Search Results

This chapter assesses the US-led counter-terrorism response to the September 2001 attacks on the American homeland in order to gauge the successes and failures of the Global War on Terror. It concludes that successes against transnational terrorist threats, as represented by al-Qaida and its affiliates, have been few and far between. Instead, the past decade has been marked by a failure to meet set goals for a number of reasons, including but not limited to: the shifting character of war, the unintended fallouts of the counter-terrorism policies adopted, and an inadvertent strengthening of al-Qaida’s material and ideological capabilities through the US macro-securitisation of the Global War on Terror–all of which point to the absence of a long-term strategic vision. However, our counter-terrorism failures hold crucial lessons for the future and the chapter concludes by outlining how they can enable us to translate our past failures into future successes.

Framed by an account of the author’s visit to Guantánamo Bay, the Introduction to Figuring Violence queries the limits of what outsiders know about the six beings around which the book is organized: civilian children, military children, military spouses, veterans with PTSD and TBI, detainees, and military dogs. Reflecting on the common status of these beings as political subjects that are partially or fully unknowable, the Introduction outlines the various affective and imaginative practices that transform them into repositories for sentiment. It also explores the mechanisms and politics of the ‘figuring’ that gives the book its title, namely the abstraction of the actual beings with whom these practices are ostensibly concerned. The Introduction makes the case for the centrality of apprehension, affection, admiration, gratitude, pity, and anger in contemporary American militarism. In addition to providing an overview of the book as a whole, the Introduction also elaborates a methodology for the study of affect as it materializes in practices of representation and through wartime public culture.

Discussion about the nature of warfare in Afghanistan is related with several bigger inter-related debates in the field of military history. First, is the world witnessing a Military Revolution, or a Military Technical Revolution/Revolution in Military Affairs at the dawn of the new millennium? Second, is conventional warfare dead? Third, are we witnessing a new form of insurgency and is it part of the so-called Eastern Way of Warfare? Fourth, does it mean that counter-insurgency in Afghanistan is part of the West’s ongoing Global War on Terror? Last, is the paradigm of war culled from the Afghan experience the only possible paradigm of war for the future or are other alternatives also possible? The author explores these questions in the chapter.

The conclusion summarizes how these arenas contributed to larger American narratives about the Islamic world and how they translated into specific policies. It then details the profound repercussions of these policies for the peoples of the Middle East, North Africa and Asia continuing into the twenty-first century. It analyzes how perceptions about Islam continued during the Cold War, when Israel and oil became the two pillars of American foreign policy. The chapter concludes by analyzing the resurgence of Islamophobia in the 21^st century, focusing on the theory of the “Clash of Civilizations,” authored by Samuel Huntington in 1993, which resonated so deeply in the American psyche after 9/11, during the Global War on Terror, led by George W. Bush.

The first chapter locates Milton High School within national efforts to install militarized regimes of discipline in public education through the corporate takeover of schools, wage war under the banner of national security, and draw young people into the war-making business through fear by examining the genealogies of neoliberal school reform, zero-tolerance school policies, school militarization, and fear in U.S. politics. Knitting these strands together lends itself to an understanding of how the Milton school staff thought about the shifting purposes of education, the needs of their students, and the role of national security in their daily lives.

The emergence of Al-Qaeda resulted in the deterritorialization of the war waged against it. Neither an old-fashioned enemy operating through institutions like states and armies, nor a civilian and purely criminal enterprise, its networked form of militancy ended up fragmenting and disrupting the hierarchies of Western military force from the inside. This became evident in juridical enclaves like Guantanamo Bay as well as in the culture of torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib.

The power to name terrorists is key to the “War on Terror”. The Bush presidency codified that naming, not only in legal opinions but in the enhancement of presidential authority to “decide” how terrorism is defined. In the circular system that developed to prevent terrorist attacks—we “know” who terrorists are/will be because we have come to define their characteristics—the trait of decisiveness came to characterize US actions against terrorism. The decisive and authoritative presidency is mirrored by popular action heroes, thereby solidifying the stories that can be told about who terrorists are and how they must be handled.

This chapter defines the serious Hollywood war film of the post-Vietnam era within industry, genre, visual style, and reception history. These movies engage seriously with historical fact from the point of view of the individual soldier and veteran and reflect their makers’ sense of moral urgency. Several of these films have sparked larger national conversations about specific American wars. The various discourses and practices of authenticity undergirding these films are discussed. The capacity of young men to read ostensibly anti-war films as celebrations of war is noted. The four overlapping cycles of serious war film production after Vietnam are outlined: films about Vietnam made between 1978 and 1989, four films about US military involvements in the Middle East in the 1990s, the long-lived World War II cycle begun in the late 1990s, and the twenty-first-century cycle of combat films about ongoing American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The introduction starts at 9/11 and provides a background of the consequences and implications of September 11 and the events that followed in the U.S. Global War on Terror (GWOT), highlighting a key gap in current analysis -- women as agents, partners and targets of counterterrorism. It discusses the importance of examining women through the cases of Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen and Syria referenced throughout the book. It introduces the original framework developed in this book that allows readers to unpick how, where and why women became visible in the discourses and practices of counterterrorism. These include: the categories of 'women' in US counterterrorism discourses the 'factors' that impacted how women evolved in US counterterrorism practices and the justifications stated when including women. The story of women in counterterrorism is demonstrated to bring to light broader tensions in the GWOT. Finally, a summary of each chapter of the book is provided.

Great Britain has been influenced strongly by its history, and its grand strategy is shaped by both this legacy and by shifting geopolitics. Nevertheless, it has adapted to these forces, adjusted to its post-imperial posture, and remains an influential, nuclear-armed global power. While Great Britain promotes multilateralism and collective security, and is staunch in its alignment to the United States, it is—as Brexit demonstrates—less certain with regard to its relationship with Europe. It is a firm advocate of NATO, but—harking back to the nineteenth nentury—seeks to avoid the dominance of the continent by any single country. This chapter addresses the tension in the GB’s grand strategy through the legacy of its history, its close alliance with the United States, and the influence of domestic politics on key strategic choices. It also addresses the proactive British approach to the Global War on Terror, and the constraints that now impose themselves in the early decades of the twenty-first century.

Beginning with an autobiological account, the introduction of A Curriculum of Fear relates the author’s interest in schools featuring specialized Homeland Security program, especially Milton High School. Based on the author’s fieldwork and rooted in political geography, sociology, and critical education studies, this book examines the inner workings of Milton and its Homeland Security program. As the first ethnography of a U.S. public school with a specialized Homeland Security program, it explores how synchronizing the school with the needs of the national security industry shaped its students understandings of the world and their place in it. Moving messily between scales, this ethnography traces how Milton, by design, undertook the epistemic, political, and emotional work needed to train its students as the next generation of national security workers. By investigating this remaking of Milton, it documents the deep implications of these national security pedagogies on young people’s psyches, social imaginaries, and daily interactions.