Homegrown. Piotr M. Szpunar
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has as much to do with the criminalization of terrorism as it does with the militarization of law.
While much attention has been (rightfully) given to the US PATRIOT Act in this regard, the process began decades earlier and produced a variety of implications. For example, the much-discussed “material support” statutes were amended rather than introduced by the PATRIOT Act; they were drafted in the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act (section 120005). This occurred two years after the Federal Courts Administration Act inscribed a distinction between domestic and international terrorism into criminal law. What is significant here is that while the previous inscriptions of terrorism into the US Code (in 1978 and 1987) were connected to foreign policy, the 1992 distinction is placed in Title 18 (chapter 113 B, section 2331), Crimes and Criminal Procedure, a markedly different focus. During the 1990s there were various attempts to further criminalize political violence with a variety of repercussions, some exceptional, others not. For example, the US Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 established a list of “foreign terrorist organizations” and the ability to deport suspected terrorists based on secret information. Others facilitated practices that could hardly be characterized as exceptional. In the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, the “terrorism enhancement” of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines (section 3A1.4) was enacted, under which a judge may significantly increase the sentence of an individual if his crime is deemed to be terrorism (we see examples of this in Chapters 1 and 3).38 This is not to suggest that practices that could be characterized as exceptional have been abandoned. While the proposed Enemy Expatriation Act of 2012, which sought to grant the government the ability to strip individuals of their citizenship if convicted of a terrorism-related crime, initially failed—thought to have no chance of surviving a challenge on constitutional grounds—it has reemerged in more recent proposed legislation that I address in Chapter 3.39 Nevertheless, the point here is that the criminalization of political violence sets up a particular mode of depoliticization that opens the door to discourses of radicalization.
Historically, every time terrorism entered (or threatened to enter) mainstream political discourse its valence of illegitimacy has been articulated in different ways.40 But the marking of terrorism as inhuman and barbaric always begins, pace Badiou, with the manner in which it is emptied, or made “devoid of content.” This process is evident in the definition found in the US Legal Code: “premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience.” While terrorism is often used interchangeably with or is defined as “political violence,” the two are hardly synonymous. Terrorism transforms the single space that separates the two terms (political violence) into an intractable gap, a distance already signified in the US definition by the insertion of “motivated.” Political, in the context of terrorism, is thus always meant to be understood as being struck through, as political, that is, as fundamentally illegitimate. The obliteration of the political is completed through the stress placed on noncombatants, those who cannot be rightfully constituted as targets of aggression.41 The absence of legitimacy leaves in its wake only barbarism, irrationality, and evil.
In a peculiar maneuver, defining terrorism in US law voids the very motive fundamental to distinguishing it from other types of criminal violence, marking the complexity of its operation. Take, for instance, the 2006 Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, which replaced the 1992 Animal Enterprise Protection Act. The result of a decades-long effort on the part of business lobbies, it is an example of the successful introduction of terrorism into new spaces of activity. The striking through of the political in domestic law opens an aporia in the “incorporeal transformation” of a criminal, arsonist, or vandal into a terrorist.42 It is the political that differentiates these figures. Yet, when making sense of these crimes the political cannot be given significant weight. The political must be simultaneously invoked and refuted: “These individuals claim to be motivated by the deprivation of the earth, but what is really driving them?” In other words, without a legitimate political lens through which to decipher the motivation to violence and with the stakes becoming increasingly global, a void emerges: how to make sense of incidents in which Americans carry out terroristic violence against America? In effect, the political returns criminal motive to the level of the personal, but not in the same way as it relates to petty crime. The move back to the personal in the context of homegrown terrorism is not marked by a motivation of material gain. What remains is pathological.
Useful here is French philosopher Michel Foucault’s interrogation of how psychiatry came to bear on law in the nineteenth century by addressing crimes that appeared to be “without reason” and “against nature”—two phrases commonly used to describe terrorism. Crimes, in essence, not preceded by a history, disturbance, or sign.43 The psychologizing of such crimes—like that of a woman who killed and decapitated her neighbor’s daughter, tossing her severed head out a window—injected into the fabric of society, a “dangerous individual.” This dangerous element is similar to the “enemy of mankind” that emerged alongside and facilitated the terror of the French Revolution. Today, homegrown terrorism is discussed in similar terms. To be clear, my argument is not that homegrown terrorism is a crime without reason, history, or sign. As I show in the following chapters, these are precisely the claims made in government discourses. Rather, the history I am outlining illustrates how it has become possible to speak about homegrown terrorism in this way. While certainly not the same as the merging of insanity and criminality in Foucault’s argument, what I argue here is that without the political to explain or make sense of violence, and yet a need to distinguish particular actions from petty crime, violence becomes unintelligible, monstrous, and irrational and a space opens up in which the (pseudo-)psychology of radicalization comes to bear on terrorism.44
Large amounts of government capital and academic effort have been placed into outlining, detailing, and defining the process of radicalization. Faiza Patel, co-director of the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program, outlines two approaches to radicalization. On one end of the spectrum, proponents of radicalization almost all agree that there is no singular profile of a homegrown terrorist based on categorical schema such as race, ethnicity, class, gender, or religious upbringing. On the other, as political writer Arun Kundnani also illustrates, theories of radicalization are built on the assumption that violence originates from theological ideas.45 In fact, many theories, but not all, do focus solely on jihadist violence.46 Certainly, radicalization and the practices it underwrites are not equally distributed—the Double does not usurp the other, a topic I will return to below. Here, I am interested in the conjunction of the two approaches, and suffice it to say, models of radicalization however unequally deployed do not operate on the logic of the other exclusively. This is not to say that those “less reductive” theories are any less problematic; only that their multiplicity and messiness ought to be addressed. The theories posit a process in which a plethora of cognitive, affective, and experiential factors move someone from an unremarkable state and into one of bloodthirsty violence. These factors are conceptualized as personal, social, economic, and political (or more appropriately political), from one’s views on the war on terror to one’s feelings of social alienation, from one’s familial relations to one’s socioeconomic status. Reflected in the “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign, in which the terrorist is often depicted as white, injected into discourses of terrorism is an idea that the threat America faces is not easily confined to particular categorical molds. Rather, threat is communicated as a distributed potential, as a dangerous element that can be triggered or put into action by the most ordinary of experiences or constellation of factors—which ultimately helps to strike out any political motive as legitimate. Sounding calls for monitoring, this narrative comes to signify not only “the rare and monstrous figure of the monomaniac … [but also] the common everyday figure of the degenerate, of the pervert, of the constitutionally unbalanced, of the immature, etc.”47 In effect, the figures are merged and the face of the foe is shown to mirror that of the citizen; the Double might materialize in the most ordinary of shapes.
The lineages that make up homegrown terrorism’s genealogy are complex lines that contain overlapping and cascading notes. The territorial