Police in Paris. Demotix/Elyxandro Cegarra. All rights reserved.After the Paris attacks, what are the logical and tragic consequences of war with no geographical limits? Arun Kundnani has studied terrorism and counter-radicalisation programmes in the United Kingdom and the United States, and is the author of The Muslims are coming!, published by Verso. In this interview, he unveils and critiques the ramifications of the ‘war on terror’, from the conservative and liberal rhetoric of the intellectuals and commentators who have emerged, to the theories of ‘radicalisation’ which have fuelled counter-terrorism programmes in the west. Only an anti-racist, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist politics can provide a genuine alternative to jihadism, Kundnani argues.
Is everywhere a war zone now? How does this connect to the rhetoric of the ‘war on terror’?
The promise of the ‘war on terror’ was that we would kill them ‘over there’ so they would not kill us ‘over here.’ Hence mass violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Palestine, Yemen, and Somalia – in the name of peace in the west. The “Authorization to Use Military Force” that the US Congress passed in the days after 9/11 already defined the whole world as a battlefield in the ‘war on terror’. President Obama continues to rely on the authorization to give his drone-killing programme a veneer of legality. This is the old colonial formula of liberal values at home sustained by a hidden illiberalism in the periphery – where routine extra-judicial killing is normalised.
