Genealogies of Terrorism: Revolution, State Violence, Empire by Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson

Author:Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: History, Revolutionary, Philosophy, Political, Political Science, History & Theory, Terrorism, Social Science, Violence in Society
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2018-07-30T00:00:00+00:00

TERRORISM AND CITIZENSHIP

To bring into view the salience of the dynamic of synthetic terrorism, it is helpful to consider its role in producing norms of citizenship and humanity. We saw in chapter 1 that a growing number of legal and political theorists are drawing attention to the role of terrorism in creating a particular image of citizenship and national identity by way of excluding ostensibly unruly and dangerous subjects from the social body. In particular, these scholars emphasize processes of racialization and perverse sexualization, which conflate terrorism with what Muneer Ahmad calls “the Muslim-looking person”84 and Jasbir Puar refers to as “terrorist look-alikes.”85 Individuals perceived as terrorists are then disidentified as citizens, independently of their legal status. On this view, citizenship names a collective identity, or what Leti Volpp describes as “citizenship as a form of inclusion.”86 This notion of citizenship does not precede our understanding of terrorism, whose perpetrators are then excluded from the social body. Instead, the interpellation of certain subjects as terrorists serves to define citizenship negatively by marking who is not included in a notion of citizenship understood as a collective identity.87 This is not simply an exclusion of the terrorist other from the fabric of citizenship but rather the simultaneous production of citizen and terrorist as “reciprocal and incompatible” identities.88 Citizen and terrorist thus stand in a relationship that Colin Koopman describes as reciprocal incompatibility, in which contemporary notions of citizenship and terrorism—much like madness and reason, as well as freedom and power in Foucault’s account of modernity—“presuppose one another”89 at the same time as “they cannot admit of admixture with one another.”90

Here I want to build on these claims to highlight the specific operation of synthetic terrorism in the production of citizenship. By considering the case of Dzokhar Tsarnaev, also known as the Boston Marathon bomber, I hope to illustrate the way in which the synthetic nature of contemporary terrorism is harnessed to articulate and implement a certain normative view of citizenship. I argue that although terrorism is predominantly associated with a racially and sexually inflected notion of Islam and the Muslim-looking person, other elements of the concept can be brought to the fore to identify perpetrators as terrorists even when they fail to conform to the Muslim-looking construct. In this way, it becomes possible to simultaneously be “one of us,” that is, a citizen in both the legal and the inclusive sense, and a terrorist. This, in my view, is precisely what the notion of domestic terrorism is intended to capture. By selectively activating different dimensions of the synthetic concept of terrorism, a dispositif of terrorism can be deployed as a broad mechanism of social defense that protects society from a wide variety of threats, including crime, immigration, whistle blowing, and even doing math or reading Heidegger on an airplane.91

In 2013, Dzhokhar and his brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, detonated two bombs at the Boston Marathon, killing three people and injuring more than 250 others. After a shoot-out with Boston police, in which Tamerlan was killed, Dzhokhar was captured during an unprecedented manhunt in Boston’s Watertown area.

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