Gang Politics Revolution, Repression, and Crime

Demystifying forces of the state, gangs, and revolutionary violence.

In Gang Politics, Kristian Williams examines our society’s understanding of social and political violence, what gets romanticized, misunderstood, or muddled. He explores the complex intersections between “gangs” of all sorts—cops and criminals, Proud Boys and Antifa, Panthers and skinheads—arguing that government and criminality are intimately related, often sharing critical features. As society becomes more polarized and conflict more common, Williams’s analysis is a crucial corrective to our usual ideas about the role violence might or should play in our social struggles. 

Kristian Williams is the author of six books, including Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America. Williams has been actively writing and leading discourse on anarchism in historical and present-day contexts, social inequalities, and critiques on police and political force since the 1990s. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Robert Evans, the author of After the Revolution, has had an eclectic career as an investigative journalist reporting from war zones in Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, and covered the 2020 uprising in Portland, Oregon. He hosts the podcasts Behind the Bastards and It Could Happen Here.