Interrogating representations of “militants” and “terrorists” in the United States’ Militant Imagery Project and the Counterterrorism Calendar

ABSTRACT

This article adopts a post-colonial approach to analyse representations of “militants” and “terrorists” in the United States’ Militant Imagery Project (MIP) and the Counterterrorism Calendar. It argues that sites such as the MIP and the Calendar produce meanings of “militant” and “terrorist,” wherein Muslims/Arabs are linked with violence. At the same time, similar violence committed by right-wing extremists, gun owners, and so on are ignored. There is also a related assumption about an uncritical, homogeneous audience gazing at these images. All of these serve to continually securitise Muslims and Arabs in the United States. This article aims to dismantle this racialised meaning by illustrating processes through which sites such as the MIP and the Calendar link “militant” and “terrorist” violence with Muslims and Islam. In doing so, they erase Western-led and state-sanctioned violence from representations of “terrorism.” By outlining these erasures and silences, this article questions the meanings of “militants” and “terrorists” produced and communicated by the MIP and the Counterterrorism Calendar. It also directs attention to the socio-political and ethical implications of selectively labelling only some violence and violent actors as “terrorist.”

KEYWORDS:

• Counterterrorism
• visual analysis
• United States
• post-colonialism
• Muslims
• spectatorship

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I am writing this at a time when it appears xenophobia, bigotry and hatred of Muslim “others” have become normalised in some political and media spheres in the United States. Examples of anti-Muslim activities in the week of 15–21 November have included airlines removing Muslim passengers from flights because some other passengers complained about them, gun-carrying “anti-Islam” protesters outside Muslim houses of worship, and so on. Huffington Post has a list of anti-Muslim violent acts here http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/all-the-islamophobic-acts-in-us-canada-since-paris_564cee09e4b031745cef9dda In the political sphere, leading candidates for the 2016 United States presidential elections have called for targeting and even registration and tracking of Muslims in the country. The mayor of the city nearest me went even further, calling for internment camps www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-34864814. The voices speaking against such acts are getting silenced in the clamour of anti-Muslim sentiment.

2. Securitisation theory is the approach derived from the Copenhagen School of Security Studies. It examines how issues and actors become socially constructed as a security issue and known as a security threat – securitised, as it were (Buzan, Waever, and de Wilde 1998). It focuses on visual and textual representations as data for analysing these practices and has been extensively debated and discussed (e.g., Balzacq 2005; Balzacq et al. 2015; Buzan and Waever 1997; Eriksson 1999; Hansen 2000; Jensen 2013; Karyotis 2007; Lisle 2013; Roe 2012; Taureck 2006; Williams 2003). Hansen (2011, 2015), and Heck and Schlag (2012) discuss visual securitisation or securitisation of images.

3. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “Islamophobia” as “Intense dislike or fear of Islam, esp. as a political force; hostility or prejudice towards Muslims.” I am using it here in this sense.

4. The United States Military Academy at West Point, commonly called “West Point” (and referred to as such through the rest of this article), is funded by the US government and trains most of its military leaders.

5. Wright and Bachmann (2015) use US military-inspired framework on propaganda to analyse the images of the MIP. Their goal is to note how Jihadist and Islamic extremist images appeal to recruits and incite them to violence. They use the MIP as their dataset for their project. They do not question the selection of images, the texts used to describe them (though they do mention that an independent translator agreed with the CTC’s translations), as those are not the major goals of their project. As an exercise in how datasets like the MIP normalise and invisibilise the processes of image/data selection and depiction, however, this is illustrative.

6. Racialisation and spectatorship will be further discussed later in this article.

7. For more on decolonising images in security studies, see Dixit (2014).

8. I would suggest the possibilities of resistance remain limited, however, as many Muslim and Arab people, especially in the United States, are unwilling to draw attention themselves. This is the case in what has become a context in which Islam and people who are viewed as connected to Islam are automatically deemed as suspect and dangerous.

9. The effects of such racialization practices have been relatively under-studied in the context of the United States. Garrod and Kilkenny (2014) discuss how Muslim college students in the United States viewed their own identities before and in the aftermath of 9/11 and touch upon their feelings of helplessness and bewilderment (and anger). The psychological impact of the event upon Muslim-Americans is discussed in this article: http://www.apa.org/monitor/2011/09/muslims.aspx. For an overview and discussion of “suspect communities” and how Muslims in the West have become framed as such, see Dixit (2015), Chapter 6.

10. Himadeep Muppidi (1999, 123–124) defines a “security imaginary” as “a field of meanings and social power. Operating as a field of meanings, the security imaginary provides an organized set of interpretations for making sense of a complex international system. Operating as a field of social power, the security imaginary works to produce social relations of power through the production of distinctive social identities.” Jutta Weldes (1999) illustrates how the US Cold War “security imaginary” made sense of Cuba (and other actors) during the Cuban missile crisis. Both Muppidi and Weldes, however, are concerned with state-to-state relations (India and the United States; Cuba and the United States). Here, I suggest there is a blurring of boundaries as “terrorists” outside of the US physical borders (and “far away” in Yemen, Pakistan and elsewhere) are linked – by their skin colour and appearances – with similar persons of colour within the US nation-state.

11. It is worth recalling the depiction of one of the Boston bombing suspects – Dzhokhar Tsarnaev – on the front cover of Rolling Stone. It was an image that evoked musician Jim Morrison’s similar pose some decades ago. Tsarnaev passes for white and is labelled “the bomber” (not “the Jihadist” or even “the terrorist”). The cover was controversial as this story shows: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/16/rolling-stone-boston-bomber-cover_n_3607630.html. It would be difficult to imagine a brown-skinned male receiving this same treatment.

12. The class exercise I began this article with is to get us discussing these visual parallels and to question the notion that a “hooded man with a gun” means a “Muslim terrorist.” On parallels, a quick review of the Conflict Archives on the Internet (CAIN) project on Northern Ireland’s section on posters (http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/images/posters/index.html) indicates similarities between IRA members and the “militants” of the MIP. Google Image search on “Irish Republican Army” also brings up hooded figures, carrying guns. Indeed, even some of the weapons are similar. Furthermore, the use of religion, history and visual motifs depicting future rewards can also be noted in other majority-White “militant” groups’ imagery and is not limited to “Jihadists.” The “Mural directory” of CAIN indicates this reliance of historical, religious, and past “heroes”-based narratives of violent groups: http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/mccormick/index.html

13. A selection of these murals can be seen here: “Political Wall Murals in Northern Ireland” http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/murals/

14. For the calendar year of 2014, there are only four days with no incidents depicted. This serves to maintain the view that “terrorist” violence is a daily concern, thus creating a sense of anxiety. I am grateful to Dr Matt Davies for this point.

15. It is not just states but also their agents who are the focus (e.g. February has entries for one US hostage shot in Ecuador and a UK citizen killed in Saudi Arabia). Of states, the US, UK, and Israel get the most attention as targets of terrorism.

16. For a critique of this erasure of state violence from “terrorism” definitions, see Blakeley (2008), Jackson, Murphy and Poynting (2009), and Stohl (2008).

17. Though I suppose drone strikes do lead to explosions.

18. This is not meant to justify violence by Hizbollah/Hezbollah but, instead, to point out that non-state violence does not occur in a vacuum.

19. There are, of course, different modes of othering, and visualisation may be linked with same-ness and not just the production of difference. Hansen (2006) discusses how relations with others are not always antagonistic or confrontational, but can also be relations of similarities and identification. The MIP and the CTC 2014, however, do not encourage these identifications with those depicted – these are militants and terrorists and their narratives are often “inscrutable” (CTC n.d.b).

20. Of course, “white spectatorship” is also differentiated by class, gender, geography and other markers. That being said, as Gagnon (2008), Diawara (1990) and Stewart (2003) point out, it is useful to consider spectatorship from the perspective of people of colour. This leads to considering spectatorship as differentiated based on race, class and gender, rather than as a homogeneous whole as this homogeneity tends to default to white, middle-class viewers.

21. At the time I’m writing this, there are reports of increased anti-Muslim attacks in the United States and other Western countries. This past weekend, armed persons demonstrated outside a mosque in Irving, TX, claiming they were defending Christianity against dangerous Muslims. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/irving-texas-armed-mosque-protest_5651eddfe4b0d4093a581d14 Again, it is difficult to conceive of an occasion when brown people carrying guns outside of Christian places of worship would be received similarly.

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Priya Dixit

Priya Dixit is an Assistant Professor in Political Science at Virginia Tech (United States). Recent books include The State and ‘Terrorists’ in Nepal and Northern Ireland: The Social Construction of State Terrorism (Manchester University Press: 2015) and Critical Methods in Terrorism Studies (with Jacob Stump, Routledge: 2015).