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The past ten years have witnessed a revival in scholarship on militarism, through which scholars have used the concept to make sense of the embeddedness of warlike relations in contemporary liberal societies and to account for how the social, political and economic contours of those same societies are implicated in the legitimation and organization of political violence. However, a persistent shortcoming has been the secondary role of race and coloniality in these accounts. This article demonstrates how we might position racism and colonialism as integral to the functioning of contemporary militarism. Centring the thought and praxis of the US Black Panther Party, we argue that the particular analysis developed by Black Panther Party members, alongside their often-tense participation in the anti–Vietnam War movement, offers a strong reading of the racialized and colonial politics of militarism. In particular, we show how their analysis of the ghetto as a colonial space, their understanding of the police as an illegitimate army of occupation and, most importantly, Huey Newton’s concept of intercommunalism prefigure an understanding of militarism premised on the interconnections between racial capitalism, violent practices of un/bordering and the dissolving boundaries between war and police action.

This article posits a point of entry for anarchist interventions in critical theories of international relations and security studies. It explores potential for an approach which begins with grassroots direct action as a means to reforming dominant ontologies of agency. The article discusses the potential in a resistance which engages in perpetual struggle between a direct action rooted in positive constructions of alternative agencies, and a direct action which commits to an ongoing resistance to the imposition of order and control, through a sustained engagement with Simon Critchley and Gustav Landauer, arguing that the tensions between their positions might offer productive routes for anarchismto make an intervention in the field. This argument is taken forward through a case study of the 'Raytheon 9', an anti-arms trade group who offer powerful perspectives on the broader discussion here.

How can we conceive of practices of counter-conduct within spaces of resistance? This paper examines practices of counter-conduct

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