Encountering the stranger: Ontological security and the Boston Marathon bombing

The stranger

I lay the groundwork for a more nuanced look at securitizing identity by employing Huysmans’ (1998) analogical coupling of Schmitt’s ‘enemy’ with the fear of biological death and Simmel’s ‘stranger’ with the anxiety of the unknown (see also Schmitt, 2007; Simmel, 1971). The latter pairing is particularly salient in moments of traumatic rupture, when identity narratives have been upended and one’s sense of Self lies in tatters. Such scenarios result in anxiety over no longer knowing who one is or is not – where the boundaries are. That ambiguity then places renewed emphasis on the role of the stranger living amongst us, since the very definition of a stranger is someone who is unknown and as yet unknowable.

The stranger adds further complexity to the Self/Other analytic by highlighting the contextually varied proximity we express between ‘us’ and ‘them.’ Like more traditional existential threats, the liminal subject position between safe and dangerous is discursively constructed and often associated with ongoing anxiety or foreboding that a threat of some kind might exist. These bodies are characterized in the discourse as appearing to belong to us, yet they are deceptive and potentially dangerous. Terms such as ‘sleeper cell’ and ‘homegrown terror,’ not to mention domestic security policies such as the USA PATRIOT Act, reinforce the belief that there are people who look like us and act like us but who are really allied with ‘them.’ The discursive representation of these unknowable bodies complicates our view of the Self because we cannot so easily distinguish them from us. They are us – at least for a while.

By not being able to clearly classify the stranger as us or them, she ends up belonging to either and neither at the same time: a non-place that initially presents us with both physical and ontological insecurity. Huysmans (1998) writes, ‘Different from enemies, strangers are disordering because they express the possibility of chaos within the existing order … They articulate ambivalence and therefore challenge the (modern) ordering activity which relies on reducing ambiguity and uncertainty by categorizing elements’ (p. 241, emphasis added; see also Rumelili, 2012: 496). In this regard, there is not much conceptual separation between the stranger and a state’s ontological insecurity. By being impossible to categorize, by ‘[unmasking] the brittle artificiality of division’ (Bauman, 1990: 148), she disturbs the ordering schema inherent to a state’s legitimacy, namely, an ability to clearly delimit who belongs and who does not. As such, she mediates between safe and unsafe, us and them, good and bad, friend and enemy, routine and exceptional (Mälksoo, 2012: 483).

There are two primary ways in which the stranger comes into political focus. Firstly, the stranger reveals herself as such by doing something strange. The Tsarnaevs, for instance, are only identified as strangers because they caused the bombing. Secondly, a particular group is assigned blame for pre-existing danger as a means of dispelling some of the social anxiety associated with that danger. This has long been the case with marginalized groups, such as migrants (see Hughes, 2009). In both cases, the prescription ‘stranger’ is a subject position that invites further intervention; it is a site of becoming insofar as the state, or the Self more broadly, attempts to reconcile the ambivalence of the stranger into one of the two categories meant to sustain social and political life: Self or Other (Bauman, 1990). As a result, we are constantly in the process of attempting to normalize or distinguish ‘strange’ and make it more ‘familiar/normal/routine’ or push it towards ‘foreign/abnormal/exceptional.’

In each case, however, the idea of strangeness and the potential for future danger lingers beyond the bounded confines of any specific person or group of people. In this regard, any attempt to reconcile ‘the stranger’ only succeeds in the short term, since this does not actually ‘solve’ the ambivalence or anxiety associated with the possibility of future strangeness amongst us. Such ongoing insecurity manifests in state policies that seem to blur the distinction between moments of political exceptionality and the normality of the day-to-day. For example, ‘the diffuse politics of little security nothings,’ the ‘unspectacular processes of technologically driven surveillance, risk management and precautionary governance,’ is legitimized by raising the specter of anxiety as a foil to the fear engendered by exceptional security practices (Huysmans, 2011: 372, 375–376). This suggests that the security concerns underlining identity construction and boundary-making are not easily categorized as just emanating from the discursive portrayal of threatening ‘Radical Others,’ to borrow Campbell’s (1998) term. Rather, understanding the relationship between security and identity also necessitates the inclusion of the specter of the unknown, the possibility of Otherness that resides inside us all but eludes easy rhetorical or physical capture.

Consequently, looking at how we address the stranger in security narratives attempts to unearth how ontological and physical security are bound up in identity reflection. In the case of Boston, ignoring the role of the stranger in the framing obscures important insights into how identity and (in)security were (re)asserted shortly after the bombing. Because critical security studies generally overlook the stranger in favor of a more dyadic – even if relational – Self/Other, it cannot adequately explain why the Tsarnaevs are not immediately vilified in narratives of the attack. Moreover, it conceals the distinction between the physical fear of bodily harm and the anxiety aroused by the phantasmatic nature of the liminal. These competing yet interrelated components to identity construction correspond with two different phases in the Boston narrative. The first – before the brothers are identified – places strong emphasis on ‘our’ physical insecurity coupled with a reassertion of ontological well-being. The second phase focuses on the brothers as neither Self nor Other, which upends that sense of well-being. Together, they reveal the importance of understanding identity as a process and explain the resulting ambiguity towards the Tsarnaev brothers that characterized the initial telling of the attack.

15–18 April 2013

Between Monday afternoon and Friday morning, print media, television, and websites inundated the public with coverage of the bombing – commentary, speeches, press conferences, eyewitness accounts, and hundreds of photographs and videos showing the carnage of the attack. The first impression of these texts is the visceral, physical, and extremely personal nature of the experience – colored discursively and visually in blood, tears, and anguished expressions. Indeed, the initial days of coverage were marked by a predominant focus on the victims’ bodies and a decided absence of the perpetrators,’ save as abstracted and personified hatred. The threat was rendered real through the graphic description of the violence done to ‘average Americans.’ One newspaper described ‘maimed’ spectators ‘struck by a flying piece of hatred’ at a ‘yard sale of people and body parts.’ ⁹ Boston-area hospitals added to this narrative by providing regular updates on the over 180 critically injured victims suffering from ‘emergency amputations, shrapnel wounds, fractures, ruptured internal organs, and severe burns.’ ¹⁰ The use of the word ‘limbs’ in almost every description of the scene, particularly as it contrasted to the implicit physicality of running a marathon, evoked the gruesome and personal toll of the attack. Moreover, the characterization of physical injuries was paired with a sense of fear that such violence could happen at a local event full of ‘ordinary folks.’ ¹¹ Many repeated the refrain ‘we will never feel safe again in our own town’ – a fear augmented by the numerous graphic photographs that accompanied each report. ¹²

This initial narrative vividly underscores our physical insecurity by placing the primary focus on our broken and dispersed bodies: it delimits threat by the wounds it inflicts. Scattered helter-skelter in a bomb radius, we are literally and discursively marked as victims of the attack, an attack described as horrific, sinister, and viscerally evil. Moreover, the absence of a definitive ‘bad guy’ fostered speculation and fear of possible future attacks – not just on ‘us’ as the USA, but on us as individuals and community members. ¹³ This is attributed to the perceived randomness of the violence, which ‘resonates more on an individual level … People think, “That could have been me. That could have been my child”.’ ¹⁴ The mostly indirect Other of this narrative is implicitly inhumane, evil, ‘little men,’ ‘weak and terminally maladjusted,’ ‘disaffected … nut jobs,’ ‘troglodytes,’ ‘demons,’ rhetorical commonplaces that reflect the ‘evil terrorist’ rhetoric common after 9/11. ¹⁵

Thus far, despite the gruesome nature of the attack, a general American sense of ontological security appears intact. It remains so because the innocence versus evil account jibes with the same story we have been telling to various degrees for 12 years; the threat of Islamist terrorism is no longer a surprise. Rumelili (2015) notes that while the initial reaction to 9/11 was one of trauma, incredulity, and shock; hence, ontological insecurity, the subsequent ‘War on Terror,’ and the targeting of al Qaeda and radical Islam institutionalized a particular Self/Other relationship that came to redefine ‘normal’– a consistent sense of knowing our place in the world vis-à-vis those who would harm us (p. 61; see also Zaretsky, 2002). Then, our reaction as a nation and a state, personified by brave men and women rushing a cockpit or into burning buildings to save others, largely engendered a national desire for revenge and counterassault (e.g. the Bush Doctrine) and led to exceptional security practices meant to keep us safe. ¹⁶ In 2013, our reaction, personified by 78-year-old runner Bill Iffrig, who, crumpled from the concussion of the bomb, was helped up by three police officers and went on to finish the race, eschewed retaliation in lieu of a search for normalcy and routine, a focus on ‘[leaving] no trace [of the attacks] on our society or way of life.’ ¹⁷ Perseverance, haloed by expressions of strength, courage, and love of tradition, became synonymous with putting Boston back together again, reuniting the city and its inhabitants into a single body euphemized by ‘Boston Strong.’ ¹⁸ Author Dennis Lehane quipped in the Boston Globe and on Meet the Press that ‘They messed with the wrong city!’ ¹⁹ Stephen Colbert riffed,

Whoever did this obviously did not know shit about the people of Boston, because nothing these terrorists do is going to shake them. For Pete sake — […] They attacked […] an event celebrating people who run 26 miles on their day off until their nipples are raw — for fun! ²⁰

In short order, this praise was extrapolated to the rest of the nation as signs of support and solidarity showed up around the country, such as the tribute paid the next day during the Yankees–Red Sox game. ²¹ The refrain: we are a resilient [singular] political and social ‘body’ possessed of a mental toughness that refuses to permit such wanton acts of violence to penetrate the image we have of ourselves as freedom-loving ‘Patriots’ (given dual resonance due to the attacks falling on Boston’s ‘Patriots Day’); no act of terrorism can deter us from living in freedom or ‘surrender[ing] our liberties and our heritage’ so ‘indispensable to our way of life.’ ²²

Ontological security-seeking serves three functions in this discourse. Firstly, it counters or mediates the horror of the visual and physical descriptions of destroyed and scattered body parts, lending strength and purpose to many otherwise dumbfounded by the local and more personal nature of the attacks. Secondly, imagery of people rushing in to help the victims challenges the notion of a body politic falling to pieces. Thirdly, it sets up an interesting contrast to the discursive representation of America immediately after 9/11, in that ‘we’ are now more mature and better prepared. Thomas Friedman of The New York Times writes,

Fortunately, we don’t frighten anymore. You could feel it in the country on Tuesday morning. We’ve been through 9/11. We probably overreacted then, but never again. We tracked down Osama bin Laden with police and intelligence work, and we’ll do the same in this case. ²³

David Ignatius adds, ‘A decade has taught the United States that the most destabilizing consequence of 9/11 wasn’t the terrorist act itself but the way the country responded.’ ²⁴ This hint at an identity–behavior disconnect suggests the need for a different response to terror, one that repairs and returns American identity to a more consistent self-narrative imbued with liberal values. ²⁵

Maneuvering strength of character (security-as-being) alongside vulnerability of flesh (security-as-survival) helps steer our understanding of the attacks towards a greater degree of acceptance and normalization of ‘evil’ in the world, even as we vow to fight it. In place of self-pity is a pragmatic, no-nonsense approach that refuses to be cowed by the perpetrators of violence, despite grievous bodily trauma. ²⁶ We fight our fear by contorting terrorism into the inevitable; reworking our very understanding of Self into the type that gets back up, brushes herself off, and gets on with life. Namely, we normalize physical threat from Others into the refrain of a secure biographical narrative. Still, the staid resiliency represented in this discourse was not inevitable or necessarily sustainable. Fear lingers while the perpetrators remain at large: bodiless, invisible. Such concealment is reflected discursively by the absence of specific pronouns or attributions, which in a sense suggests that they are everywhere and nowhere: danger still abounds.

19 April–May 2013

The revelation of the bombers to be two young brothers, longtime residents of the greater Boston metropolitan area, complicates the initial narrative by underlining the ‘homegrown’ aspect of the attack. While the Boston bombing was not the first instance of homegrown Islamist terrorism, several factors combine in this particular case to disrupt the ontological security of knowing (or, in this case, assuming) the identity of one’s enemy and one’s place vis-à-vis the broader social framework. To begin with, this was the first attack since 9/11 that was designed to maim and kill total strangers. ²⁷ Secondly, and perhaps more striking, the lives of the two brothers – immediately picked apart in minute detail by the media – did not easily fit into the ‘foreign terrorist’ model that characterized the discourse up to that point. Here is where ambiguity begins to creep up in the media’s portrayal of the crisis, throwing a wrench in the pre-existing identity positions informed by the War on Terror.

By the end of the week, the prominent media focus placed on victimized bodies was replaced with an almost obsessive spotlight on the two brothers after their names and photos were released late Thursday, 18 April. In almost every report during this time, the shift in attention to a more concretely delineated threatening actor is first marked by a sort of disowning, rhetorically illustrated by the imposition of national boundaries: these were ‘Chechen’ individuals with foreign-looking names that are difficult to pronounce. ²⁸ Chechnya, after all, was a hotbed of Islamist unrest, even if the focus of their ire was Russia, not the USA. Indeed, the older brother had recently spent six months back ‘home’ in Dagestan visiting his parents. In this way, their ‘exotic’ Chechen ethnicity and the Chechen ‘warrior tradition’ helps distance the brothers from ‘real’ Americans. ²⁹ They are foreign bodies, They are from over there. As Stern (2006) says, ‘[s]patial borders and boundaries both define [us] against the dangerous Other and protect it from the threats this Other poses’ (p. 194).

Yet, the unfolding narrative of the actual bombers was not as simple as the ‘evil foreign terrorist’ storyline that structured news analysis in the immediate aftermath of the attack. Paradoxically, both were also acknowledged as ‘belonging’ to the USA: the younger brother was a naturalized American citizen, and the older one was living in Boston legally with a Green Card. Tamerlan once harbored ambitions to box for the US Olympic team. This concomitant blurring of boundaries between us and them was further insinuated by describing the brothers as ‘kids’ ³⁰ – disaffected and homegrown radicalized youths misguidedly looking for approval and belonging ³¹ – a comparison many made to recent examples of gun violence in Newtown, CT, and Aurora, CO. The dichotomous interpretation of the young men as both exotic/different and misguided youths highlights an uneasy ambivalence on our part in simply viewing or dismissing the perpetrators as evil incarnate. This is particularly true with regard to the younger brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who is repeatedly described as a typical teenager, interested in girls, pop culture, and smoking pot. Testimonials from friends and acquaintances indicate that he never showed any proclivity to extremism or violence. Captain of his high school wrestling team, winner of a scholarship to UMass Dartmouth, and role model to his teammates, Dzhokhar seemed to all intents and purposes ‘well-adjusted,’ ‘like he didn’t have any problems,’ ‘chillaxed and very laid back,’ basically, like any other 19-year-old boy. ³²

It is difficult to square this description with the wanton disregard for life so prominent in the early reports of the bombing. It is even harder to understand how Dzhokhar could have returned to campus after the attacks and gone about his life as if nothing had happened. This juxtaposition between evil and banal makes the Boston bombing that much harder to digest: if Dzhokhar can be described as ‘recognizably human’ on the one hand, yet work out at the gym after committing atrocities on the other, how do we find meaning in what otherwise appears unexplainable? How can this new danger be incubated for so long in the shroud of normalcy? Moreover, if it is possible with these two, who else among us might be harboring plans to kill innocent Americans? The news reports offer no easy answers. Instead, what presents is a re-articulation of the Other as a far more liminal and ambiguous figure – a ‘new’ type of threatening body that is self-radicalized and hostile, yet clothed in normal, average, ordinary.

Here again, focusing on ontological security helps explain how Boston discursively moved beyond the dichotomous nature of ‘9/11.’ This latter emphasis on the liminal draws out certain limitations of the traditional Self/Other paradigm. Our concern over the possible presence of dangerous strangers, who, through their very definition ‘render problematic the viability of clear boundary drawing,’ elicits anxiety or dread of the unknown and unknowable (Huysmans, 1998: 242). Kathleen Parker writes,

The Tsarnaev brothers have shuffled our templates into something that eludes easy characterization and denies us a unifying enemy that at least provides a sense of something that can be fixed. Whom do we hate when the enemy is a composite of our own diverse ecosystem? When ‘them’ is ‘us’? ³³

Unlike the fear generated by a specifically delimited threat, which, although destabilizing in the physical sense, can be reassuring ontologically, anxiety is a general state of unease that ‘destroy[s] the certitude of institutionalized routines’ (Giddens, 1984: 61). Fear is managed by addressing the threat at hand; anxiety cannot be addressed in the same way, since the ‘threat’ is everywhere and nowhere all at once.

The Tsarnaevs discursively have one foot in each camp: on the one hand, they are described as ethnic Chechens, Muslim, and born overseas. In this sense, they are foreigners, ‘exotic,’ ³⁴ linked by association to the ‘bloody terrorist movement’ and the ‘nihilism and cruelty of Chechen terrorists.’ ³⁵ They are Other. On the other hand, and particularly with Dzhokhar, they have lived in the USA since they were young and participated until recently in various normal civic activities, including school, sports, and community outreach. In many regards, they seem to have accepted and integrated into the broader understanding of American culture. We see ourselves, our friends, or our children in the characterization of Dzhokhar as the ‘floppy-haired teen’ ³⁶ who seems so ‘recognizably human’ ³⁷ and ‘one of us.’ ³⁸ To a certain extent, this leaves us more vulnerable because it is simply impossible to root out lone wolves that so easily wear sheep’s clothing. ³⁹

The cracks in our concept of [a singular] collective Self prompt several possible responses. One is to let our Self shatter – ostensibly the aim of the attackers – leading to increased mistrust and suspicion. Two is to readjust the boundaries of Other. While the typical discursive move to achieve the latter is to then securitize the newly perceived threat, securing the unknown seems on the surface to be paradoxical. Still, acknowledging that the unknown is out there and could strike is in some sense a process of turning the ‘unknown unknown’ into the ‘known unknown,’ to borrow from Rumsfeld. It is an attempt to reestablish a consistent self-image.

The end result is a broadening of who inhabits the vague corners of Other, which in some ways increases perceived physical danger even as it tempers uncertainty with a resignation that we no longer can anticipate who will be a threat. Joan Vennochi writes,

It’s personal. It’s random. It can happen to anyone, and it can happen anywhere … For the post-9/11 generation of young Americans, violence is not an abstraction. It’s on their turf and in their face, whether it’s the work of foreign or domestic terrorists or of individuals fueled by inexplicable rage or untreated mental illness. ⁴⁰

State officials reiterated the sentiment; commenting on the very quotidian-ness of the new threat facing the US, General Michael Hayden, former CIA Director, remarked to host Chris Wallace, ‘this tragedy is the new normal. We’re going to have to live with this risk.’ ⁴¹ Richard Haass, President of the Council on Foreign Relations, echoed, ‘What happened the other day in Boston unfortunately is not the exception. This is not a one off. This is a glimpse of the future.’ ⁴²

Unlike the physical danger evoked in the initial coverage of the bombing, threat in these later discussions centers far more on its pervasive and elusive nature, making actions like the bombing emblematic of a ‘new’ era of uncertainty in the USA. This new threat does not stem from the more understandable ‘foreigners who hate us’ narrative so prominent after 9/11. Instead, threat is understood as emanating from local ‘lone wolves’ loosely associated with larger groups like al Qaeda, but often self-radicalized via the internet. ⁴³ They are strangers among us. While the discourse still implicitly suggests that radicalization happens ‘over there’ – for instance, during Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s trip in 2012 – it cannot be so easily policed or located once inside the USA because they are hidden in plain sight. This change in the topography of threat is marked by the increased use of the term ‘homegrown,’ a term used to distance perpetrators like the Tsarnaevs from the hijackers of 9/11 and to associate them with other assailants, such as the London Tube bombers and the recent spate of mass gun shootings in the USA. It also subtly insinuates that we are somehow complicit in their creation.

Still, strangers once identified are rarely allowed to remain as such. Indeed, the later discussions of Boston attempted to mollify this sense of ontological insecurity by linking the very liminal nature of the new threat to discussions over how the USA should respond. The resulting theme of perseverance accomplishes two things: it holds up the notion of consistency of values and spirit as a palliative to the anxiety arising from the stranger; and it repairs the dissonance between those values and state action by linking the response to the bombing to a reassertion of the ‘true’ American identity, our ‘true’ security-as-being. Steele (2008) comments that an identity–behavior disconnect produces ontological insecurity ‘when a state realizes that its narrative actions no longer reflect or are reflected by how it sees itself’ (p. 3). For instance, certain security measures taken after 9/11, such as the sanctioning of enhanced interrogation techniques, were designed to keep the USA physically safe from another attack while also preserving an image of the USA as strong and powerful. Yet, these same security measures appear to challenge the very core of American identity; namely, as an enlightened democracy that guarantees freedom (of movement, beliefs, speech, etc.) to all.

This dissonance is acknowledged in the earlier Boston narrative at the more social and individual level (in refrains of ‘we became temporarily insane after 9/11’ ⁴⁴ ). The latter narrative, on the other hand, is far more directly bound to the role of the state in a crisis. In this regard, ameliorating ontological insecurity is discursively linked to the technical response and ability of law enforcement to gather evidence and quickly apprehend the Tsarnaevs. Descriptions of cross-department cooperation, as well as federal, state, and local collaboration, and finally the release of the suspects’ photos to the public all implied a feeling of unity, with the public playing an instrumental role in the capture of the suspects by both identifying them and staying sheltered inside over the course of the day on Friday. Mayor Tom Menino, Governor Deval Patrick, and Police Commissioner Ed Davis reiterated this sense of accomplishment by ‘the extraordinary team of law enforcement folks who – who have done this the right way, by building from facts up to a theory rather than from a theory out.’ ⁴⁵ One cannot help but think of the lead-up to the Iraq War and the ultimately false evidence presented to justify it. In contrast, the success described by law officials in Boston highlights a unity of purpose and a semblance of control over the situation.

By 21 April, questions of how the state should treat the surviving brother surfaced with regard to the legal system, raising wider concerns about the state’s response to terror. Given the wide terrain of the narrative – Chechen roots, foreign travel, Jihadism, weapons of mass destruction, difficulty of unmasking lone wolves – some sought consistency of being by falling back on a familiar 9/11 narrative that called for Dzhokhar to be treated as an enemy combatant and interrogated for more information (e.g. John McCain, Peter King, Lindsay Graham, Kelly Ayotte). This default position dispels the ambiguity of homegrown terrorism and the unknown by grouping the Tsarnaevs and others like them into a single ‘terrorist’ subject position. Interestingly, however, the ‘enemy combatant’ storyline failed to gain traction amongst the broader press and public. In fact, most commentary praised President Obama for insisting that Dzhokhar be tried in a criminal civilian court and given his Miranda rights. ⁴⁶ This later turn of the Boston Marathon discourse seems to reiterate the sentiment so clearly articulated in the initial days just after the attacks: namely, that the USA has matured and learned from its excesses following 9/11 ⁴⁷ ; that the USA respects the rule of law and the American justice system; that the USA can respond to the new nature of terrorism capably and within the bounds of international norms and law; and that the USA response to Boston will contest the panicked thinking associated with 9/11 and the traumatic rupture of American identity. ⁴⁸

Ultimately, Dzhokhar’s status as liminal stranger, an ambiguous insider/outsider, appears to be somewhat resolved in favor of ‘more one of us than one of them,’ at least legally. As a citizen, he is guaranteed all the protections given to any American under the Constitution. Upholding the law takes a bit of the exceptionality away from the crisis (akin to Rumelili’s desecuritization) and places the attacks in a more mundane criminal framework. Treating him as a criminal bolsters or stabilizes certain myths of liberalism so fundamental to American identity, thereby repairing the identity–behavior disconnect made so prominent after 9/11. ⁴⁹ Commentary in The Boston Globe on 28 April summed up the general mood:

In a sense, the trial itself is our weapon–one that, by its very nature, can never be as sensational, spectacular, or emotionally penetrating as a bomb. ‘A trial […] would show that we as a people know how to deal with murder, whatever the slogans behind it, and that these killers can’t force us to give up our treasured legal system.’ ⁵⁰

This conclusion demonstrates a clear desire to escape the Exceptionalist mentality of 9/11 and reassert a consistent sense of the liberal/democratic self. Juliette Kayyem writes in the Boston Globe that the Obama Administration’s insistence on a criminal trial ‘was an embrace of normalcy … Reasserting the rule of law over this case is an important step toward moving beyond a warlike mentality.’ ⁵¹ On the whole, even as our physical security remains in question with the possibility of future attacks, we look to protect our ontological security by reclaiming what is considered to be a ‘truer’ sense of self. The end result does not necessarily take away the fear of future attacks or the anxiety that someone we know might perpetrate them. It does, however, manage these concerns by reworking and re-articulating them into a more loosely constructed and discursive body politic, where ambiguity is [temporarily] normalized as just another fact of life.