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Abstract
The core concern of this article is derived from my personal experience of being stopped and questioned at Heathrow Airport on 28 March 2012 for possession of “suspect materials”: academic books on terrorism. I seek to utilise this experience to reflect on how logics of counterterrorism can become manifested in bizarre and prejudicial ways, and how autoethnography provides a unique means to articulate human experiences of such logics. I further utilise my experience to reflect on the dynamics of academic privilege, which often flourish at the expense of the voices of “ordinary citizens”, and argue that autoethnography can be embraced as an empowering form of self-expression through which “ordinary citizens” might de-subjugate themselves from the margins of academia towards an emancipatory ideal wherein the lived experiences of such citizens occupy a substantial space in academic and popular understandings of (counter)terrorism.
Acknowledgements
The author thanks the anonymous reviewers, Richard Jackson and Maura Conway for their helpful comments on previous drafts of this article.
Notes
1. Although I differentiate between “academic” and “ordinary citizen”, I am not unburdened by this distinction. It should be noted that employment of these categories does not suggest a natural or essential distinction between the two; rather, it pertains to their reification as socially constructed identities that are further mediated – in this account at least – by privilege. Ultimately, the aspect of “privilege” that I wish to explicate here is as regards the degree to which “academics” are foregrounded to speak expertise on issues of (in)security over countless “ordinary citizens” who have directly experienced the lived effects of (counter)terrorism and have, perhaps, more pertinent stories to tell.
2. Given the common aggregation of “Asian” ethnicity in official statistics, quantifying discrimination against Muslim communities is somewhat difficult, making qualitative accounts even more important to our understanding of these counterterrorism practices (see Parmar Citation2011).
3. Which I have, in turn, judged as “worthy” of inclusion.
4. Here, we must note the particularly pervasive effect of 7/7 on subsequent interpretations of the contemporary terrorism threat within the UK. As Mythen puts it: “Following on from 7/7, the problem of ‘home-grown’ terrorism became foregrounded as the lens of intelligence agencies fixed sharply on the religious, cultural and political affiliations of young British Pakistanis” (Citation2012, 411).
5. Indeed, recent polls indicate that 47% of British people view Muslims as a threat, whereas 58% associate Islam with extremism (Moosavi Citation2012; cited in Mythen Citation2012, 410).
6. Interestingly, in a content analysis of 13 UK national newspapers over 40 years, Maura Conway (Citation2013) has found zero mentions of the term “radicalization” – or terms derived immediately therefrom – as used to characterise members of the (Provisional) Irish Republican Army (IRA) and/or “dissident Republicans”. Conway’s preliminary findings suggest that when it comes to prominent UK media and policy discourses, violent Jihadis are characterised as being made (via a process of radicalisation), while Irish Republicans – both violent and non-violent – are characterised as being simply born.
7. Hasnath had been previously convicted of putting up posters adorned with the text “gay-free zone” in London’s Brick Lane (The Telegraph, 2012).
8. These forms include novel-writing (Dauphinee Citation2013), storytelling (Inayatullah Citation2011b), and film (Der Derian, Udris, and Udris Citation2010; Der Derian and Phillip Citation2012; Weber Citation2011).
9. It should be noted at this point that the recent “narrative turn” in IR does not necessarily represent the adoption of “new” techniques to critically inquire important political dynamics. As neatly outlined by Eschle and Maiguashca (Citation2007), for example, feminist approaches have long facilitated reflexive critiques that are sensitive to lived experiences of politics and the embedded power dynamics that determine who, essentially, gets to speak of the same. Eschle and Maiguashca’s approach of de-subjugating the voices of organised protesters as a form of narrated resistance is to be welcomed, and there is certainly scope here for the adoption of similar approaches with regard to investigating “organized” resistances to key narratives of (counter)terrorism. In prioritising the voices of those who have taken part in organised protests; however, Eschle and Maiguashca’s collective object of inquiry entails that the voices of those who are not actively involved in this precise form of resistance remain subjugated. As will be outlined in the main text to follow, this paper call for a more expansive inquiry into the lived experiences of counterterrorism: It is concerned with the potential de-subjugation of those who may not have taken part in organised political protest and may not be overly interested in “politics” per se, but those who – through their individual stories – offer resistances of their own to prominent narratives and practices of (counter)terrorism.
10. Anthony Burke’s review, which adorns the back cover, is similarly representative of the power of Dauphinee’s text: “An extraordinary work that I found hard to put down each night, and whose emotions, echoes and affects disturbed my sleep and days…a very fine and powerful work of art that glows dangerously in the hands” (Dauphinee Citation2013). Furthermore, having assigned this book as required reading for one of my undergraduate courses, the unanimous verdict from students has been one of the pleasant surprises that an academic text could actually be enjoyable.
11. As Edkins puts it: “The Politics of Exile challenges the comfortable and comforting world we have made – our world as academics, in particular – and the separations we have produced in creating it. It points to the possibility of an international relations that is creative in another, more challenging, sense – as an unsatisfactory aesthetic practice: A practice that intervenes in the partition of the sensible, and enacts another politics” (Citation2013, 292).
12. “My grandfather’s wars gave me virtual cause for this book. But my personal motivations come with a perennial intellectual research reservation: How to tell the story of war? How to convey its dangers and horrors without falling prey to the preferred contemporary formats of neutral documentary or Oprah exposé?” (Der Derian Citation2009, xxxiii).
13. Appropriate credit goes to Professor Christine Sylvester, who raised this point to me at the CTS Annual Conference, 9 September 2013.
14. A similar sentiment is evinced in Eschle and Maiguashca’s approach to mapping “feminist anti-globalisation activism”: “Our study seeks to foreground and critically engage with a form of feminist activism that has been marginalised and treats participants in that activism not only as objects of inquiry, but also as sources of knowledge, particularly by privileging interview accounts” (Citation2007, 288).
15. Indeed, I fall prey to this mimetic trap later in this piece, whereby I argue for the inclusion of citizens’ voices at length, yet I cannot but choose what I view as “suitable” extracts to buttress my arguments as pertains to the lived experiences of “suspect communities”. This trap is apropos of many factors, not least the very form of the journal article and the sedimented vestiges of “academic” writing that broadly determine the acceptable parameters by which submitted arguments should be formed. I am, therefore, like all academic authors, a subject (see Fitzgerald Citation2014).
16. Of course, the submission of this point raises an immediate question with regard to assessing the “importance” and “legitimacy” of stories. How is a story rendered important? Is it the quality of the prose? Its entertainment value? Its relevance to a pre-determined agenda (e.g., an edited volume on everyday resistances to counterterrorism)? These are all valid concerns and ones that cannot be easily ameliorated. I would argue, however, that in the absence (and unsuitability) of de facto indicators to determine the contents of an “important” or “good” story, the judgement is ultimately made by relevant epistemic communities, who adorn a story with a particular status by virtue of its inclusion into a particular articulatory space (see Fitzgerald Citation2014). In the context of telling stories within the articulatory space(s) as provided by an academic journal, for example, its worth may be determined by the process of peer review. However, insofar as such stories are articulated and subsequently read, the ultimate arbiter of validity lies with the reader, for it is always the reader who will determine the legitimacy of what has been written (Fitzgerald Citation2014). The call for an articulatory space whereby/wherein lived experiences of (counter)terrorism can be facilitated beyond the orthodox contours of academia – such as via self-uploaded accounts to a website/blog – would place the burden of validity even more so in the hands of the reader (assuming minimal editorial overview). A messy dynamic, for certain – and the recent literature on storytelling in IR has yet to adequately address this problem – but then, does that not say something of the unique nature of storytelling itself? Perhaps, the sedimented mechanisms for judging the worth of “academic” content are not suitable for judging the self-told stories of “ordinary citizens”; indeed, perhaps, this is another reason as to why an alternative space for articulation is required.
17. This account is reproduced in this form for two reasons. Firstly, the email was written in close proximity to the event, thus entailing a more lucid retelling of “banal” details that may have been otherwise omitted or re-remembered (notwithstanding the reflexive observation that no one “true” story exists to be approximated thereafter). Second, retaining its informal orientation (inclusive of grammar and syntax errors) is key to capturing the precise mode of autoethnographic recollection by which I originally articulated an event which was not written for the purposes of publication. Its subsequent incorporation into the space provided by a journal article – much like the potential incorporation of myriad (other) citizens’ self-told recollections of counterterrorism within similar “academic” spaces – should not necessitate a fundamental re-orientation of its contents, much like extracts from interviews, focus groups, and so on are typically reproduced and adorned with “[sic]” corrections, where applicable.
18. This piece is available at http://richardjacksonterrorismblog.wordpress.com/2012/05/09/how-bizarre-book-burning-magic-and-the-logic-of-counter-terrorism-4/
19. This is notwithstanding the reflexive observation that perhaps – as suggested by an anonymous reviewer – these bizarre events did not happen to me as an “academic expert” (such that my identity is pre-determined in this way) but that, rather, I may have (re)created myself as an academic expert in the course of experiencing these events and attempting to make sense of them. My answer here is that it is somewhat impossible to determine which of these scenarios is ultimately more “true” than the other; suffice it to say that the author’s general commitment to an intertextual ontology entails their identity/ies as socially constructed and thus apropos various discursively mediated settings. My feeling at the time was that my status as an “academic” was important in shifting the setting from one of suspicion to one of facilitation – whether this is actually “true”, is not for me to decide (see note 17).
20. With the “two” referencing Sabir and his supervisor Rod Thornton, as opposed to Sabir and Yezza.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
James Fitzgerald
Dr James Fitzgerald is Lecturer in Terrorism Studies at the School of Law and Government, Dublin City University and co-convenor of the Critical Studies on Terrorism Working Group. His current research interests include: everyday resistances to (counter)terrorism; discourse analysis of the primary statements of al Qaeda; and exploring (in)orthodoxies of “academic writing” and the types of knowledge produced thereof.