In the late Cold War, right-leaning Americans launched a series of private paramilitary schemes in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. By doing so, they hoped to realize the global ambitions of the Reagan Doctrine, a global anticommunist offensive to be carried out by guerrilla movements in nearly a dozen countries. However, as Congress, the American public, and a transnational human rights movement offered stiff resistance to the Reagan administration’s covert wars, many on the right concluded that the private sector was better suited to channel money, weapons, supplies, and advisers to embattled anticommunist guerrillas. And so, using millions of dollars in donations from wealthy individuals and businesses, international organizations, and grassroots conservative groups, they purchased weapons and supplies and sponsored training programs, propaganda campaigns, and recruitment drives. Their efforts tapped into a strain of revanchist masculinity, and helped catalyze and legitimize a growing paramilitary subculture at home which, in turn, supplied hundreds of American mercenaries for conflicts in overseas. Our speaker, Dr. Kyle Burke, will detail this history.

Kyle Burke is an historian of US politics, culture, and foreign relations who specializes in the Cold War. He received his PhD in history from Northwestern University in 2015. Before coming to Temple, he held fellowships at New York University's Center for the United States and the Cold War, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, and the Buffet Institute for Global Studies.  He is currently completing a book entitled Revolutionaries for the Right: American Conservatives, Anticommunist Internationalism, and Covert Warfare in the Cold War (UNC Press, forthcoming), which examines the rise and fall of an international network of right-wing paramilitaries from the 1950s through the 1980s.