Insecurities: Beyond Religious (Non)Violence

This paper draws on the insights of scholars of the secular to interrogate the foundation upon which contemporary theories of nonviolence--and civil disobedience, more specifically--rest: what I call the "myth of religious nonviolence." In short, no such thing exists; just as “religion” cannot precipitate violence, it does not cause nonviolence. I contend that post-war attempts to link religion and nonviolence in the aftermath of Indian Independence and the American Freedom Movement betray a misunderstanding of both religion and nonviolence and, in turn, reveal more about the preoccupations of post-war political philosophy than either phenomena. Namely, they illustrate that religious nonviolence, understood as a primarily or essentially communicative (rather than coercive) approach to public life underpinned by the dissident’s “religious” commitments, was invented to buttress secular accounts of civil disobedience and constitutional democracy and integrate nonviolence into their nascent theories of democracy.

This paper proposes to look in a perhaps unexpected place for insight into the 2024 election: the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, which introduces a strange apocalyptic narrative in which the katechōn or “restrainer” holds back the depredations of the “man of lawlessness.” Applying this framework to the two-party system in the US, this paper shows that each party casts itself in the role of katechōn and its opponent in the role of “man of lawlessness,” turning every election into an apocalyptic showdown in which the forces of evil may triumph once and for all. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s attempted secularization of Second Thessalonians’ apocalyptic myth in The Mystery of Evil, the paper argues that the very urgency of always staving off “the worst” is in fact the true force of chaos and destruction, actively preventing us from constructing a livable political and economic order.

The intersection of insecurity and exception applied in climate politics is examined through an engagement of Giorgio Agamben’s theory on the limit—more specifically, violence—of law in modern politics. Agamben maintains that the sovereign law, or more precisely the sovereign ban, is applied to disasters, catastrophes, and emergencies which are increasingly becoming ubiquitous conditions of modern life. This constant declaration of the state of exception reveals that the law is in force but without concrete significance. The essential problem with the normalization of the state of exception might be summarized as the sovereign power’s separation between law and life, while replacing it with indistinction between law and violence. This discussion seeks to understand the conceptual mechanisms and processes that enable familiar apocalyptic ideas such as risk and crisis that activate the state of exception, and consequently legitimize and authorize the unleashing of violence in full complicity with law.

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.