order to afford that apartment independently without being rent burdened – defined by the U.S. Census Bureau as spending no more than 30% of total household income on rent – a survivor would need to earn $6,963 per month, or more than $83,000 per year. For a single-income household, this would mean earning more than $40 per hour while working full time.

For housing-insecure victims of domestic violence, many of whom are fleeing with children, this is an untenable housing cost. In a survey of 3,400 residents at 215 emergency domestic violence shelters conducted by researchers at the University of Connecticut and the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence, 78% had a child under age 18 and 68% had a child with them in the shelter. The same survey found that the majority of sheltered residents had, at most, a high school education.

Barriers to safe housing

When there isn’t an emergency shelter in their area, or if the local shelter is full, many domestic violence shelter programs are still able to offer survivors nonresidential services such as legal assistance and safety planning. Nonshelter programs like the Rose Andom Center in Denver also support survivors who need help connecting to resources, but their ability to support victims at risk of homelessness beyond a few days is limited.

Other types of housing supports introduce new problems for survivors. Emergency homelessness shelters often have restrictions to entry. The restrictions include not allowing clients to bring all of their belongings or requiring sobriety. Many of these organizations, including the Denver Rescue Mission, are open only to men or women without children and operate only overnight, leaving folks with nowhere to go during the day.

Domestic violence service providers may be able to pay for a survivor to stay in a hotel for a few days, but hotels can be unsafe, unclean and retraumatizing. For example, hotels lack the kinds of security systems and cameras that are common at emergency domestic violence shelters to prevent abusers from contacting survivors staying there.

Survivors of domestic violence also face the same general housing challenges as those not fleeing violence: an affordability crisis in rentals, necessary time to find a place, and security deposits and moving costs. Yet the nature of domestic violence means these challenges are more intractable.

For example, survivors who share custody of children with their abusers must get permission from the child’s other parent, and often the court, in order to move. Domestic violence makes it more likely that survivors will have a history of evictions, making finding housing even more challenging.

With limited shelter availability and long waits for long-term housing assistance such as Section 8, housing-insecure survivors of domestic violence can find themselves with few safe, stable options. This can mean that survivors looking to separate from their abusers are not able to leave – subjecting them, and their children, to further violence.

Kaitlyn M. Sims receives funding from the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families, the Arnold Ventures Foundation, and the Institute for Humane Studies.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

In January 2025, Seema received an email from the International Organization for Migration saying that her flight from Pakistan to the United States, which she and her family were booked on after months of extensive interviewing and background checks by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, had been canceled.

“We had sold our TV and refrigerator,” her husband, Samir, told me during an interview for my dissertation project on Afghan migration to America after the 2021 U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan. “We had told our landlord that we were vacating our apartment. Then it was all canceled.”

The U.S. withdrawal in August 2021 triggered a rapid political collapse that left millions of Afghan civilians in limbo. As the Taliban swept across the country and reclaimed power, Afghans who had worked alongside U.S. forces and international NGOs faced immediate danger.

Women, minorities and human rights advocates feared the loss of basic freedoms and possible Taliban reprisals. With evacuation pathways unclear and protections unevenly applied, panic spread as families tried to escape before they were cut off entirely.

Seema, Samir – pseudonyms to protect their identity – and their children are among tens of thousands of Afghan refugee families who immediately fled to neighboring Pakistan in late 2021 on the U.S. government’s recommendation for Afghans to process their immigration cases in third countries. However, many Afghans soon encountered Pakistan’s mass deportation campaign, underway since 2023, as they awaited U.S. resettlement.

Following the fall of Kabul in 2021, President Joe Biden directed the federal government to launch Operation Allies Welcome and other immigration pathways in an effort to resettle Afghans who had worked for U.S. forces and were at risk of being targeted by the Taliban. Beginning in early 2025, however, the U.S. refugee system retreated from the commitments U.S. leaders once made to protect Afghan civilians.

The costs of suspension

Until recently, some Afghans waiting in Pakistan hoped they would eventually be resettled in the United States through the few humanitarian pathways still open to them. However, that hope has dimmed.

The suspension of U.S. refugee resettlement during the first days of Donald Trump’s second presidency, along with additional immigration restrictions issued after the November 2025 shooting of National Guard personnel in Washington, D.C., have frozen the processing of all Afghan cases – including those already approved.

The Trump administration has justified these measures as necessary to protect U.S. safety and national interests.

For families like Seema’s, U.S. policy decisions have left them insecure and abandoned. As a scholar focused on international migration, I believe Seema’s story highlights a common thread among many Afghans stranded in Pakistan: Many of those who supported the U.S. are questioning the worth of the U.S.’s decades-long mission for promoting security, democracy and human rights in Afghanistan.

Exposed to the Taliban’s retaliation, regional deportation regimes and a collapsing refugee protection system, Afghans are holding the U.S. and other international governments responsible for abandoning them.

Caught between abandonment and deportation

Trained as a gynecologist, Seema worked at a private clinic in Afghanistan. And alongside her husband Samir, she served as managing director of an organization that led U.S.-funded projects for women and children.

“We took two projects from the U.S. Embassy,” she told me. “We established a resource center, bought computers, gave girls internet access and trained them in digital literacy.”

That work, funded and promoted by the U.S. government, made Seema and Samir targets. Even before 2021, they received threats from the Taliban. After the Taliban takeover in 2021, the threats escalated.

Fearing for their lives, they fled their home and attempted but failed to enter the Kabul airport multiple times during the chaotic U.S. evacuation in 2021. They ultimately escaped to Pakistan.

In Pakistan, a former colleague at the U.S. embassy recommended Seema for a Priority 2 visa – an immigration pathway created specifically for Afghans who supported U.S.-funded programs.

But when she and Samir tried to follow up with the U.S. Embassy in Pakistan in 2022, they received no response. A few months later they learned that changes to the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program in early 2022 likely caused their referral to be lost.

As U.S. processing stalled, Pakistan’s stance toward Afghan refugees hardened. Since late 2023, the Pakistani government has accelerated deportations under its “Illegal Foreigners’ Repatriation Plan” that targets both undocumented Afghans and those who once held legal refugee status. More than 1 million Afghans have already been deported.

Human rights groups warn that these removals violate the principle of nonrefoulement, which prohibits returning people to countries where they face serious harm. Under Taliban rule, women’s rights, employment opportunities and personal safety in Afghanistan have been systematically diminished.

Yet while Pakistan deports, the U.S. and other countries where Afghan refugees had once been able to resettle, including Germany, continue to close their doors.

A promise made, then suspended

In 2024, the U.S government accepted Seema’s refugee resettlement case, which she submitted in late 2022 with the assistance of SHARP, a local organization in Pakistan that works to protect Afghan refugees amid the country’s intensifying immigration crackdown. After several rounds of interviews, background checks, biometrics and medical exams, she and her family were told they would soon leave for the U.S.

Then the cancellation email arrived.

Seema and her family fear for their safety and their children’s future. Their children can no longer go to a school in Pakistan, as many Pakistani schools refuse to enroll Afghan students.

Police raids across major cities have also forced Afghan families to stay indoors, afraid to work or move freely. With no stable income, Seema and Samir struggle to meet basic needs.

“When I came to Pakistan, I was 40 years old,” Samir said. “Now I’m 44. Four years of my life have gone waiting for the U.S. case.” His voice hardened with anger. “We worked with the U.S. for 20 years. We fought terrorism. We supported democracy. What was the benefit?”

For decades, the U.S. government relied on the critical leadership of Afghan civilians like Seema and Samir to promote peace, security and women’s empowerment.

These partnerships were not symbolic. They were deeply embedded in everyday Afghan life.

With a smile on her face, Seema said that before 2021 “it never crossed my mind to leave Afghanistan because we were helping people in our country.”

Seema now fears being forced to return to Afghanistan, where her work and identity place her at grave risk of being targeted by the Taliban. Her request is modest. “At least let those whose cases were approved, whose flights were booked, resettle in the U.S.,” she said.

Her plea echoes across Pakistan, where thousands of Afghan families remain stranded.

Their lives now hinge on policy choices that will determine whether the United States honors the obligations it made during two decades of intervention that reshaped Afghan lives and livelihoods.

Mehr Mumtaz receives funding from the Russell Sage Foundation Dissertation Grant, and the Mershon Center for International Security’s Graduate Research Grant.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

As the operations of Immigration and Customs Enforcement have intensified over the past year, politicians and journalists alike have begun referring to ICE as a “paramilitary force.”

Rep. John Mannion, a New York Democrat, called ICE “a personal paramilitary unit of the president.” Journalist Radley Balko, who wrote a book about how American police forces have been militarized, has argued that President Donald Trump was using the force “the way an authoritarian uses a paramilitary force, to carry out his own personal grudges, to inflict pain and violence, and discomfort on people that he sees as his political enemies.” And New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie characterized ICE as a “virtual secret police” and “paramilitary enforcer of despotic rule.”

All this raises a couple of questions: What are paramilitaries? And is ICE one?

Defining paramilitaries

As a government professor who studies policing and state security forces, I believe it’s clear that ICE meets many but not all of the most salient definitions. It’s worth exploring what those are and how the administration’s use of ICE compares with the ways paramilitaries have been deployed in other countries.

The term paramilitary is commonly used in two ways. The first refers to highly militarized police forces, which are an official part of a nation’s security forces. They typically have access to military-grade weaponry and equipment, are highly centralized with a hierarchical command structure, and deploy in large formed units to carry out domestic policing.

These “paramilitary police,” such as the French Gendarmerie, India’s Central Reserve Police Force or Russia’s Internal Troops, are modeled on regular military forces.

The second definition denotes less formal and often more partisan armed groups that operate outside of the state’s regular security sector. Sometimes these groups, as with the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, emerge out of community self-defense efforts; in other cases, they are established by the government or receive government support, even though they lack official status. Political scientists also call these groups “pro-government militias” in order to convey both their political orientation in support of the government and less formal status as an irregular force.

They typically receive less training than regular state forces, if any. How well equipped they are can vary a great deal. Leaders may turn to these informal or unofficial paramilitaries because they are less expensive than regular forces, or because they can help them evade accountability for violent repression.

Many informal paramilitaries are engaged in regime maintenance, meaning they preserve the power of current rulers through repression of political opponents and the broader public. They may share partisan affiliations or ethnic ties with prominent political leaders or the incumbent political party and work in tandem to carry out political goals.

In Haiti, President François “Papa Doc” Duvalier’s Tonton Macouts provided a prime example of this second type of paramilitary. After Duvalier survived a coup attempt in 1970, he established the Tonton Macouts as a paramilitary counterweight to the regular military. Initially a ragtag, undisciplined but highly loyal force, it became the central instrument through which the Duvalier regime carried out political repression, surveilling, harassing, detaining, torturing and killing ordinary Haitians.

Is ICE a paramilitary?

The recent references to ICE in the U.S. as a “paramilitary force” are using the term in both senses, viewing the agency as both a militarized police force and tool for repression.

There is no question that ICE fits the definition of a paramilitary police force. It is a police force under the control of the federal government, through the Department of Homeland Security, and it is heavily militarized, having adopted the weaponry, organization, operational patterns and cultural markers of the regular military. Some other federal forces, such as Customs and Border Patrol, or CBP, also fit this definition.

The data I have collected on state security forces show that approximately 30% of countries have paramilitary police forces at the federal or national level, while more than 80% have smaller militarized units akin to SWAT teams within otherwise civilian police.

The United States is nearly alone among established democracies in creating a new paramilitary police force in recent decades. Indeed, the creation of ICE in the U.S. following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, is one of just four instances I’ve found since 1960 where a democratic country created a new paramilitary police force, the others being Honduras, Brazil and Nigeria.

ICE and CBP also have some, though not all, of the characteristics of a paramilitary in the second sense of the term, referring to forces as repressive political agents. These forces are not informal; they are official agents of the state. However, their officers are less professional, receive less oversight and are operating in more overtly political ways than is typical of both regular military forces and local police in the United States.

The lack of professionalism predates the current administration. In 2014, for instance, CBP’s head of internal affairs described the lowering of standards for post-9/11 expansion as leading to the recruitment of thousands of officers “potentially unfit to carry a badge and gun.”

This problem has only been exacerbated by the rapid expansion undertaken by the Trump administration. ICE has added approximately 12,000 new recruits – more than doubling its size in less than a year – while substantially cutting the length of the training they receive.

ICE and CBP are not subject to the same constitutional restrictions that apply to other law enforcement agencies, such as the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable search and seizure; both have gained exemptions from oversight intended to hold officers accountable for excessive force. CBP regulations, for instance, allow it to search and seize people’s property without a warrant or the “probable cause” requirement imposed on other forces within 100 miles, or about 161 kilometers, of the border.

In terms of partisan affiliations, Trump has cultivated immigration security forces as political allies, an effort that appears to have been successful. In 2016, the union that represents ICE officers endorsed Trump’s campaign with support from more than 95% of its voting members. Today, ICE recruitment efforts increasingly rely on far-right messaging to appeal to political supporters.

Both ICE and CBP have been deployed against political opponents in nonimmigration contexts, including Black Lives Matter protests in Washington, D.C., and Portland, Oregon, in 2020. They have also gathered data, according to political scientist Elizabeth F. Cohen, to “surveil citizens’ political beliefs and activities – including protest actions they have taken on issues as far afield as gun control – in addition to immigrants’ rights.”

In these ways, ICE and CBP do bear some resemblance to the informal paramilitaries used in many countries to carry out political repression along partisan and ethnic lines, even though they are official agents of the state.

Why this matters

An extensive body of research shows that more militarized forms of policing are associated with higher rates of police violence and rights violations, without reducing crime or improving officer safety.

Studies have also found that more militarized police forces are harder to reform than less-militarized law enforcement agencies. The use of such forces can also create tensions with both the regular military and civilian police, as currently appears to be happening with ICE in Minneapolis.

The ways in which federal immigration forces in the United States resemble informal paramilitaries in other countries – operating with less effective oversight, less competent recruits and increasingly entrenched partisan identity – make all these issues more intractable. Which is why, I believe, many commentators have surfaced the term paramilitary and are using it as a warning.

Erica De Bruin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

America’s role in the world is changing. If this wasn’t obvious before, it should be now, following President Donald Trump’s efforts to take over Greenland and his visibly strained relations with traditional allies in Europe and elsewhere.

But how much will the world change if America’s stance is different?

Some scholars of international relations argue that because Washington has been central to global governance for so long, Trump’s “America First” turn – suggesting isolationism on some issues and unilateral action on others – spells the end of the international order as we’ve known it.

The most pessimistic analysts caution that the era of “Pax Americana,” or the long period of relative world calm since World War II due to U.S. leadership, is coming to a close. They forecast a turbulent transition to a more chaotic world.

This view may well prove correct in the long run. But it is too early to say with confidence. As a scholar who studies U.S. foreign policy, I see some grounds for optimism. The world can become a more just, stable and secure place despite the diminishment of American leadership.

For the remaining three years of Trump’s presidency, all bets are off. Trump is famously difficult to predict. That world leaders genuinely believed in recent weeks that the United States could invade Greenland – and still might – should give pause to anyone who thinks they can foretell the remainder of Trump’s second term.

The unprecedented raid on Venezuela and Trump’s oscillation between threatening Iran and calling for negotiations with Tehran provide additional examples of Trump’s volatile foreign policy maneuvers.

But the long-term trends are clear: The United States is losing its enthusiasm (and capacity) for global leadership. The rest of the world can assume that, after Trump, there will continue to be a decline in America’s participation in world affairs. His recent actions suggest America’s security guarantees to others will become more dubious, its markets will become less accessible to foreigners, and its support for international institutions will weaken.

Does this mean a cascade of disorder for smaller nations? Perhaps – but not necessarily.

Are US allies more vulnerable?

Certainly U.S. foreign policy and its wars and other actions abroad have sparked criticism over the past few decades. Still, the prospect of U.S. retrenchment understandably causes anxiety for those who have long sheltered under America’s security umbrella.

Once U.S. forces, spread throughout the globe, have decamped to the continental United States, the argument goes, there won’t be much stopping large countries such as Russia and China from steamrolling their vulnerable neighbors in Europe and East Asia.

This is an overly pessimistic assessment, in my view. It must be remembered that America’s alliance commitments and vast military deployments date from the early Cold War of the 1950s, an era that bears few similarities with the present day. Back then, U.S. forces were needed to deter the Soviet Union and China from attacking their neighbors, who were almost uniformly weak and impoverished following the Second World War.

Today, the European members of NATO and America’s allies in Asia are among the world’s wealthiest countries. These governments are easily rich enough to afford the sort of national militaries needed to deter potential aggressors and uphold stability in their respective regions. Indeed, they can likely do a better job of securing themselves than the United States presently manages on their behalf.

Preserving free trade

Will the world become poorer and perhaps more dangerous if global economic integration falls by the wayside?

This is a reasonable concern given the standard view that free trade leads to economic growth and, in turn, that economic growth can help foster world peace.

But again, it is wrong to assume that the worst will happen. Instead of accepting that globalization is irreversibly in retreat, there is every chance that governments will relearn the benefits of economic integration and defend an open world economy, even absent U.S. leadership. After all, Trump’s trade wars have visibly harmed U.S. firms and consumers, as well as caused friction with America’s allies. Future leaders in Washington and around the world will presumably learn from such fallout.

Finally, there is no reason to conclude that global governance must collapse in the absence of strong U.S. leadership. As Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney proposed at the recent Davos conference in Switzerland, so-called middle powers, such as Australia, Brazil and Canada itself, have the capacity to rescue the world’s most vital international organizations for the benefit of future generations, and to create new institutions as necessary.

Nations such as Canada, Japan, Australia and the members of the European Union obviously lack the overwhelming military power and economic clout of the United States. But they could choose instead to implement a more collective approach to global leadership.

No safe bets

There are obviously no guarantees that the post-Pax Americana era will be an unbridled success. There will be war and suffering in the future, just as there has been war and suffering under U.S. leadership. The idea of Pax Americana has always rung hollow to some people, including citizens of countries that have been attacked by the United States itself.

The question is whether the international system will become any more violent and unstable in the absence of U.S. leadership and military dominance than it has been during America’s long period of global dominance. It well might, but the international community shouldn’t resign itself to fatalism.

The United States has lost influence. The silver lining is that more countries – including America’s friends and allies – might rediscover their own capacity to shape world affairs.

The post-American era is therefore up for grabs.

Peter Harris is a Non-Resident Fellow with Defense Priorities.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

When Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained Liam Conejo Ramos, a 5-year-old boy who is an asylum seeker, in Minneapolis on Jan. 20, 2026, the photos quickly became a flash point in the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement activity.

In one image, a man wearing a black uniform holds onto a gray and red Spider-Man backpack that the worried-looking young boy, wearing a blue bunny hat with floppy ears, has on his back.

Meanwhile, ICE and Customs and Border Patrol operations near schools have become increasingly common over the past year, spreading from Texas to Maine. While some parents in Minnesota have set up patrols around schools, there are families choosing to keep their kids home for days or weeks.

We are scholars of migration and children and childhood adversity.

Our research shows that exposure to severe immigration enforcement experiences during childhood carries long-term, significant consequences: These children are twice as likely to suffer from anxiety in young adulthood.

Why this matters

There is well-documented research showing how immigration enforcement has immediate negative effects on children and adults

Children whose immigrant parents are arrested, detained or deported often experience emotional and behavioral problems, including separation anxiety, school absenteeism, hyperactivity and other behavioral issues.

Yet, until recently, it has not been well understood how experiencing or being subjected to immigration enforcement actions affects children once they grow up to become adults.

That said, over three decades of research shows the clear links between traumatic childhood events and mental health problems in adulthood. Studies show, for example, that adults who experienced temporary separation from their parents as children are more likely to say they’ve experienced depression symptoms years later.

We decided to investigate whether a child being exposed to immigration enforcement actions – meaning the arrest of a parent, or detention of a close family member, for example – is associated with mental health problems among young adults who grew up in immigrant families.

How immigration enforcement unravels families

Our study first combined interviews and open-ended survey questions to define what it means to experience severe immigration enforcement during childhood.

We then examined the link between severe immigration enforcement actions and anxiety among 71 young adults – all U.S. citizens age 18 to 34 – who were raised in immigrant households in New York.

As children, all of these young adults witnessed or experienced the arrest, detention or deportation of an immigrant family member or a member of their communities. Three-quarters of the participants identified as Hispanic.

We analyzed our interviews to develop several criteria to determine what constitutes severe exposure to enforcement during childhood, considering factors like whether they witnessed a detention or arrest more than once, and how old they were when these experiences took place.

We found that approximately 26% of the survey participants – all of whom in this group were Hispanic, except one – had severe exposure to immigration enforcement actions during childhood. Not all of them had a parent who has been deported.

Some of these young people had relatives who had drawn-out cases in immigration court, or felt constant fear that their parents might be deported.

When we linked our interviews with survey data, our results were striking.

We found that young adults who experienced severe immigration enforcement actions as children were twice as likely to have anxiety, compared with young adults who did not have this experience when they were growing up.

Exposure to severe immigration enforcement actions as a child was not independently associated with depression as a young adult. But all the survey participants who said they were experiencing depression also reported anxiety symptoms – further evidence of a connection between severe immigration enforcement actions and anxiety among young people.

Lasting impact of today’s policies

Many legal experts and political observers say that the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement tactics in Minneapolis and in other cities are designed to intimidate and instill fear among civilians.

Children are not immune to these tactics, either as witnesses or as targets.

Federal immigration officers deployed tear gas, for example, on students at Roosevelt High School in Minneapolis on Jan. 8. Experiences like this constitute a major adverse childhood event, exposing children and adolescents to significant trauma.

We believe that we can learn from decades of adverse childhood experiences research, which clearly shows the link between childhood adversity and physical and mental health outcomes in adulthood.

The enforcement tactics ICE is using in Minnesota and other places in the U.S. today are likely, our research suggests, going to harm the next generation of U.S. citizens and residents.

As trauma researchers have long known, our bodies keep score over a lifetime. The question facing policymakers is not whether these enforcement tactics will cause lasting harm – our research suggests they would – but what human costs we, as a nation, are willing to bear.

Joanna Dreby receives funding from Russell Sage Foundation

Eunju Lee receives funding from Russel Sage Foundation (PI Dreby).

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

A series of shootings by federal immigration agents, including two deaths in Minneapolis, have galvanized intense local and national protests against the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement operations. Federal immigration agents killed Renee Nicole Good, 37 – a mother of three – and Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old nurse, weeks apart in January 2026.

Since Donald Trump assumed the presidency on Jan. 20, 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have detained thousands of people across the country, including U.S. citizens and legal residents. At least 11 people have been shot, including a Venezuelan migrant in Minneapolis on Jan. 14, 2026. Children and babies have been tear-gassed.

I am a political scientist who studies authoritarian regimes. I also lived through Argentina’s brutal military junta of the 1970s and 1980s. When I consider today’s ICE violence, I think of the state terrorism that tore Argentina apart – and how mothers became a potent force in resisting authoritarianism and ultimately restoring democracy.

Masked agents and the ‘Trump effect’

U.S. federal immigration enforcement actions began raising human rights concerns starting in April 2025, when masked federal agents in plain clothes began detaining international students.

Historically in the U.S., police and other official state security forces have used face coverings almost exclusively during undercover operations to protect agent safety and the integrity of ongoing investigations, according to federal law enforcement sources.

The global human rights group Amnesty International has begun using the phrase “the Trump effect” to describe masking and other administration actions that it believes violate global human rights standards.

Meanwhile, violence by ICE agents also runs counter to international law – as does police violence more broadly.

Several United Nations principles require that police action be guided at all times by legality, necessity, proportionality and nondiscrimination. Any use of force that does not comply with these principles violates international law.

Amnesty International’s policing guidance is based on these standards. It explains that police must attempt to use nonviolent means first, such as verbal commands, negotiation and warnings.

When force is necessary, officers must use “the least harmful means likely to be effective.” In such cases, proportionality requires that “the harm caused by the use of force may never outweigh the damage it seeks to prevent.”

Good’s and Pretti’s killings occurred in broad daylight. Video analysis suggests that Good was attempting to turn her vehicle away from the scene when an ICE agent shot her three times. Pretti had a holstered weapon, but witnesses and videos show he had been disarmed before a federal agent fatally shot him.

As nonimmigrant local community members, neither victim would be the apparent target of immigration enforcement operations in Minneapolis.

Argentina’s dictatorship

In both its use of masks and its brazen disregard for proportionality, ICE evokes in me unsettling memories of all-powerful, authoritarian governments that exercise control over life and death.

In March 1976, the Argentine armed forces overthrew a weak and chaotic government – that of María Estela Martínez de Perón, widow of Juan Domingo Perón – claiming the need to restore order in a country engulfed in political violence. So began one of the darkest periods in contemporary Argentine history.

Between 1976 and 1983, approximately 30,000 people were forcibly “disappeared,” meaning secretly kidnapped, never to be seen again. The vast majority were young men and women involved in labor unions, political organizations or student movements with left-wing ideologies, including Catholic priests and nuns who embraced liberation theology, a movement within the church that interprets the gospel of Jesus Christ through the experiences of poor people and the oppressed.

In April 1977, roughly a year after young Argentines first began vanishing, 14 women gathered in the Plaza de Mayo, a central square in Buenos Aires that faces the presidential palace. They were searching for their sons and daughters, who had been detained by the police or the military.

Some of these arrests had taken place at night, in the homes where these young victims lived with their families. In those cases, the women – who came to be known as the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, or Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo – knew their children had been taken by security forces. In other cases, their children had simply failed to return home. Nothing was known of their whereabouts. They had disappeared.

Even those who had been detained at home had disappeared, too, as their location remained unknown.

Later, the nation would learn that many of the regime’s victims were tortured, then flown in airplanes over the nearby River Plate and dropped into the water on so-called “death flights.” All this information was compiled in a 1984 report written during the first democratic government after military rule and published under the name “Nunca Mas”: Never again.

The Mothers didn’t know that yet. They wanted their children back – alive.

Demonize, deny, discredit

The dictatorship had imposed a state of siege prohibiting all forms of assembly. To technically evade this restriction, the Mothers walked in circles around the plaza, avoiding the concentration of people in any single location, demanding truth and justice.

The regime reacted by systematically attempting to discredit the grieving women. To weaken their moral authority, state-controlled media labeled them as emotionally unstable “mad women.” The were called Las Locas de Plaza de Mayo instead of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo.

Regime media also suggested the Mothers were political subversives with links to guerrilla groups and members of foreign organizations out to damage Argentina’s international reputation.

Officials accused the women of exaggerating or inventing kidnappings and sometimes mocked their ever-growing weekly marches. By attacking their credibility and dignity, the dictatorship sought to undermine public sympathy and maintain a climate of fear.

At first, this narrative worked. Early in the dictatorship, many Argentines viewed the Mothers with ambivalence, skepticism or even fear. Others, while privately sympathetic, avoided expressing support due to fear of repression and social consequences.

The government’s attacks were not only rhetorical. In 1977, three of the founding Mothers – Esther de Balestrino, Azucena Villaflor and Mary Ponce de Bianco – disappeared when a group of military personnel stormed the Church of the Holy Cross in Buenos Aires. Twelve other people were abducted. None have ever been found.

The Mothers received substantial support from abroad. International human rights organizations, foreign journalists and religious institutions all played a crucial role in legitimizing their claims and broadcasting their struggle to the world.

France, in particular, helped publicize the Mothers’ cause in Europe, which put diplomatic pressure on the Argentine regime. This international solidarity contributed significantly to breaking the dictatorship’s silence and exposing its crimes.

Over time, as evidence of systematic forced disappearances became undeniable, public perception of the Mothers gradually shifted in Argentina, too. The Mothers came to be seen as a brave force for moral resistance.

A democracy built in part by mothers

In 1982, the military dictatorship invaded the South Atlantic islands known in Argentina as the Malvinas, or Falklands. The land has been British since 1833, but Argentina’s generals claimed sovereignty. Argentina was quickly defeated, and the military government fell.

After democratic elections were held in October 1983, the Mothers continued their efforts to uncover the histories of their children and to find and bury their remains. Many also started working to locate their grandchildren who had been born in captivity and illegally adopted after their parents were disappeared.

Their dedication to recovering their loved ones exposed the full extent of the regime’s atrocities.

In 1983, President Raúl Alfonsín, who reestablished Argentine democracy, established the National Genetic Data Bank to identify kinship between the parents and children of the disappeared. Thousands of analyses were conducted on children suspected of being born in captivity and illegally adopted by military families.

More than 120 grandchildren have since been identified.

The Mothers and children of the disappeared have also played a fundamental role in convicting dozens of military officials for crimes against humanity. As direct witnesses to the long-term consequences of forced disappearance, they have repeatedly testified against military officials.

The Mothers’ activism, which continues today, has helped sustain public pressure in Argentina for accountability and to transform private trauma into collective political action.

The killings in Minneapolis inspired me to recount this story for a simple reason: The government can protect, condemn or kill. Argentine history shows that it matters how society reacts to state terrorism.

This story was produced in collaboration with Rewire News Group, a nonprofit news organization that covers reproductive health.

Laura Tedesco is an Amnesty International donor.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Amid the discussion between U.S. President Donald Trump and Danish and European leaders about who should own Greenland, the Inuit who live there and call it home aren’t getting much attention.

The Kalaallit (Inuit of West Greenland), the Tunumi (Inuit of East Greenland) and the Inughuit (Inuit of North Greenland) together represent nearly 90% of the population of Greenland, which totals about 57,000 people across 830,000 square miles (2.1 million square kilometers).

We are Arctic anthropologists who work in a museum focused on the Arctic and its people. One of the areas we study is a land whose inhabitants call it Kalaallit Nunaat, or land of the Kalaallit. Known in English as Greenland, it is an Indigenous nation whose relatively few people have been working for decades to reclaim their right to self-determination.

Arrivals from the west

For nearly 5,000 years, northwestern Greenland – including the area that is now the U.S. Space Force’s Pituffik Space Base, formerly known as Thule Air Force Base – was the island’s main entry point. A succession of Indigenous groups moved eastward from the Bering Strait region and settled in Siberia, Alaska, Canada and Greenland.

Approximately 1,000 years ago, the ancestors of the Inuit living in Greenland today arrived in that area with sophisticated technologies that allowed them to thrive in a dynamic Arctic environment where minor mishaps can have serious consequences. They hunted animals using specialized technologies and tools, including kayaks, dog-drawn sleds, complex harpoons, and snow goggles made from wood or bone with slits cut into them. They dressed in highly engineered garments made from animal fur that kept them warm and dry in all conditions.

Their tools and clothing were imbued with symbolic meanings that reflected their worldview, in which humans and animals are interdependent. Inughuit families who live in the region today continue to hunt and fish, while navigating a warming climate.

Arrivals from the east

At Qassiarsuk in south Greenland, around the time Inuit arrived in the north, Erik the Red established the first Norse farm, Brattahlíð, in 986, and sent word back to Iceland to encourage others to join him, as described in an online exhibit at the Greenland National Museum. Numerous Norse families followed and established pastoral farms in the region.

As Inuit expanded southward, they encountered the Norse farmers. Inuit and Norse traded, but relations were sometimes tense: Inuit oral histories and Norse sagas describe some violent interactions. The two groups maintained distinctly different approaches to living on the land that rims Greenland’s massive ice sheet. The Norse were very place-based, while the Inuit moved seasonally, hunting around islands, bays and fjords.

As the Little Ice Age set in early in the 14th century, and temperatures dropped in the Northern Hemisphere, the Norse were not equipped to adjust to the changing conditions. Their colonies faltered and by 1500 had disappeared. By contrast, the mobile Inuit took a more flexible approach and hunted both land and marine mammals according to their availability. They continued living in the region without much change to their lifestyle.

A center of activity

In Nuuk, the modern capital of Greenland, an imposing and controversial statue of missionary Hans Egede commemorates his arrival in 1721 to establish a Lutheran mission in a place he called Godthåb.

In 1776, as trade became more important, the Danish government established the Royal Greenland Trading Department, a trading monopoly that administered the communities on the west coast of Greenland as a closed colony for the next 150 years.

By the 19th century some Kalaallit families who lived in Nuuk/Godthåb had formed an educated, urban class of ministers, educators, artists and writers, although Danish colonists continued to rule.

Meanwhile, Kalaallit families in small coastal communities continued to engage in traditional economic and social activities, based on respect of animals and sharing of resources.

On the more remote east coast and in the far north, colonization took root more slowly, leaving explorers such as American Robert Peary and traders such as Danish-Greenlandic Knud Rasmussen a free hand to employ and trade with local people.

The U.S. formally recognized Denmark’s claim to the island in 1916 when the Americans purchased the Danish West Indies, which are now the U.S. Virgin Islands. And in 1921, Denmark declared sovereignty over the whole of Greenland, a claim upheld in 1933 by the Permanent Court of International Justice. But Greenlanders were not consulted about these decisions.

The world arrives

World War II brought the outside world to Greenland’s door. With Denmark under Nazi control, the U.S. took responsibility for protecting the strategically important island of Greenland and built military bases on both the east and west coasts. The U.S. made efforts to keep military personnel and Kalaallit apart but were not entirely successful, and some visiting and trading went on. Radios and broadcast news also spread, and Kalaallit began to gain a sense of the world beyond their borders.

The Cold War brought more changes, including the forced relocation of 27 Inughuit families living near the newly constructed U.S. Air Force base at Thule to Qaanaaq, where they lived in tents until small wooden homes were built.

In 1953, Denmark revised parts of its constitution, including changing the status of Greenland from a colony to one of the nation’s counties, thereby making all Kalaallit residents of Greenland also full-fledged citizens of Denmark. For the first time, Kalaallit had elected representatives in the Danish parliament.

Denmark also increased assimilation efforts, promoting the Danish language and culture at the expense of Kalaallisut, the Greenlandic language. Among other projects, the Danish authorities sent Greenlandic children to residential schools in Denmark.

In Nuuk in the 1970s, a new generation of young Kalaallit politicians emerged, eager to protect and promote the use of Kalaallisut and gain greater control over Greenland’s affairs. The rock band Sumé, singing protest songs in Kalaallisut, contributed to the political awakening.

In a 1979 Greenland-wide referendum, a substantial majority of Kalaallit voters opted for what was called “home rule” within the Danish Kingdom. That meant a parliament of elected Kalaallit representatives handled internal affairs, such as education and social welfare, while Denmark retained control of foreign affairs and mineral rights.

However, the push for full independence from Denmark continued: In 2009, home rule was replaced by a policy of self-government, which outlines a clear path to independence from Denmark, based on negotiations following a potential future referendum vote by Greenlanders. Self-government also allows Greenland to assert and benefit from control over its mineral resources, but not to manage foreign affairs.

Today, Nuuk is a busy, vibrant, modern city. Life is quieter in smaller settlements, where hunting and fishing are still a way of life. While contemporary Greenland encompasses this range of lifestyles, Kalaallit are unified in their desire for self-determination. Greenland’s leaders have delivered this message clearly to the public and to the White House directly.

Susan A. Kaplan has received funding from NSF, NEH, IMLS, SSHRC and private foundations to pursue anthropological and archaeological research in Nunatsiavut, NL, Canada; and offer Arctic-focused outreach programs, museum exhibits and conferences.

Genevieve LeMoine receives funding from the National Science Foundation, Office of Polar Programs, the National Geographic Society, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. She has conducted fieldwork in Avannaata Kommunia, Kalaallit Nunaat in collaboration with Nunatta Katersugaasivia Allagaateqarfialu/Greenland National Musuem and Archives and the University of California, Davis.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation