Andrew Johnson

Andrew Johnson received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California Santa Barbara in 2022, with an interdisciplinary emphasis in Global Studies. He has a Master’s degree in Philosophy from Louisiana State University and a Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy from the University of Maine. He lived and taught Philosophy for several years in China. He worked as a Research Fellow for the UCSB Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies in the “Structural Violence, Police/Prison Abolition, and Decoloniality” Research Cluster and helped supervise an educational correspondence program for prison inmates throughout California as a Public Humanities Fellow for the UCSB Interdisciplinary Humanities Center. Last year, he was a Visiting Lecturer in Political Science at Seattle University, where he taught courses on Global Policing, Police and Politics, and introductory and upper-level courses in political theory. He is currently a Visiting Fellow at Philipps-Universität Marburg, where he is working on a collaborative research project “Dynamics of Security: Forms of Securitization from a Historical Perspective.” He is in the process of adapting his dissertation research into a book, entitled Theses on the History of Police. This book explores the historical narratives surrounding the formation and development of police institutions and contemporary social movements seeking to diminish their political power. Finally, when not struggling as a professional academic, he has spent half his time involved with community and political organizations dedicated to collective liberation.

Bureaucrats with guns: Or, how we can abolish the police if we just stop believing in them