Empire’s Bureaucracies: Digital Warfare, Smart Cities, and the Afterlives of Cold War Militarism

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

This roundtable convenes at a moment when the logics of Cold War militarism are being renewed and repurposed through digital warfare, bureaucratic governance, and techno-utopian urban planning. From AI-driven surveillance in occupied Palestine to Silicon Valley’s role in shaping smart city developments like Prospera in Honduras, we examine how empire sustains itself through both overt military violence and the technocratic management of crises. These global infrastructures of war, surveillance, and urban development are not new; they are deeply entangled with Cold War-era counterinsurgency and anti-surveillance struggles. This roundtable asks: How do bureaucratic and technological infrastructures mediate empire’s violence? How does digital warfare rework colonial governance in the present? And what insights can we draw from 1970s anti-surveillance and anti-imperialist movements to contest these forms of power today?
Anjali Nath traces the racial and imperial politics of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, anti-surveillance organizing, and art using formerly classified materials in the 1970s. She explores how networks of anti-imperial organizers challenged state secrecy, linking their work to contemporary struggles against militarized surveillance. Rebecca Uliasz examines how Cold War militarism continues to shape global smart urbanism and new city discourses, offering a case study of Prospera in Honduras to map the Silicon Valley imaginary. Gavriel Cutipa-Zorn interrogates the role of Floridian 1990s digital technology in forging the architecture of early surveillance computing that would be used during the Global War on Terror.
Taken together, this panel offers a critical genealogy of how late American empire operates through digital warfare, bureaucratic rationality, and urban futurisms. By situating contemporary crises within longer histories of Cold War counterinsurgency and anti-imperialist resistance, we rethink the stakes of anti-war, anti-surveillance, and abolitionist movements in the present.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Andrea L. Miller, Penn State University

Panelists

• Gavriel Cutipa-Zorn, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities

• Anjali Nath, University of Toronto Mississauga

• Rebecca L Uliasz, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor

• Dorothy Santos

Biographical Information

Rebecca Uliasz is a scholar and artist whose research centers on digital media, the history of science, and environmentalism and design. She received her Ph.D. in Computational Media, Arts & Cultures at Duke University in 2024 and MFA in New Media from State University of New York at Stony Brook in 2017, and is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Digital Studies Institute at the University of Michigan. She is working on a manuscript that examines the relation between environmental computing, urban design, and enduring forms of colonial and imperial violence.

Anjali Nath is Assistant Professor in Institute of Communication, Culture, Information, and Technology at the University of Toronto Mississauga. Her work focuses on the visual culture of American militarism, with a focus on document redaction, transparency, and the archives of state violence. Her forthcoming book, A Thousand Paper Cuts: US Empire and the Bureaucratic Life of War (Duke University Press), is a critical reckoning with the racial and imperial work of paper as mobilized in the service of American militarism. Nath’s research has been supported by the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University, the University of California office of the President, and the UC Davis Humanities Institute. Her essays and writing have appeared in American Quarterly, Cultural Studies <=> Critical Methodologies, Studies in Documentary Film, Visual Anthropology and elsewhere. Nath co-edits the newly inaugurated Critical Militarization Studies book series on University of Michigan Press, with Dr. Crystal Baik. Prior to joining the faculty at UTM, Nath held positions at University of California, Davis and the American University of Beirut.

Dorothy R. Santos, Ph.D. (she/they) is a Filipino American writer, artist, and media scholar. She earned her Ph.D. in Film and Digital Media with a designated emphasis in Computational Media from the University of California, Santa Cruz as a Eugene Cota-Robles fellow. She received her Master’s degree in Visual and Critical Studies at the California College of the Arts and holds Bachelor’s degrees in Philosophy and Psychology from the University of San Francisco. She is an Assistant Professor of Teaching focused on Art, Justice, and Digital Media in the Art Department and Principal Faculty for the Creative Technologies program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her creative and research interests include voice recognition, speech technologies, assistive tech, radio, sound production, feminist media histories, and critical medical anthropology. Her work has been exhibited at Ars Electronica, Rewire Festival, Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Southern Exposure, the Natalie and James Thompson Gallery, and the GLBT Historical Society. Her writing appears in art21, Art in America, Ars Technica, Hyperallergic, Rhizome, Slate, and Vice Motherboard.

Gavriel Cutipa-Zorn (He/him) is a postdoctoral fellow at the Perry World House in the University of Pennsylvania, where his research explores imperial histories of surveillance, infrastructure, and the environment. His writing has been featured in Jewish Currents, Cultural Dynamics, Review of International Studies, and Space and Society.