Counterinsurgent Force: Islam and Speculative Violence

This paper engages with the intractable fact that Islamic communities in the United States have become sites that express the force of counterinsurgent warfare. As the War on Terror persists, both abroad and domestically, it has developed its weapons and technologies by virtue of taking Islamic forms of life and their spaces as its experimental means. This has intimately reverberated across local Islamic communities in the US, who have felt the pressures of surveillance, capture, and racial violence most intimately inside mosques and within their souls. This paper depicts an experience of counterinsurgent warfare with particular attention to the practices of securitization that are wielded for and against Islamic communities who are deemed prone to domestic terrorism. Fundamentally, the aim of the paper is to conceptualize the mode of violence that is animated by securitization and the counterinsurgent force that perpetuates the use of security technologies within Islamic life.