Homegrown. Piotr M. Szpunar
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House Committee on Internal Security held hearings and published a staff study under the rubric of terrorism.14
Around the same time, an academic field began to take shape around the notion of terrorism, a key landmark of which was the 1977 establishment of Terrorism: An International Journal. The connection between government agencies and the academy in ushering in an era in which political violence was increasingly made sense of as terrorism cannot be understated. Researchers and agency representatives attended the same conferences and government perspectives were regularly published in academic journals; Stampnitzky vividly outlines the details and nuances of this process. The resulting alignment of interests is unsurprising: one Cold War–era study asserted that 90 percent of terrorist groups either were Marxist or had pro-Marxist sympathies.15 Similarly predictable is that even in the proliferation of definitions and debates about terrorism that began to emerge at the time, much of the field of terrorism studies adopted an uncritical statist view that precluded or explained away the possibility of “state terrorism.”16 In effect, the delegitimizing valence of terrorism—which was never done away with in the transformation of terrorism from epithet to refrain—was maintained and institutionalized under the guise of objective inquiry in favor of the state. This relationship continues into the present through journals, think tanks, and sanctioned talking heads on network news.
Early on, the purview of terrorism was international in scope, concentrated on foreign policy with a particular emphasis on how left-wing and revolutionary groups affected the interests of the United States. In other words, terrorism was largely a foreign land. For example, an early classification of terrorist organizations mentioned only one US group.17 More revealing in this respect is terrorism’s initial migration into the US Legal Code. First introduced by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, the definition in the code currently cited by legislation was introduced by the 1987 Foreign Relations Authorization Act. These acts placed terrorism into Titles 50 (War and National Defense) and 22 (Foreign Relations and Intercourse), respectively; that is, they firmly situated terrorism in the realm of foreign policy.18 A preoccupation with the foreign or international continued into the 1990s and beyond as domestic groups were mentioned only in passing in many academic studies. The work of one prominent commentator on terrorism, journalist Brigitte L. Nacos, is indicative. Her 1994 Terrorism and the Media made no mention of domestic groups. The second edition of the book changed the subtitle to include the Oklahoma City bombing. In a later work, Mass-Mediated Terrorism, she asserted that the incident brought about an increased awareness of domestic terrorism in the United States but did not devote any significant attention to domestic terrorism until her 2005 Terrorism and Counterterrorism.
Despite the preeminent focus placed on the world outside of the United States, over time domestic spaces incrementally garnered more attention, altering the territory enclosed by the terrorism refrain. While the Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations has never been replaced by a list of domestic terror groups, the FBI was nonetheless designated as the lead agency on terrorism within the United States in 1982. The agency focused on a variety of groups, such as Puerto Rican separatists and racist right-wing groups under the umbrella of “Aryan Nation Affiliates.”19 It was not until 1992, however, that a distinction between international and domestic varieties of terrorism was entrenched in the US Legal Code. From the mid- to late 1980s and into the 1990s, academics followed suit and a variety of extremisms within America increasingly found their way into the pages of journals and books about terrorism. This included the racist, white supremacist right, abortion-clinic arsons and bombings—which, at the time, were increasing in frequency and exposure—and environmental terrorism or ecoterrorism. While the state and its violence was rarely the subject of inquiry, forms of racist violence endemic to US history were partially absorbed into discourses of terrorism, partially, it suffices to say, because the categorization of racist violence as terrorism remains more inconsistent than other forms.20
In 1995 two white supremacists brought down much of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building by detonating a forty-eight-hundred-pound truck bomb. The Oklahoma City bombing was certainly a catalyst in annexing domestic spaces into the territory of terrorism. More importantly, it was also in the unsettled dust of the attack that “homegrown terrorism” was first uttered in US political discourse (the reasons and repercussions of which will be discussed in conjunction with the racialization of Arabs and Muslims below). Homegrown terrorism became a permanent fixture in security discourse a decade later in the wake of the 2005 London bombings when it was discovered that the perpetrators had grown up in the United Kingdom. In the United States, the term became widespread around 2009. While homegrown and domestic are often used interchangeably, the Department of Homeland Security offers the following definition:
A homegrown violent extremist (HVE) is a person of any citizenship who has lived and/or operated primarily in the United States or its territories who advocates, is engaged in, or is preparing to engage in ideologically-motivated terrorist activities (including providing support to terrorism) in furtherance of political or social objectives promoted by a foreign terrorist organization, but is acting independently of direction by a foreign terrorist organization. HVEs are distinct from traditional domestic terrorists who engage in unlawful acts of violence to intimidate civilian populations or attempt to influence domestic policy without direction from or influence from a foreign actor.21
Much like the increased focus on domestic terrorism before it, homegrown terrorism also reconfigures the territory of terrorism. It does so not by expanding the space encompassed therein, but by altering the organization of the terrorism refrain in a more fundamental way. At first encompassing largely foreign actors, then an increasing amount of domestic players, with homegrown, a global quality emerges. The once guiding spatial distinction (domestic/foreign) collapses in homegrown: domestic actors (Americans or, at least, American residents) are operating in line with foreign ideologies. The Double begins to take shape in this confounded boundary.
Homegrown terrorism distinctively captures what Carl Schmitt called “absolute hostility,” a mode of enmity characterized by global ideologies and a lack of any spatial or temporal limits: adversaries are not confined or locatable in delineated spaces and operations of combat are not constrained to a particular battlefield.22 But changes in the nature of conflict—a result of technological, tactical, and normative innovations—do not fully account for the emergence of the phenomenon of homegrown terrorism, particularly in how it is conceptualized, debated, and combated. Another key lineage integral to the problematic of homegrown terrorism is hinted at in the DHS definition above. It makes explicit something that the term “homegrown” itself implies: a foreign seed (of terror) takes root in American soil (in a manner beyond infiltration), the outgrowth of which can take multiple and shifting forms. Thus, as homegrown collapses the neat binary between foreign and domestic, it does so without fully negating either category—even if, as I will show, they do not exclusively manifest in forms of hyper-representation.
The Brown-Arab-Muslim-Other
The history of the contemporary terrorism refrain is simultaneously that of the foreign actor, the brown-Arab-Muslim-other. The oft-cited passage from French philosopher Alain Badiou’s Infinite Thought illustrates the intimate link between this figure and terrorism:
When a predicate is attributed to a formal substance (as is the case with any derivation of a substantive from a formal adjective) it has no other consistency than that of giving an ostensible content to that form. In “Islamic terrorism,” the predicate “Islamic” has no other function except that of supplying an apparent content to the word “terrorism” which is itself devoid of all content (in this instance, political).23
Here, “Islamic” is not only a designation of religiosity, but also a racialized marker of difference. I use this triple-hyphenated term, “brown-Arab-Muslim-other,” to indicate that these identity positions are often conflated and used interchangeably in discourses of threat.
Race or racialization in this context is a formation or process that goes beyond phenotype. Building on the work of Hannah Arendt, sociologist Sherene Razack explains that race thinking is a “structure of thought that divides up the world between the deserving and the undeserving according to descent.”24 In the war on terror this division is traced and cut along civilizational lines, naturalized by an emphasis on the incommensurable difference between cultures