On Race, “Terror,” and Risky Calculations: The Geopolitics of Doubt

By Samar al-Bulushi (UC Irvine)

This essay is part of a Vital Topics Forum on “Geopolitical Lives”

My memory is fuzzy about when and where I learned that Ahmed had been erased.[1] In 2010, he physically disappeared from Nairobi, later to resurface in a police interrogation room in Kampala, where he faced charges associated with the July 2010 bombings in Uganda that were attributed to the Somali militant group Al-Shabaab. At some point soon after that, his name was removed from every document that would associate him with the private foundation that had been funding the human rights NGO he cofounded. Together with his colleagues, Ahmed had been documenting the disappearance and extraordinary rendition of individuals suspected of terrorism in East Africa. He visited prisons to inquire about individuals who were being held as terror suspects, gradually developing an understanding of who was making what decisions, who was released, and who remained behind bars. In 2010, he became a victim—in more ways than one—of the very practices that he had worked to expose.

Fearing guilt by association in the wake of Ahmed’s arrest, the US-based foundation that provided funding to his organization proceeded to erase his name from all of their paperwork—quite literally with “white out.” I first discovered this roughly a year after I had returned from my extended period of research on surveillance and policing in the context of Kenya’s relationship to the so-called war on terror. As we sat on the fourteenth floor of a high-rise office building in New York City, my contact at the foundation outlined the risks it faced if it were to be accused of providing material support to a suspected “terrorist.” It would likely have been forced to shut down all of their work in the region, he explained. It was just not worth the risk. Easier to delete.

This short piece is an attempt to think through the racialized perceptions of risk that animate geopolitical calculations and forms of knowledge in the context of the war on terror. Thinking from East Africa, I situate the racialized figure of the Muslim “terrorist” in relation to the anti-Blackness that has marked Africa as the quintessential Other in the global order of nation-states, noting the ways in which multiple racial formations (Islam, Blackness, Africa) are linked and mutually reinforcing.[2] Using Ahmed’s predicament as an entry point, I probe the sphere of international human rights—not as a domain that stands outside of the racialized politics of suspicion that characterize the war on terror but as a domain that actively constitutes it.

When the US government instituted “no material assistance” legislation that monitors civil society organizations for potential links to “terrorism,” it expanded the domain of post-9/11 surveillance and policing to the aid apparatus and the people who constitute it. For grant-making bodies, it introduced new considerations about risk with implicit consequences for individuals racialized as Muslim and for organizations that are Islamically oriented or motivated. As Lisa Bhungalia (2015, 2316) observes, “fear of unintended violation and prosecution under US terrorism legislation has meant that many organizations receiving any kind of US funding have built ‘anti-terror’ infrastructures into their programs, such as screenings, certificates, and restrictive contractual terms to ensure money is not ‘purposely or inadvertently used to provide support to entities or individuals deemed to be a risk to national security.’” Bhungalia’s work points to the ways in which the bureaucratic infrastructures of entities devoted to the “rule of law” organize and institutionalize racialized suspicion.[3] When Kenyan newspapers published front-page stories about Ahmed as a terror suspect with purported ties to Al-Shabaab, employees at the US foundation calculated that it was time to sever ties—by pretending he simply didn’t exist.

What does it mean to be disappeared not by the police or military but by an entity that professes to hold those very entities accountable? We know that NGOs, humanitarian organizations, and the donor-industrial complex have long been entangled in the categorization of persons (refugees, migrants, etc.) and that such categorizations are underpinned by ideas about race. These bureaucratic exercises affirm in writing the existence of specific human beings, often indicating which bodies belong in what spaces or delineating between those who are deserving of protection and care and those who are not. But what of the racialized valuations of life that shape calculations among the very professionals and activists who constitute these spheres?

Despite the liberal principles of justice and equality that purportedly guide the work of international human rights and philanthropic organizations, we are compelled here to think about these spaces not simply as a domain of law and ideals but as a domain in which dilemmas regularly arise in the enactment of those ideals, prompting doubt and uncertainty. This is a distinctly different provocation than the critique of human rights as a sphere of elite techno-politics (e.g., Englund 2006); instead, we have an opportunity to reflect on the question of alterity and difference for our understanding of global power formations more broadly, and everyday intra-elite relations specifically.[4] By foregrounding the significance of race, we begin to see that implicit, commonsense understandings of world politics continue to center whiteness as the legitimate, recognized terrain of the political, rendering subalterns either too subjugated or too suspicious to legitimately constitute the geopolitical.

After his arrest in 2010, Ahmed suddenly became an object of doubt among the people who had worked closely with him. Increasingly, they began to ask themselves “Who was Ahmed, really?” Here we begin to trace the ways in which racialized suspicion is constituted not simply through standard policing and interrogation processes but through more subtle forms of power. Indeed, Ahmed’s story serves as a critical reminder that the specter of the terrorist threat lies not only at the seeming margins of the liberal democratic order but equally at its heart.[5]  The aid recipient/civil society “partner,” too, is an inherently racialized figure that must be monitored for signs of risky behavior.[6] Class status and connections to powerful institutions matter little, as it is often those very institutions that become complicit in the reproduction of racialized suspicion through their own bureaucratic calculations about risk.[7]

In the course of my research in Kenya, I encountered NGO activists and others who privately articulated to me that they had doubts about individuals they once thought of as colleagues or as friends. The sources of doubt, I found, were often instilled not by actors in the realm of intelligence or security but by those in diplomacy, philanthropy, and human rights (Kenyan and non-Kenyan alike). This speaks to Ilana Feldman’s (2015) observation about the heterogenous yet ultimately overlapping domains of suspicion that structure the social and political landscape in societies governed by logics of security. In 2014, I learned that a consultant for a Scandinavian donor instilled uncertainty in the leadership of a Kenyan human rights organization about whether they should hire Karim, who had spent a year in prison on false charges (later dropped) of having ties to Al-Shabaab. Emails internal to the organization quickly circulated indicating that the suspicions about Karim were “very serious” and that donors would not take this lightly. Employees of the organization—one that has similarly fought tirelessly to expose killings and disappearances at the hands of US-trained Kenyan police—subsequently concluded that it was in their interest not to hire Karim and thereby to save the organization from potential disrepute.

What analytical tools do we have to make sense of these dynamics? In Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation, Deborah Thomas (2019) argues that doubt is what twenty-first-century sovereignty feels like as we attempt to make sense of the complex chain of multiscalar power formations that operate across the world today, particularly the overt and covert dimensions of US empire. “Doubt,” she writes, “strangles the imagination. . . . It is this affective state that destabilizes the sovereignty of knowing . . . and creates perpetual insecurity about what it means to be human” (24).

Perhaps most acutely, doubt contributes to the rupturing of trust among suspect communities themselves.[8] The fact that many of the actors tasked with making calculations about risk are Muslim illustrates that the (re)production of racialized suspicion is hardly limited to the actions of individuals racialized as white or to Global North institutions. We can begin to see the ways in which a seemingly legal-bureaucratic process seeps into the fabric of human relationships, instilling distrust and fracturing community.

The story I have shared illustrates that seemingly benign institutions—in their allegiance to and privileging of liberal legality over politics—are inescapably entangled in the production of doubt, contributing to what Frantz Fanon would refer to as the systematic negation of the humanity of the colonized. Doubt, here, was the basis for calculations about risk and, ultimately, for erasure­—not simply of Ahmed as a human, as a father, and as an organizer but also of the geopolitical knowledge that he accumulated and represented. Doubt worked to obscure and silence entangled histories—in this case, the “partnership” between a multi-million-dollar foundation and a man who dared to engage in counter-mappings of US empire. His erasure was effectively a burial, a submerging of his quotidian counter-hegemonic practices, moving from prison to prison, house to house, as he worked to map the disappearance of his countrymen and countrywomen.

An anthropology of geopolitics has the potential to draw ethnographic attention to these erasures to reflect on the ways that certain geographies and their subjects are written out of what we have come to know as “geopolitics,” defined most simply by Jatin Dua in this collection as a story about place. In the words of Katherine McKittrick (2006, xv), “if who we see is tied up with what we see,” then erasure situates certain subjects and their geopolitical concerns as outside the frame, obscuring daily struggle. How might we extend McKittrick’s theorizations to our understandings of imperial warfare, where drone attacks constitute one mode of erasure, and the aid apparatus constitutes another? How might this compel us to reflect on our understandings of war and policing in order to account not only for the material destruction and loss of life “but also the mundane, bureaucratic, and largely concealed” (Bhungalia 2015, 2308)?

References Cited

Agrama, Hussein Ali. 2012. Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty, and the Rule of Law in Modern Egypt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Al-Bulushi, Samar. 2021. “Race, Space, and 'Terror’: Notes from East Africa.” Security Dialogue 52 (S): 115–23.

Asad, Talal. 2004. “What Are the Margins of the State?” In Anthropology in the Margins of the State, edited by Veena Das and Deborah Poole, 279–88. Santa Fe, NM: SAR Press.

Benton, Adia. 2016. “African Expatriates and Race in the Anthropology of Humanitarianism.” Critical African Studies 8 (3): 266–77.

Bhungalia, Lisa. 2015. “Managing Violence: Aid, Counterinsurgency, and the Humanitarian Present in Palestine.” Environment and Planning A 47 (11): 2308–23.

Englund, Harri. 2006. Prisoners of Freedom: Human Rights and the African Poor. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Fanon, Frantz. 1963. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press.

Feldman, Ilana. 2015. Police Encounters: Security and Surveillance in Gaza under Egyptian Rule. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Maira, Sunaina. 2016. The 9/11 Generation: Youth, Rights, and Solidarity in the War on Terror. New York: NYU Press.

Marei, Fouad Gehad, Mona Atia, Lisa Bhungalia, and Omar Dewachi. 2018. “Interventions on the Politics of Governing the ‘Ungovernable.’” Political Geography 67:176–86.

McKittrick, Katherine. 2006. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Peterson, Kristin. 2014. Speculative Markets: Drug Circuits and Derivative Life in Nigeria. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Razavi, Negar. 2021. “NatSec Feminism: Women Security Experts and the US Counterterror State.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 46 (2): 361–86.

Thiranagama, Sharika, and Tobias Kelly. 2010. “Introduction: Specters of Treason.” In Traitors: Suspicion, Intimacy, and the Ethics of State-Building, edited by S. Thiranagama and T. Kelly, 1–23. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Thomas, Deborah A. 2019. Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation: Sovereignty, Witnessing, Repair. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

 Young, Alden, and Keren Weitzberg. 2021. “Globalizing Racism and De-Provincializing Muslim Africa.” Modern Intellectual History:1–22.

Notes

[1] This is a pseudonym.

[2] See Al-Bulushi (2021b) and Weitzberg and Young (2021).

[3] For more on the relationship between the law and organized suspicion see Agrama (2012) and Asad (2004).

[4] See also Benton (2016) and Razavi (2021).

[5] See especially Thiranagama and Kelly (2010, 2), who observe that “it is not just the stranger that is feared and suspected but also the seemingly faithful citizen.”

[6] See Lisa Bhungalia’s intervention in Marei et al. (2018) for more on the racialized security logics at work in western aid interventions across the Global South.

[7] Kris Peterson (2014) notes that theories of risk in liberal societies require scrutiny. Drawing on Fanon (1963), she observes that the kind of agency that liberal risk paradigms afford does not exist for colonized populations.

[8] For more on this topic, see especially Maira (2016).

Cite As

Al-Bulushi, Samar. 2022. “On Race, “Terror,” and Risky Calculations: The Geopolitics of Doubt.” American Anthropologist website, August 4.