Editors’ introduction: white supremacy in the age of (counter-)terror

The right-wing attack on the US capital on 6 January 2021 dramatically illuminated the cultural consequences of Trumpism as a euphemism for White Supremacist violence and political thought in the United States. The egregious abuse of executive authority and federal collusion by the Trump administration during both the attempted coup and Black Lives Matter protests during the Summer of Racial Reckoning, for example, saliently marked the convergence of state-sponsored violence, White supremacy, and post-9/11 war on terror discourses, as they were mobilised to frame a new (race) war “at home,” deepening the erasure of constitutional protections in the name of so-called national security.

Rather than exceptionalise Trumpism, how might we understand the historical legacies underpinning such present-day political formations – the colonial logics, governance structures, and dominant cultural discourses actively shaping contemporary cultural conceptions of “threat”, “terror”, and “security”? How, for example, have the consequences of global war on terrorism discourses and policies shaped, and been shaped by, Trumpism, the global alt-right, and transnational movements for White supremacy? What political futures will Trumpism continue to conjure amidst new frontiers of security and emergency, at home and abroad, and what political possibilities does the current crisis in American democracy offer for social transformation by way of attending to the legacies of White supremacy, both in its most extreme forms, evident in the January 6^th attack and escalating defence budgets, and in its more mundane manifestations embedded in structural conditions, like lack of access to adequate healthcare, housing, education, and food?

This special section seeks to understand the White supremacist logics of contemporary terrorism discourses and counter-terrorism policies. Although White supremacist violence continues to be an active threat to national and community security, the racialised discourses of modern-day terrorism studies continue to evade labelling White supremacy extremists and contending with the material violence of White nationalism. “Trumpism”, for example, has proliferated the rise of far-right nationalisms, compounding authoritarianism, and White supremacist vigilantism in the US and beyond. A popular euphemism for both the Trump presidency and its White supremacist political agenda, “Trumpism” has also witnessed the resurgence of anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and anti-Black and anti-Muslim racism on a global scale. Yet despite the obvious connections between Trumpism, White supremacy, and global increases in White nationalist vigilante violence, counter-terrorism discourses and policies continue to focus on the racialised bodies of Black, Brown, and Muslim “others” (see Nguyen 2019; and this entire special issue). Such logics underscore the widespread failure of US intelligence in preventing the attacks on the Capital, noting how agencies were “blinded” to seeing the threat of “a broad right-wing [White supremacist] movement come together”, focusing instead on “lone wolf” actors and the alleged threat of “leftist groups” (Goldman and Feuer 2023).

Although the political violence that unfolded on 6 January 2021 at the US Capitol has since been labelled an act of “domestic terrorism” by the FBI and Jan 6 committee, dismantling the structural power of White supremacy in national security discourses and counter-terror policies is proving much more difficult to achieve. For example, there is a growing number of governmental entities and think tanks working to re-evaluate the growing threat of White Supremacist groups in the United States (see Jones, Doxsee, and Harrington 2020; at the Center for Strategic and International Studies; the US Department of Homeland Security’s Homeland Threat Assessment report, 2020; the Brookings Institute 2022; the Center for American Progress and the McCain Institute for International Leadership, etc.). Reaching congressional consensus on a federal domestic terrorism statute to consistently criminalise and prosecute groups and actors committing White supremacist political violence, however, has yet to be achieved, despite evidence that White supremacy extremists remain “the most persistent and lethal threat in the Homeland” (US Department of Homeland Security 2020).

Therefore, although governmental efforts under the Biden administration have worked to define, label, and understand the growing threat of White Supremacist political violence more accurately, the racialised histories and apparatuses of counter-terrorism policy and practice continue to sustain the structural power of White Supremacy, which, at their core, is the result of extant political ideologies incumbent to the nation’s very founding. The outcome of the 2020 U.S. presidential election remains unsettled in American public memory at the time of this writing. The 2022 mid-term elections ushered in a string of wins by far-right political candidates, with Trump endorsees winning over 80% of their congressional races (see Huggins 2022; Bender 2022). And, with the United States House Select Committee only recently bringing its nearly two-year-long investigation on the January 6 insurrection to a close, the cultural consequences of Trumpism are still largely unfolding. Rather than simply reframe the January 6 attack as an example of contemporary domestic terrorism, how might we theorise it – along with Trumpism itself – as a logical expression of structural White supremacy?

This special section explores how the emergence of Trumpism, alongside the political-legal framework of the US-led global war on terror, has sustained the conditions for White supremacist violence, racialised surveillance, and other oppressive policies, in the post-9/11 decades. In challenging the orthodoxy of terrorism discourses and knowledge production, critical studies on terrorism have carved out the intellectual, political, and material space to critique how racial and gendered logics continue to shape terrorism discourses and policies, and how conventional methodological approaches to the study of political violence limit how such violence is knowable (see Jackson, Breen-Smyth, and Gunning 2009; Jackson et al. 2011; Dixit and Stump 2015; Toros 2017; Erlenbusch-Anderson 2018; Jackson et al. 2019). Here, power enters to mark certain forms of violence as terrorist violence, while colonial formations and their residue continue to instruct governance structures to police and criminalise certain forms of violence and not others (see Kawash 1999; Jackson 2007; Miller and Mills 2009; McQuade 2021; Ahmad and Monaghan 2022; Zalewski 2013; Monaghan and Molnar 2016; Groothuis 2020; Norris 2020; Trindade Viana and dos Santos da Silva 2021). Building on these interventions, this special issue crucially investigates the symbiotic relationship between White supremacy, the global war on terrorism, and the enduring legacies and logics of state-sanctioned violence, containment, and control, and how these relationships come to bear on present-future questions of safety and security, transnationally.

Engaging interdisciplinary scholars at the intersections of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexualities Studies, and Critical Human Geography, this special section critically interrogates counter-terrorism as a tool of White supremacy. During his time in office, President Trump routinely wielded global war on terror discourses to garner political support for his administration’s anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant policies. Presidential tweets disseminating unproven claims of Islamic prayer mats discovered at the U.S.-Mexico border, for example, recentered public attention to the threat of international terrorism and post-9/11 border security (see Qiu 2019). Such claims aided the administration in ramping up its domestic surveillance programs against Arab, Black, Latinx, and immigrant communities of colour, under the guise of counter-terrorism. Meanwhile, funding put in place by the Obama administration to direct governmental agencies to (nominally) curb White supremacist terror threats were strategically cut under Trump. By placing Critical Terrorism Studies in conversation with Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, this edited collection investigates the various ways the state has invoked “terrorism” and “national security” to intensify global policing and security regimes and therefore White supremacy itself.

Placing Critical Terrorism Studies in conversation with Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, this special section approaches the January 6 insurrection as a conjuncture. A conjunctural approach to the critical study of political violence means we must understand the multiple economic, political, social, ecological, and medical crises – and their contradictions – that coalesced at the US Capitol. To do so, this edited collection begins with Louise Cainkar’s juxtaposition of the “fine-tuned” effort to identify and arrest every individual who participated in the January 6 attempted takeover with the blanket surveillance and apprehension of entire Muslim communities following the September 11 attacks. This comparative analysis illustrates how White supremacist logics criminalise entire communities of colour while searching for individual perpetrators of White supremacist violence at the US Capitol. In this national security approach, White supremacy is the problem of a handful of aberrant actors, rather than an institutional problem that requires structural change.

Next, Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo and Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo examine the militarisation of disease following the September 11^th terrorist attacks in order to understand how the January 6 attempted coup brought together (former) members of the military, White supremacist organisations, and regular citizens alike, to reassert White nationalism as a mode of counter-terrorism. To do so, the authors situate January 6 in the longstanding White supremacist narratives that justified militarised responses to infectious diseases as a way to enhance national security.

With these rich analyses of January 6 and its White supremacist roots in hand, Carla Angulo-Pasel takes us to the US-Mexico border to understand how President Trump’s White supremacist spectre of the “Migrant Caravans” contributed to the remaking of the “war on drugs” into another front of the global war on terrorism, marking migrants as imminent “terror” threats to US national security – in need of both its defence and containment. She demonstrates how these racialised and gendered taxonomies differentiate between “foreign” and domestic bodies within national security policies and practices in ways that continue to exonerate the violence perpetrated by governmental and non-state actors working to “defend” US borders.

Expanding our conjunctural approach, Jacque Micieli-Voutsinas re-historicises the emergence of Trumpism in the post-9/11 era by locating President Trump’s evocation of the September 11^th attacks and their memory, within broader efforts to intensify White supremacist ideology and legitimise its resultant violence as forms of “counter-terrorism.” Her historicization re-evaluates the convergence of anti-Black and anti-Muslim racism in recent American cultural memory. To this end, she argues that anti-Blackness serves as an instructive cultural archive for contemporary forms of state-sanctioned violence aimed at Brown and Black communities in the post-9/11 era.

Sabrina Alimahomed and Yazan Zahzah relatedly illustrate the symbiotic relationship between liberal feminisms and transnational securitisation programs. They contend that while there has been critical examination of the White supremacist and Islamophobic nature of Countering Violent Extremism, it is essential to examine the co-optation of feminist frameworks within the CVE’s “women’s rights” arm: Women, Peace, and Security. Ultimately, the two argue that by invisibilizing grassroots, Muslim feminist voices, state sponsored security programs are able to undercut community based autonomous movements, further imperial security regimes, and sustain war on terror economies.

Finally, Nicole Nguyen and Yazan Zahzah close the special section by examining the 1983 bombing of US military barracks in Beirut and, in doing so, thinking through the relationship between power, politics, and violence. Their analysis outlines the limitations of the contemporary concept of terrorism in understanding political violence and therefore offers counterviolence as an alternative frame capable of interrogating the social contexts, power relations, and material conditions that give rise to violence.

It is our hope that the articles in this special section will provide readers not with definitive answers, but with new starting points for developing further inquiry and analysis into histories of political violence, with the goal of critically re-evaluating the continued utility of “terrorism” as both a field of study and global security lexicon. Instead, we envision a future where counter-terrorism practices, policies, and discourse are actively dismantled, alongside with the White supremacist logics intrinsic to their development and design.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the N/A [N/A].

Notes on contributors

Jacque Micieli-Voutsinas

Jacque Micieli-Voutsinas, PhD, is a critical museum and heritage studies scholar with research and teaching expertise on 9/11 memory and landscapes of terrorism, broadly defined. Her research program explores the evocative power of places of difficult heritage to cultivate public emotion (such as fear, empathy, and hope) and generate a collective sense of community in the wake of traumatizing events. She is particularly interested in trauma-informed museum practices and the pedagogical power of heritage landscapes to advance or impede social change. Drawing on anti-racist, queer, and feminist theories of intersectionality, affect, and emotion, her work on heritage landscapes critically interrogates dominant narratives of cultural memory and questions of historical justice. She is an Assistant Professor and Co-Director of the Graduate Program of Museum Studies at the University of Florida, Gainesville.

Nicole Nguyen

Nicole Nguyen (she/her) is associate professor of criminology, law, & justice and educational policy studies. She also is a 2022 Soros Justice Fellow. As a feminist geographer, Nicole ethnographically investigates the intersections of national security, war, and US public schooling. This research agenda contributes to, and draws on, grassroots struggles challenging racialized policing, war, and empire, particularly in collaboration with community organizations like Vigilant Love. Nicole teaches classes on the school-prison nexus, alternatives to incarceration, and qualitative writing. From 2018 to 2022, she led the College's Creating Cultural Competencies initiative, which included curricula and teacher workshops related to countering anti-Muslim racism in schools and classrooms. With Dan Cohen and Alice Huff, she co-created the Critical Geographies of Education specialty group of the American Association of Geographers (AAG), which works to promote, organize, and advance critical geographic explorations of education and schooling; support the scholarly growth of critical geographers of education; and contribute to social movements related to struggles over schooling.