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This paper examines the genealogy of domestic security in the United States through an analysis of post-World War II civil defense. Specifically, we describe the development of an organizational framework and set of techniques for approaching security threats that we call 'distributed preparedness'. Distributed preparedness was initially articulated in civil defense programs in the early stages of the Cold War, when US government planners began to conceptualize the nation as a possible target of nuclear attack. These planners assumed that the enemy would focus its attacks on urban and industrial centers that were essential to US war-fighting capability. Distributed preparedness provided techniques for mapping national space as a field of potential targets, and grafted this map of vulnerabilities onto the structure of territorial administration in the United States. It presented a new model of coordinated planning for catastrophic threats, one that sought to limit federal intervention in local life and to preserve the characteristic features of American federalism. Over the course of the Cold War, distributed preparedness extended to new domains, and following 9/11 it has moved to the center of security discussions in the US. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I explore the use of Gramsci's notion of hegemony in analyzing the relationships between US labor unions, the US foreign policy establishment, and workers in the global South. The hegemonic position of US capitalists, in relation to both US workers and states in the global South, heavily conditioned the development of American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations foreign policy during the cold war, with path-dependent effects that have carded over into the post-cold-war era of ‘globalization’. Although recent changes in the relationships between US capitalists and US labor unions have undermined the US ‘labor accord’ that reigned during the cold war, the new, ascendant transnational neoliberal hegemony has not as yet completely transformed the relationships of labor unions in the United States to those elsewhere in the world, which poses ongoing challenges for international labor solidarity, even in a context of new possibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]