Theorising the “suspect community”: counterterrorism, security practices and the public imagination

Abstract

This article considers Hillyard’s first application of the term “suspect community” to the Irish in Britain in the era of the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) and its more recent application to Muslims in the global war on terror. A review of the application of the term “suspect community” and research in the field points to the problems associated with constructing an entire population and to problems of misidentification. Ethnographic and other evidence illustrate the stigmatisation, alienation and violence that results from its deployment. Given these difficulties and Greer’s objections to the use of the term “suspect community”, a redefinition of the concept of “suspect community” is proposed, borrowing from Anderson’s concept of the imagined community. The “suspect community” is not merely the product of legal and security apparatuses, but the product of a larger cultural apparatus or “imaginary”. It is redefined as “a community created in and by the securitised imagination and enacted in a processes of ‘othering’ through a range of security practices of counter-terrorism”. The “suspect community” is not an embodied community, but an imagined one, whose boundaries are permeable and shifting and in the eye of the beholder. Its operations are distinct from Islamophobia or anti-Irish racism, yet racism, Islamophobia and other forms of subordination may well be implicated in the process of “othering” the suspect. The effect of being “suspect” on the performance of identity and citizenship is indicated in the conclusion.

Keywords:

• suspect community
• counterterrorism
• othering
• racism
• Islamophobia

Introduction

This article reviews how “suspect communities” have been defined and described in the literature, considers how contemporary counterterrorism policy and practices identify dangerous people, how such people are subsequently regarded with suspicion, and how they are constituted as a suspect community. Given the inexactness of such identifications and their sometimes fatal effects, the article proposes a re-examination and a redefinition of the “suspect community”. Such a re-definition aims to better reflect the actual security practices of contemporary counterterrorism. It is argued that the allocation of suspicion on this basis undermines security in two main ways: first, it silences, marginalises and prevents democratic participation of the suspected group, thus alienating them from democratic processes and undermining the possibility of a peaceful politics; and second, by its inexact nature and misidentifications, it renders “suspects”, who may be innocent, and liable to be targets of a range of punitive security measures, up to and including, fatal attack. Being “suspect” also stimulates particular forms of self-censorship, especially in relation to political expression, with detrimental consequences for the possibility of participatory democracy. It is proposed here that the suspect community is no longer conceptualised as an embodied community, but an imagined one, created in the imagination of a suspicious public.

Method, the self and the author

In this article, the author interrogates her own experience of being from Northern Ireland and living through several decades of being the target of suspicion – of being identified and identifying with a “suspect community”. Personal engagement with and position within the topic is made explicit and is incorporated into the analysis. The author could have written an article about suspect communities adopting a conventional social science approach which presumes a “scientific distance” between the author and the topic. Her lived experience would still have coloured and shaped the way in which the topic is addressed, just as the lived experience of the reader – as suspect and/or as suspecting – will colour and shape how the article will be read. With Muncey (2002), I contend that individual experience is sufficiently worthy of research and more than just a deviant case.

Muncey’s (2005) experience of undertaking autoethnography led her to observe that the representation of an individual’s story that touches on society’s taboos will elicit demands for the legitimation not only of the text but also of the method by which the text is presented. The personal accounts produced in autoethnography may be dismissed by some as anecdotal and limited in scope and generalisability, yet the place of autoethnography in politics and international studies is an ongoing debate (see, for example, Dauphinee 2010; Löwenheim 2010).

Analytical autoethnography as espoused by Anderson (2006) seeks to privilege theoretical understanding of social and political phenomena over other purposes for which personal storytelling might be undertaken. Chang (2008, 43) points out that autoethnography goes beyond autobiography to engage in cultural analysis and interpretation. Autoethnographers, using ethnographic research methods, seek an understanding of the social and political through analysis of the self in interaction with others.

Most significantly, autoethnography offers what Tierney (1998, 66) describes as the ability to “confront dominant forms of representation and power in an attempt to reclaim … representational spaces that have marginalised those of us at the borders”. It is therefore predictable that advocates of autoethnography in the discipline of Politics and International Relations are often female, and/or from minority and other populations that have traditionally been consigned to the margins of the discipline.

Debates about the “suspect community”

The term “suspect community” and debates about its use have largely been confined to the fields of criminology and law, yet it is also increasingly used in the context of security studies, politics and international relations and specifically in terrorism studies.

Hillyard (1993), a criminologist and sociologist, coined the term “suspect community” to describe the Irish community in Britain, a community rendered suspect by the institution and operation of the anti-terrorist legislation. Hillyard, citing Lord Donaldson, points out that under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) (1989) the requirement of “reasonable suspicion” to justify stopping a person was dispensed with:

An officer … does not have to have any grounds for thinking that they have the information, but merely that the person concerned shall be in a category. (Re Boyle, O’Hare and McAllister, Divisional Court, 30 October 1980 (unreported) cited in Hillyard 1993, 19; emphasis added)

Hillyard argues that this made it lawful for officers to stop and examine someone simply because they were Irish. Whereas random stop and search powers, in theory at least, mean that everyone has an equal chance of being stopped, the PTA permitted categories of people, namely Irish people, to be picked out (Hillyard 1993, 19). Thus:

a person who is drawn into the criminal justice system under the PTA is not a suspect in the normal sense of the word … they are not believed to be involved in or guilty of some illegal act … people are suspect primarily because they are Irish and once they are in the police station they are often labelled an Irish suspect, presumably as part of some classification system. In practice, they are being held because they belong to a suspect community. (Hillyard 1993, 7; emphasis in original)

Thus, although Hillyard sees the origins of the “suspect community” lying in legal provisions and judgement, his analysis is sociological and his focus is the effect on those suspected. The targeting of a category of people following a threat to security emanating from a source associated with them led to the targeting of Irishness – or perceived Irishness as in the case of Harry Stanley (Independent Police Commission 2006). Harry Stanley, a Scot, newly discharged from hospital with colon cancer, was shot dead outside the Alexandra Pub in South Hackney by the police when coming home carrying a chair leg. The police officer who shot him thought he was dealing with an armed Irishman. Whilst the targeting of Irish people was regarded by the police as justified, Hillyard points to several effects of this targeting: the widespread infringement of Irish people’s civil liberties; increasingly intrusive and intensified policing techniques; the viewing of the whole Irish community as officially suspect; and the encouragement of the public to do the same, thus augmenting anti-Irish racism (1993, 259–260).

Whilst the ostensible purpose of the “huge trawling operations” of stopping, searching, detaining and excluding Irish “suspects” was to gather intelligence, Hillyard argues that the PTA not only constructed a suspect community, it also criminalised Irish people living in Britain by setting a different legal standard for Irish individuals. This facilitated miscarriages of justice against Irish people, most notoriously the cases of the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four (Hillyard 1993, 31).

In 2008, Gareth Peirce (the solicitor for those wrongfully convicted in the Birmingham and Guildford bombs, and later for the family of Jean Charles de Menezes and Moazzam Begg) drew parallels between the Irish and Muslims in Britain. She pointed to legally perpetrated injustices that contribute to the alienation of many Muslims from the authorities and the state. Although the Irish had similar experiences, unlike the Irish, she points out, Muslims lack advocates such as the Irish state and the Irish American diaspora.

Subsequently, the term has been applied to Muslims in Britain and parallels have been drawn between the Irish and Muslim experiences. Hickman et al. (2008, 2013), Hickman, Silvestri and Thomas (2010a, 2010b), have published various studies, firstly, of the Irish community (1997), and latterly, of both Irish and Muslim communities in the UK, focusing on their experience of being suspect, rather than on debating how they might be defined as a community, suspect or otherwise (see, for example, Nickels et al. 2012a).

Pantazis and Pemberton (2009) applied the term “suspect community” to Muslims in Britain and defined it as:

a sub-group of the population that is singled out for state attention as being ‘problematic’ … individuals may be targeted, not necessarily as a result of suspected wrong doing, but simply because of their presumed membership of that sub-group. Race, ethnicity, religion, class, gender, language, accent, dress, political ideology or any combination of these factors may serve to delineate the sub-group.

Others, such as Appleby (2010) concentrate on aspects of Muslim identity and culture, using labelling theory, without using the term “suspect community” or addressing its definition.

Greer (2010), an academic lawyer, criticised the use of the term and his objections are reviewed below. For the purposes of this article, there are two chief difficulties facing existing definitions of the suspect community. First, the difficulty alluded to by Hillyard (1993) of the blanket attribution of threat and dangerousness to an entire category of people based on an aspect of their identity; and second, as illustrated by the cases of Harry Stanley and Jean Charles de Menezes, there are the difficulties – sometimes fatal – raised by instances of misidentification.

Actual embodied communities and random “suspectness”

According to both Hillyard’s study and my own experience, Irish people travelling in and out of Britain during the conflict in Northern Ireland were closely monitored and regarded as suspect. Where Irish people travelled outside of Britain, they were profiled, pulled out of lines waiting to board aircraft and taken to side rooms for questioning in foreign airports, in full view of other concerned passengers. For many years, this was a routine experience for me and other Irish people.

In the UK and wider European experience, when the Irish were previously identified as a suspect community, it was sufficient to have an Irish accent, particularly a Northern Irish accent, to be identified as suspect. This blanket attribution meant that, for example, Northern Irish Unionists and Loyalists fiercely loyal to the British crown and vehemently opposed to the Irish Republican Army (IRA), were also considered “suspect”, especially when they travelled to England, where as one observer remarked, they were “just Paddies, like the rest of us”.

I am in a restaurant in South London, in 1976, with an English colleague and his wife from the hospital in which I am an intern. They are asking me about life in Northern Ireland. My accent identifies me as from Northern Ireland, and we notice a group of men who had been drinking at the bar, who had been eavesdropping on our conversation approaching our table. They surround us, talking about how blood will flow on the streets of Northern Ireland when ‘our boys’ are permitted to do what should be done there. I go to the bar to pay the bill, as it is clear we must leave. I realise that I cannot call the police, because it is me who will be arrested, not them, even if the barman would allow me to use the phone, which seems unlikely given his attitude which implies that I have caused the trouble. We leave. They follow us out onto the street. They swing punches at us, we run. We escape, with them yelling abuse at us, terrorist scum, Paddy bastards, and so on.¹

Nor were such experiences limited to my time in England. I was in a newsagent in St Stephen’s Green in Dublin in 1974, at a time when I still smoked cigarettes, during the worst of the violence of the Troubles. I asked the shop assistant for a box of matches. He told me that “they don’t serve scum”. On another occasion a Dublin bartender told me: “We don’t serve Northerners”.

My experience, which was illustrative of a widespread anti-Northern sentiment in the Republic of Ireland during the Troubles, was not exceptional, nor as severe as many. Nonetheless, it helps me to know how the suspect community and its individual members were perceived as threatening and dangerous and how it feels to be suspect. In this example, I was described as “scum” not by an English person, but by an Irish person in Dublin, because of my Northern accent, and the hatred borne by some south of the Irish border for Northerners and their “violent” and “trouble-making” ways. Irish people are able to differentiate between Northern Irish and those from the Republic of Ireland. In England, such differences were not always apparent to those targeting Irish people and anti-Irish racism was also evident in many such instances. Similar reports of the treatment of Muslims in Britain and elsewhere indicates that Islamophobia features large in the kinds of abuses to which Muslims are subjected.

Misidentification, innocence and its consequences

The identification of an actual “suspect” on the basis of this virtual template of a “suspect community” may have serious consequences for those so identified. Jean Charles de Menezes was an innocent Brazilian man shot by counterterrorist police in London who mistook him for a member of Al Qaeda. Harry Stanley, the Scot referred to earlier, was shot dead by police who mistook him for an Irishman. In these cases, the results were fatal for the imagined “suspect”.

Cases of mistaken identification are instructive, because the mistaken target is free to articulate the experience in ways that Muslims (or previously Irish people) may not be (for reasons explored later in this article). Kazim Ali is a poet who teaches at Shippensburg University, Pennsylvania. In April 2007, Ali put a box of poetry transcripts beside a trashcan outside his office building on the campus, for recycling. A young man in the next building observed him and called the police, telling them that a man of Middle Eastern descent, driving a car with out of state plates and no campus parking sticker had just placed a box next to the trash can. The bomb squad was deployed, buildings were evacuated, classes were cancelled and the campus was closed. Ali comments:

Not because of my recycling. Because of my dark body. No… Because of the culture of fear, mistrust, hatred, and suspicion that is carefully cultivated in the media, by the government… These are the days of orange alert, school lock-downs, and endless war. We are preparing for it, training for it, looking for it, and so of course, in the most innocuous of places… we find it. Instead, in spite of my peacefulness, my committed opposition to all aggression and war, I am a threat by my very existence, a threat just living in the world as a Muslim body. That man in the parking lot didn’t even see me. He saw my darkness. He saw my Middle Eastern descent… My body exists politically in a way I can not prevent. For a moment today… I ceased to be a person when a man I had never met looked straight through me and saw the violence in his own heart. (Mustafa 2007)

Since “suspects” are identified by one or two ethnic, cultural or racial markers, it is nothing personal; it is not on the basis of what we have done or are about to do, but on the basis of who we are that we attract such uninvited interventions in our daily lives. Putative members of the suspect community are singled out for special attention, over and beyond the routine kinds of security practices experienced by everyone who, for example, travels by air. We are powerless to avoid such interventions. They become part of the obstacle course one must negotiate in order to travel, shop, get a driver’s licence, or a job or a mobile phone, or do a thousand and one routine things that other citizens can do without thinking about them.

Thus it appears that following the use of violence previously by Irish Republican and currently by Al Qaeda inspired groups, media representations have played a significant role in the consolidation of a suspicious public who identify Muslim-ness – as Irishness – with threat and danger (Nickels et al. 2012a). Muslim-ness is identified as Irishness was identified previously – through a series of racial, ethnic and cultural markers. Muslims and Irish people report similar experiences of being suspected and a similar range of effects that flow from being suspected. Nor have such experiences and effects been strictly limited to Irish people in the past and Muslims in the present. Misidentification of non-Irish or Muslim people has meant that those misidentified experience the same consequences and effects of being suspect as those properly identified as Irish or Muslim.

Greer’s objection: suspect community is not a community

Greer (2008) asserts that British Muslims are not a suspect community because they are not “a community”, and yet, he is content that the Irish were a “suspect community”. He argues this because Jihadi political violence differs from Irish paramilitary political violence and Muslims are not under “official suspicion”. He relies on the difference between the violence of the Northern Ireland Troubles and Al Qaeda attacks to argue that British Muslims cannot be legitimately seen as suspect communities because of the marked differences between Republican violence and that of Jihadi militants. For Greer, those differences, which include “the advent of mass casualty suicide bombings and lack of scope for domestic political accommodation with those responsible” (163) mark the difference between the IRA and what he calls “Al Qa’eda type (AQT)” organisations.

Greer (2008), for example, asserts that Northern Irish suspect communities:

all had and retain, a clear, discrete and limited geographical location, plus a homogenous character in terms of religious and political affiliations as evidenced, for example, by electoral allegiances, wall murals, social organisations, etc. However, even these communities were not monolithic and their dominant identity was often secured by the ruthless suppression of dissent by whichever paramilitary that held sway. (169)

According to Greer then, those born into Catholic/Nationalist areas (or Protestant/Unionist areas), are intimidated into conformity with the militant majority. There are two problems with this. First, not all supporters of IRA violence lived in Catholic/Nationalist areas, and similarly on the Protestant/Unionist side. Second, this does not reflect my own experience of many years working and researching in both republican and loyalist areas where deep and sometimes violent divisions often fragment these communities. Disagreements over politics, identity, the use of violence and loyalty to the state were manifest in feuding, armed attacks and killings within these communities, sometime resulting in deaths, intimidation and people fleeing to other locations. Greer relies on this alleged homogeneity of suspect Irish communities to mark them as distinct from Muslims in Britain, who, Greer allows, are diverse in religion, ethnicity and nationality. But the Irish communities’ homogeneity is far from proven.

Conversely, Greer (2008) asserts that the “clear, discrete and limited geographical location” of Irish suspect communities distinguishes them from Muslims in Britain. Yet, segregation marks the demography of many British cities and towns and describes the distribution of many ethnic, religious and national minority groups in those locations. Whatever the original impetus for such spatial patterning, be it economic, or because of family ties, one can point to communities such as Tower Hamlets, or districts in cities such as Whitechapel in London, or whole cities, such as Bradford where Muslims have congregated and are concentrated. Segregation is not the prerogative of Northern Ireland, although it has taken a distinct and extreme form there.

Furthermore, one does not have to live in a segregated community to be suspect – or actually dangerous. IRA cells have rented accommodation in wealthy suburbs in order to exploit this myth. My own experience and that of many others of living in mixed areas, yet being suspect, is also illustrative of this.

Greer also asserts that to be a suspect community, the population concerned must be under “official suspicion”. The difference between being under “official suspicion” and being otherwise suspect is not clear. If a police officer suspects me, then I am under official suspicion, but if my neighbour suspects me, then I am not, according to Greer.

However, in 2009, the UK government announced the recruitment of 60,000 civilians throughout the UK to participate in their counterterrorism initiatives and form part of the government’s early warning system (House of Commons 2009). Is to be suspected by one of these quasi-civilians to be under official suspicion? When the lines between the security forces and civilians are increasingly blurred, it is the demarcation between being under “official suspicion” and being suspected by one’s neighbours that is blurred.

Is it Islamophobia or racism?

Lipschutz (1995) asserts that “[s]ecurity… is meaningless without an ‘other’ to help specify the conditions of insecurity” (1995, 9). The “othering” referred to by Lipschutz is the state-level division into two ideological camps, with the West characterised by the values of liberty, democracy and freedom, and the “other” camp seen as embodying antithetical values and goals and posing a threat to international security. Durkheim, using different terminology, pointed to the role of “othering” in identity formation: “[t]he lineation of the ‘in-group’ must necessarily entail its demarcation from the ‘out-group’ and that demarcation is an active and on-going part of identity formation” (Neumann 1998). Benedict Anderson’s portrayal of nationalism as an “imagined community” illustrates the role of “othering” in nation-building.

As a process of social differentiation, “othering” performs important psychological, social and ultimately political functions and has significant consequences for the “other” concerned. It ensures that the antagonistic and alienated perception of the “other” severely constrains any understanding of that “other” and their possible motives and experiences, whilst de-legitimising them as political actors and disqualifying any claims they might make on recognition or rights.

In the wake of 11 September 2001, the “other” formed quickly in the public mind, prompted by pronouncements from the Bush administration about the “axis of evil”. From the horror of the World Trade Center, a terrifying vision was conjured of a community of suspects’ intent on the annihilation of the American population and its way of life. This defining moment was, amongst other things, the beginning of the global “suspect community” of Muslims.

The practice of counterterrorism has led to the identification and “othering” of suspect communities through surveillance, profiling, stopping, searching, arrest and detention of supposed members of that suspect community. Some, such as Jean Charles de Menezes or Harry Stanley, are misidentified. These practices, witnessed by the public and represented in the media, create and consolidate a suspect community in the public eye (see Pantazis and Pemberton 2009; Nickels et al. 2012a), on the basis that “there is no smoke without fire”. Enhanced levels of public fear and the discourse of threat prepare the minds of the public for understanding this virtual “suspect community” as dangerous, antipathetic and traitorous. It becomes “understandable” – even public-spirited – to suspect the Irish or Muslims, and once suspected, it is a short leap to the attitude that to be Irish or Muslim is to be guilty

But is this, as Hillyard claims and Greer denies, institutionalised racism? Certainly, the targeting of the Irish as a suspect community offered fresh opportunities for unleashing the forces of racism and xenophobia. The identification of a person as a member of a suspect community was voiced in ways that were intertwined with and apparently indistinguishable from the practice of racism.

Whilst there have been recent important efforts to incorporate analysis of race and racism into the field of International Relations (see, especially, Chowdhry and Ria 2009, but also Chin 2009; Mittelman 2009), I would argue that the conjuring of the “suspect community” is not simply reducible to institutionalised racism, although racism may be deployed in the subjugation of the “suspect”.

Redefinition: a “community” in the securitised imagination

What distinguishes Greer’s – and Hillyard’s – definition of “suspect communities” from my own is that they both see them as an actual community with fixed characteristics, such as a location, or a homogenous set of beliefs, identifications and so on. Hillyard’s conception of the suspect community is that of a community targeted by certain legislation and policing and judicial practices. Whilst one can certainly see a suspect community in the abstract sense is so targeted, and the media do much to encourage the suspicion (see, for example, Nickels et al. 2012a, 2012b) with which the general public regard them, there are other significant dimensions to such communities. I wish to argue that whilst Hillyard sees the suspect community as formed by legislation and security practices, other significant moves and cultural, political and ideological discourses combine to construct and consolidate the suspect community in the mind of the fearful public, including those of the “suspects” themselves.

Benedict Anderson’s (1991) “imagined communities” are nationalist groupings constructed in the imagination of their members. The “nation” is created and sustained by the collective identification of its putative members, who, in their performance of the role of a nation, create and define what it is to be a member of that national grouping. Anderson’s nation “is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” (Anderson 1991, 224). For Anderson, the mobility of ideas ushered in by the revolution in printing supports the creation of such imagined communities, pre-dating Warner’s idea of a public created by “a space of discourse organised by nothing other than the discourse itself” (Warner 2002, 67). For Anderson (1991), imagined communities are both limited and sovereign: limited insofar that nations have “finite, if elastic boundaries, beyond which lie other nations” (224); and sovereign insofar as they conceive of themselves as self-determining, free from dynastic or other externally imposed power.

Finally, Anderson’s (1991) nation is a community because:

regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings. (224)

The “suspect community”, on the other hand, is constructed in the imagined fears of its non-members. Members of the “suspect community” have no essential bond with each other, since membership is defined in the imagination of non-members. Such bonds may develop on the basis of common experiences and interests in avoiding being targeted as suspicious, bound together by shared experiences of persecution. Unlike Anderson’s (1991) “imagined communities” which are created by the collective identification of its putative members, membership of the suspect group is attributed to suspects by those who suspect them. One “discovers” one’s suspectedness by performances of suspicion directed at the suspect by the police, the media or a member of the public. Thus, it is non-suspects who create and define what it is to be a member of the suspect group.

Like Anderson’s “imagined community”, members will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them or even hear of them; but unlike them, the suspect community is not created by their identification with other suspects. Rather, the community exists in the public suspicious mind, a public organised and created by a space of discourse focussed on security, insecurity, terrorism and threat and reproduced by media, security practitioners and political actors (Nickels et al. 2012a). Like Anderson’s “imagined communities”, “suspect communities” are limited, but these limits are fluid and boundaries between suspects and non-suspects are permeable and apparent to those imaging the suspect community, but not to the suspects themselves. “Suspect communities” are imagined as possessing both the power of malevolent threat, and violent agency. Yet, once identified as a member of a “suspect community”, suspects are often subject to legal exceptionalism and extraordinary security practices that deny them the most basic of rights and impose upon them external power on behalf of the suspicious and fearful public. It is this fearful public that unites to make it possible for people to both support the use of lethal force and military action and “willingly to die for such limited imaginings” (Anderson 1991, 224).

Anderson’s “imagined communities” can be seen in the context of the social constructionism of Said’s (1995) “imagined geographies”, through which power is marshalled and provide a means of controlling and subordinating territories and objectifying their populations. Ó’ Tuathail (1996) argues that geopolitical knowledge is a form of imagined geography. Such processes are historically consistent, as Gregory (2004) argues. Said’s same “imagined geographies” are evident in ideological and political construction of the war on terror. Both portray the Muslim world and Islam as backward, barbaric, antipathetic and uncivilised, thus justifying in the name of progress and self-defence, military intervention latterly in Afghanistan and Iraq. These geographies, analysed and de-constructed, reveal their inherent power relations and the drive towards subordination vested in them.

Eagleton (1989) in his play about the trial of Oscar Wilde has Oscar Wilde assert at his trial:

… I object to this trial on the grounds that no Irishman can receive a fair hearing in an English court because the Irish are figments of the English imagination. I am not really here; I am just one of your racial fantasies. (Eagleton 1989, 46)

Eagleton’s idea, expressed through the vehicle of a fictionalised Wilde, that the court was not dealing with Wilde but with a fantasy, nicely illustrates how the “suspect community” might be re-conceptualised as a fantasy product of the securitised imagination.

A “suspect community”, then, can be seen as a group of people, or a sub-set of the population constructed as “suspect” by mechanisms deployed by the state to ensure national or state “security” and reinforced by societal responses and social practices. These mechanisms are directed at one specific population identified by an ethnic, religious, racial, national or other marker and the threat to that security is seen as emanating exclusively or primarily from them. The nature of the marker is contextually determined. So accent or home address is the marker of Irishness during the IRA campaign, whilst dress or appearance is the marker for being Muslim in the context of a threat from Al Qaeda or other violent jihadi groups. Thus, counterterrorist operations, practices of surveillance, profiling, arrest, detention, exclusion, control orders and rendition, and media coverage of these practices, are focused on them. This creates in the public mind a suspiciousness of people apparently in that category and renders them a “suspect community”. These practices shape the experiences and perceptions of members of that “suspect community”, in some senses, creating bonds of understanding between people with a common sense of being suspected.

The deployment of securitising mechanisms by the state is justified in the context of the amplification and over-generalisation of selected evidence of actual danger (Mueller 2006). The fantasy of danger, the over-estimation of risk and the resultant proliferation of fear in the population is achieved by the practices of securitisation, policing and media coverage. These practices combine to construct stereotyped “folk devils” (Cohen 1973), the collective manifestation of which is “suspect community”.

In the mind of the men in that restaurant in South London, and in the minds of many at that time, I was seen as no different to fervent IRA members and their community of supporters. This is because the “community” that is suspect is not assembled, as other communities are, out of actual commonalities of interest or identification or commonalities between members, but rather out of perceived or imagined commonalities that are shared with “othered” subjects in the mind of the “general public” – stereotypes, in other words.

On this basis, I contend that the contemporary suspect community is identified as Muslim. Simply being Muslim, or “looking like a Muslim” or being a national of countries in the Middle East, is sufficient in most instances to qualify you as a “suspect”. But non-Muslims are also targeted: Sikhs were targeted after 9/11 having been mistaken for Muslims (Sidhu and Gohil 2008), as was Jean Charles de Menezes. Muslims, and the Irish before them, are seen as an amorphous, threatening mass, undifferentiated in politics, nationality, belief, ethnicity, dress or lifestyle, with widespread consequences for the Muslims, their position and relationships to the wider society.

Effects

The existence of a risk and threat of extremist violence emanating from a tiny minority of Muslims, amongst others, is not denied. The “suspect community”, however, composed of those from whom the threat is imagined to emanate, is a creation of the securitised imagination. The existence of this “imaginary suspect community” determines the nature and content of transactions between those informed by the securitised imagination and those they imagine to be “suspect”. Harry Stanley – even though he was not Irish, far less armed – was an Irish suspect. Jean Charles de Menezes, although not Muslim, was a Muslim suspect.

Increasingly, the boundaries between security practices and media showcasing become more blurred with high profile police raids and arrests (Pantazis and Pemberton 2009; Nickels et al. 2012a). Theatrical policing practices, such as those used in the Forest Gate raid (BBC News 2006) – which proved fruitless in terms of apprehending terrorists, yet an innocent man was killed – use the extensive powers available to the police and target members of the suspect community. These are presented as reassuring, necessary to the fight against terrorism, and the price “we” pay for security – except the price is paid, not by “us” but by “them” – the “suspect community”. This occurs in the context of increased militarisation of the police and contests over police accountability. Once created, the suspect community can be the happy hunting ground for practitioners of a range of counterterrorism practices, from stop and search through to extraordinary rendition and torture.

Maz Jobrani illustrates the double-bind, the double threat, which faces the member of the suspect community in his humorous depiction of a “suspect” at the airport (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = fYlaIxNX01Q). The member of the suspect community, boarding a plane, shares the same fears as other travellers of being a victim of, for example, Al Qaeda. Yet, in addition, the member of the suspect community must deal with the fear that they will be taken for a member of Al Qaeda. Members of “suspect communities” are subject to the threat and effects of political violence just as much, if not more, than other members of the public.

The case of two Muslim Imams, Mohamed Zaghloul and Masoud Rahman, is instructive. They were travelling to the North American Imam Federation Conference on Islamophobia on 5 June 2011. They were screened at the airport and then boarded Delta Flight 5452 which pushed back and commenced taxiing. However, the Captain decided that he was not comfortable with these two Imams on board, returned to the gate and requested they be removed. Back at the gate, the Captain could not be persuaded, even though no passengers felt uncomfortable. The Captain holds the absolute legal authority in such matters and he had the two passengers removed. They were de-planed and put on the next flight. The Aviation Safety Authority issued an apology and awarded them compensation (Boarding Area/Flying with Fish 2013).

During the Northern Ireland conflict, I and other “suspects” also had to live with the dangers of the conflict itself. The security forces were not perceived as protecting that “suspect community”, and consequently they did not make me feel safer from these threats. Since the inception of the war on terror, more Muslims than Westerners have died, the majority of these being civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, again, in spite of the dominant portrayal of the threat being against Westerners, with Muslims as posing the threat. My security and sense of safety, as a member of a “suspect community” is, by virtue of my membership of that community, dispensable in the interests of what the state considers to be the “greater good”. The paradox is apparent: the “suspect” – the source of threat – according to the evidence, is often more endangered than those s/he supposedly endangers.

A range of studies have examined the effects of counterterrorism on “suspect communities”. Nickels et al. (2012a) point to media pressures on both Muslim and Irish communities to “stand up to extremists”. They also argue that the creation of the “suspect community” fosters a socio-political climate permissive of civil liberties violations. Millings (2013) has looked at the impact of policing on young British Asian men’s sense of identity and belonging. Mythen and Khan’s (n.d.) qualitative study of young Muslims in the North West reported physical attack, being spat on, verbal abuse, damage to property and having clothing forcibly torn or removed, and surveillance, scrutiny and intimidation at the hands of the police.

Typically, those identified as members of a suspect community will not rely on the state to provide for their security. In Northern Ireland’s nationalist community, the security forces were regarded as a source of additional threat, and this perception has been supported with evidence that the security forces were, in fact, acting in collusion with at least one of the loyalist paramilitary groups that posed a threat to Catholic civilians (Bell 2003). Alienation from police (see Millings 2013 on young Muslim men) and the rule of law which is used against “suspects”, can lead to the perception that the state, not terrorism, represents the source of greatest threat to their security.

Furthermore, as the process of alienation advances, the alienated may well come to regard the terrorist as their only line of defence against an oppressive state. This has been manifest repeatedly in conflicts from Northern Ireland to Sri Lanka, Iraq and Afghanistan, and globally in the war on terror. In the absence of the ability to turn to agents of the state in order to secure one’s safety and freedom, those identified as suspect and the communities they come from have a sense of being left undefended, insecure and are thus more, not less likely to turn to non-state actors. The pastoral activities of Hamas, Hizballah, the IRA, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia: Ejército del Pueblo (FARC) and other groups and their delivery of functions ordinarily provided by the state, combined with their ability to represent and express, often through violence, the antagonism felt by many in suspect communities towards the state, explains precisely how the state loses the naively framed “battle for hearts and minds”.

The “battle for hearts and minds” is naive, it is argued, because it fails to engage with the problem that for many minorities to embrace the state is to engage in a denial of the self, and self-hatred (see Memmi 1965; see also Goffman 2000). In his semi-autobiographical novel, The Pillar of Salt, Memmi describes it thus:

One can, of course, learn to accept anything at the cost of an enormous effort and a vast weariness. But, before this happens, one resists and hates oneself; or else, to defy the scorn of others, one asserts one’s own ugliness and even exaggerates it so as to grin and bear it. (Memmi [1953] 1990)

This paradox lies at the heart of the counter-productivity of contemporary counterterrorist measures. The validity of a state to represent all its citizens, when in the eyes of the global community it is clearly transgressing the rights and failing to protect the interests of some of those citizens, weakens the authority of that state in the international arena.

Maz Jobrani, in his account of being of Iranian origin with a beard in an airport, uses humour to caricature how being imagined as “suspect” can impact on our perceptions of ourselves:

And then I came to the metal detector, and that thing just makes you feel guilty anyway… And I walk through and it’s like [Screech] and I‘m like, dammit I’m a terrorist, I knew it, I knew it! And they are like, ‘Sir, calm down, it’s just your belt!’ And I’m like, how do you know? Check my bags! I’m not getting on an airplane with me! I scare me! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = fYlaIxNX01Q)

This recognition of oneself as suspect, seeing oneself as others see us, creates for the suspect extensive and “real human and personal dilemmas” (O’Dowd, 64). These are described by Memmi (1965) in relation to colonialism in his classic work, “The Coloniser and the Colonised”. Kazim Ali describes the inescapability of being trapped in the identity of the suspect, by “the violence in [his accuser’s] heart”.

With caricatured and hateful images of what it is to be a Muslim circulated on the internet, the popular press enters the mind’s eye of the general public and warps their ability to see the real people to which such labels are attached. By just “being”, one is a suspect, one sees oneself represented in ways that are alien to how one understands oneself to be, and this, in turn shapes what it is to “be oneself”. As an adult, I was frustrated by my inability to escape. I lived abroad. But when I was abroad, I hungered for news of home. I worried. On more than one occasion, when I was away for a month or a year, a friend or a colleague was killed, a place I knew or frequented was obliterated, or some new “security measure” was visited on this vague grouping of which I was supposedly a part, and increasingly identified with. When living in Berlin, or New York or Massachusetts, amongst friendly audiences, I was invited to speak about the situation back home. I was pitied, or exoticised. People looked at me askance, wondering how a human being like me – like them – could live in a place like Northern Ireland.

Like Ali, I could not successfully represent myself as the law-abiding, non-violent, valuable citizen that I thought that I could be. I was disrespected, attacked, blamed to my face; I heard on the BBC and read in the newspapers what everyone thought about “people like me”, and it was not good. I overheard remarks; I witnessed the unjust treatment and persecution of “people like me”. Every miscarriage of justice perpetrated against “people like me”, every targeted assassination, every justification of these events, were lessons to me. The lesson was that to simply be me was dangerous. I was endangered by the supposedly benign, “good” respectable, mainstream forces in the society that were designed to keep people (except not like me) safe – from people like me.

According to Memmi, this process of escape or assimilation (which is often not available to the suspect in any case) involves “impoverishing himself, tearing himself away from his true self … In order to free himself, at least so he believes, he agrees to destroy himself” (187–88). But this process involves “hid[ing] his past, his traditions, in fact all his origins which have become ignominious” (189). Memmi, however, sees this process as doomed, since:

The candidate for assimilation almost always comes to tire of the exorbitant price which he must pay and which he never finishes owing. He discovers with alarm the full meaning of his attempt … Must he, all his life, be ashamed of what is most real to him, of the only things not borrowed? (189)

In my own case, the frustration at the inescapability of it turned to rage at a system that seemed ubiquitous, that relegated me to the margins of dangerousness, that considered me lesser, to be watched carefully, a trouble-maker. Undoubtedly, in later days, some of this rage was stimulated by what Judith Butler (1999) refers to as “gender trouble”. Nowadays, even a joking reference to me as a “trouble-maker” re-stimulates that frustration, dating to a time when I, like many others in my situation, recognised that my dignity, self-respect and mental health depended on resistance. Most significantly, my feelings of enmity towards those who regarded me as sub-human poisoned me. My politics became warped for a time by a sense that the enemy of my enemy must be my friend. The growth of my own schadenfreude dehumanised me, just as I and my like had been dehumanised by the ascription of suspiciousness.

Within this process of “dehumanisation by schadenfreude” lies the process of alienation and the “radicalisation” which government is preoccupied with preventing or arresting. Because of this, reversing the process of “radicalisation” will require the dismantling of the security apparatus and media operations that construct suspect communities out of ethnic and religious groups, and the undermining of racism and Islamophobia. Otherwise, it will require fostering an unprecedented outbreak of shame and self-hate among Muslims.

Methods of escape: “passing”

Mythen and Khan’s (n.d.) qualitative study of young Muslims in the North West described how respondents would “deflect dangerousness” and “perform safe identities”. Indeed, some members of racial, ethnic, class and sexual minorities attempt to “pass” as members of the dominant group (Kawash 1996; Williams 1997; Gaudin, n.d; Robinson 1994; Butler 1997) out of shame and internalised racism, sexism or class prejudice, to avoid bigotry and discrimination – or in more extreme cases to avoid being targeted by violent attack or genocide.

As a researcher in Belfast during the conflict, children I interviewed from a Catholic area in North Belfast who used a swimming pool in a Protestant area described how, in order to safely use the pool, they adopted Protestant-sounding Christian names instead of their real Irish names: Teresa became Hazel, Sean became William, and so on, so that they could “pass” as Protestant (Smyth 2004). Members of suspect communities can attempt to avoid being identified as such by changing their name, their accent, their address, their style of dress, even their diet, or their social habits, or other aspects of their lifestyle. They can attempt to “pass” as a member of a more benignly regarded group. However, it is a hazardous strategy. If they are discovered, the suspicion with which they are regarded is redoubled, since by attempting to hide their real identity, they may be assumed to be attempting to spy or infiltrate.

Being suspect also creates a specific self-consciousness. This is evident in Jobrani’s darkly humorous account of air travel as a Middle Eastern man who attempts to “pass” as all-American:

… you don’t want to be from the Middle East and have a beard and be at an airport… you want to enunciate, you don’t want to have an accent at all…I was like ‘… Carry ons? I’m just carrying on this American flag! Yee Ha!’ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = fYlaIxNX01Q)

In my own case, and that of other Irish “suspects”, the Irish peace process transformed our lives, not only by the diminution of violence, but by the change in how we were and are now regarded and treated. The visceral label of “suspect” that we invariably wore slowly melted away. Heathrow airport may still have the corridor leading only to Belfast flights, but it no longer contains the Special Branch Officers, the dogs and other security apparatus it contained during the “Troubles”. Then, we had to arrive early for flights in order to clear security, whereas now everyone has to arrive early for all flights and everyone is searched: we are not the ones singled out for special treatment, we are no more suspect than anyone else – and less suspect, of course than those identified, rightly or wrongly, as Muslim.

The war on terror and the enemy within

A number of factors make for a wider climate of increasing intolerance of political dissent, especially in relation to foreign policy. The first factor is the framing of security since 2001 as a “war” on terror and the discourse of combat, neo-orientalism, militarism. This has resulted in a bifurcation between “us” and “them” – George W. Bush’s pronunciation, “You are either with us, or you are with the enemy”, encapsulates this.

This has made for a domestic hegemonic order that is characterised by bifurcated political thinking and suspicion and resentment of those who criticise these wars in particular. This climate of intolerance of dissent has meant that critics of the war on terror or those who oppose the war in Iraq have been at pains to clarify that, whilst they oppose government foreign policy on the war, they support the soldiers who fought those wars (De Wind 2011).

Suspects, political engagement, quietism, being a “good Muslim”

This context of intense controversies and the “inviolable” quality of foreign policy makes the articulation of critiques of Western foreign policy challenging for anyone (see, for example, the Iraq Inquiry). For “suspect” groups, to criticise foreign policy is at best to attract censure, and at worst, to risk one’s safety. This has produced a number of effects.

First, it has produced a trend of quietism arising from the desire of many Muslims to avoid being seen as “dangerous” or “critical”, and the wish to avoid the over-reaction to even mildly critical analysis of foreign policy (see Mythen, Walklate, and Khan 2009 on managing “risky” identities and Lindekilde 2012 on the effects of the “ideal citizen”). This quietism involves abstaining from critical engagement with government security practices and foreign policy. Muslims who engage in such criticism risk being labelled “radical”, or exerting a radicalising effect on others (Fisher 2004), or being accused of supporting “terrorism”. These latter two activities can lead to strict legal penalties such as the imprisonment of Tarek Mehanna in Dallas for criticising US foreign policy (Aziz/Christian Science Monitor 2012). Other penalties have included deportation, the imposition of control orders, alongside the other risks of attack from right wing groups.

The second effect is the pressure on those perceived by the wider society to be Muslim to be “good Muslims”, which requires of them specific forms of political performance. For example, Muslims have taken to the streets as Muslims to condemn the attack, following the death of Lee Rigby, an off-duty British soldier killed in Woolwich in 2013 by two Muslim men (Childs 2013; Politics.co.uk 2013). Senior Imams were at pains to condemn the attack, and street demonstrations of solidarity by groups of Muslims sought to distance Muslims from the killing (The Independent 2013). That Muslims feel the need to manifest their position as Muslims in relation to such acts suggests that they wish to avoid being tarred with the same brush, to be seen as “good Muslims”. Thus, they must avoid any critical political engagement and be proactive in their condemnations of opposition and violence.

Mythen and Khan’s (n.d.) study of young Muslims discusses how some young Muslims have been “responsibilised”, and who performed the role of ambassadors for Islam, providing “potted accounts of Islam and/or explaining Islamic customs to curious non-Muslim Britons” (Mythen and Khan: n.d., 13), whilst other young Muslims resisted or were infuriated at the need for such roles. Mythen, Walklate and Khan (2009) also discuss how young Muslims experience frustration, stigma and anger in the face of their treatment as suspects, alongside exhortations to “integrate” and de-radicalise “vulnerable” fellow young Muslims, whilst feeling unable to voice their views on British foreign policy without being considered “radical” (see also Lindekilde 2012).

Muslim engagement with foreign policy

The effect of this has been to severely constrict the political space available to Muslims to engage critically with foreign policy. There are few, if any, political outlets for valid and democratic critique and opposition to foreign policy. With ongoing drone attacks in Pakistan and a large British Pakistani population acutely aware of the mounting civilian casualty count, the alienation and marginalisation, particularly of young Muslims and their outrage at wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, has very few legitimate outlets. When leaders in Muslim communities act to distance themselves from violence, these elders come to be seen as “uncles”, soft politically and therefore incapable of truly representing the strength of Muslim views and interests. This dearth of critical political space can only contribute to a situation where violence comes to be seen as understandable and one of the few outlets for political frustration, and thus the contribution to so-called “radicalisation”.

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of part of this article was presented at the Symposium on Detention and Rendition in the “War on Terror”, London School of Economics and Political Science, Department of International Relations. I am grateful for the comments of three anonymous reviewers and the additional comments of Ken Booth, Jenny Mathers, Ayla Gol, Simona Rentea, Margaret Ames, Jeroen Gunning, Richard Jackson, Adele Stanislaus and Roz Goldie on earlier drafts of this article. Any errors are mine.

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Marie Breen-Smyth

Marie Breen-Smyth is Associate Dean International in the Faculty of Arts and Human Sciences and Professor of International Politics in the School of Politics, University of Surrey.

Notes

^1. This is an account of the author’s experience, written as part of a larger memoir project, which focuses on the experience of political violence. It is, as yet, unpublished. Throughout this article, I deploy autoethnography (Anderson 2006), sifting and using illustrations from my own experience of having lived for three decades as part of a suspect community, being Irish, from a Catholic/Nationalist community in Northern Ireland, an experience shaped and limited by my gender, class, age and living and work locations, and by living in a mixed marriage (in the Northern Ireland sense).