Race and the logic of radicalisation under neoliberalism

Abstract

I argue in this article that race – reconceptualised against the post-racial logic of racial neoliberalism as a material relationship rather than simply an identity – functions within the logic of radicalisation in Australian anti-terrorism to produce the conditions necessary for the reproduction of neoliberal capitalism. Taking theoretical cues from the arguments of David Theo Goldberg and Stuart Hall, I argue that the logic of radicalisation within this process mobilises the raced spectral figure of the essentially violent, extremist Muslim ‘other’ to two key ends: first, the invisibilisation of the political motivations and grievances underpinning the actions of those who commit terrorist violence; second, the reproduction of neoliberal capitalism through the fashioning of neoliberal subjectivities, the salving of collective anxieties at the effects of neoliberal restructuring via ‘authoritarian populism’, and the innovation of new – and augmentation of existing – opportunities for profit and accumulation.

Keywords

Australia neoliberalism race racism radicalisation terrorism

From the vast array of works preoccupied with the problem space of ‘neoliberalism’ has emerged a literature concerned with theorising the relationship between neoliberal structural adjustment and the (re)production of extant and novel forms of authoritarian and disciplinary governance (Bruff, 2013; Tansel, 2017). This literature takes issue with dominant conceptions of neoliberalism as ‘ideas-centred’ (Cahill, 2013), as characterised by a sort of takeover of the state by ‘market rule’, or as discernible in the ‘malleable and mutable’ political rationalities highlighted by Foucauldian notions of governmentality (Wacquant, 2012). These dominant conceptions of neoliberalism have certainly yielded much analytical insight, but can also run the risk of obscuring ‘what is “neo” about neoliberalism, namely, the remaking and redeployment of the state as the core agency that actively fabricates the subjectivities, social relations and collective representations suited to making the fiction of markets real and consequential’ (Wacquant, 2012: 68). In other words, under neoliberalism the state has been re-engineered and repurposed, not dismantled, rolled back or hybridised.

The analytical insights developed by these authors are particularly salient in a conjuncture that is typified by the global prominence (and banality) of phrases like ‘national security’ and ‘strong borders’. In the post-9/11 world, ‘anti-terrorism’ has been comprehensively institutionalised as a key governmental logic across multiple sites. In what has been termed a now-transnational, permanent ‘state of emergency’ (Kundnani, 2014), heated debates over war, torture and surveillance have been largely replaced by the continual, bipartisan extension of state power to deal with the ‘ever-mobile, and always-receding, target’ of the ‘ever-amorphous, unbounded, and limitless’ global War on Terror (De Genova, 2010: 615). Indeed, under the rubric of ‘anti-terrorism’, a term that Nicolas De Genova has described as the ‘intransigent idiom of a new species of security state formation’ (2010: 613), the material power of the state has been increasingly redirected not only towards the maintenance of so-called ‘international security’ (i.e. ‘taking the fight to the terrorists abroad’), but also to the maintenance of a national security state at home. Anti-terrorism, it could be argued, has fused the global with the local, as the ‘so-called War on Terror’s mission of global policing’ has been inextricably coupled with the ‘entrenchment of the Homeland Security State’ domestically (De Genova, 2010: 614).

The prosecution of anti-terrorism, then, while emanating from the core of US imperial power, has gained specific expression in multiple national contexts. This is particularly evident in Australia, a long-term ‘client-state’ (Paul, 2014) wedded to the foreign policy interests of US imperialism. Hence, the task of fleshing out what this means for the domestic ‘national security state’ is of urgent importance. Following De Genova (2010) and Nisha Kapoor’s (2013) analyses of racial policing and surveillance under conditions of anti-terrorism in the US and UK, I problematise in this article the domestic face of anti-terrorism in Australia: the development of ‘radicalisation’ as the key logic underpinning various legislative instruments and policy interventions. I argue that, while these interventions are ostensibly aimed at curbing the ‘threat’ of terrorist violence, they also serve a more subtle purpose: the reproduction of neoliberal capitalism (Wacquant, 2012: 68). Furthermore, I argue that the question of the work that ‘race’ accomplishes within the trope of ‘radicalisation’ is critical to a full understanding of the nexus between the surveilling, disciplinary and carceral interventions that make up domestic anti-terrorism, and the reproduction of neoliberalism by the state.

In developing these key arguments, I divide this article into three sections: first, I synthesise the work of David Theo Goldberg on ‘racial neoliberalism’ (2009), along with Stuart Hall et al.’s work on ‘mugging’ (1978) and Hall’s work on ‘authoritarian populism’ (1988) in order to develop a theoretical understanding of the connections between neoliberalism and race. In the second section, I offer an overview of the recent strengthening of domestic anti-terrorist policies by federal and state governments in 2014 and 2015, and the New South Wales state government’s ‘Countering Violent Extremism’ program, which I argue have collectively given rise to a tripartite assemblage of polices of surveillance, incarceration and deportation – all of which are underpinned by the raced trope of ‘radicalisation’. In the third and final part of this article, I argue that the nexus between neoliberalism and race in this assemblage of anti-terrorist policies gives rise to two primary outcomes: first, the invisibilisation of the political motivations and grievances underpinning the actions of those who commit terrorist violence, and the socio-political conditions which have produced them; second, the reproduction of neoliberal capitalism through the fashioning of neoliberal subjectivities, the maintenance of societal consent for ongoing neoliberal restructuring, and the innovation of new – and augmentation of existing – profit opportunities for corporations with a direct or indirect interest in the maintenance of the ‘War on Terror’. First, I turn to the task of theorising race and neoliberalism.

Theorising race and neoliberalism

David Theo Goldberg and ‘racial neoliberalism’

Race, both in public and academic contexts, is commonly assumed to be an anachronism (or an ‘extra-economic identity’ secondary to class [e.g. Wood, 2016]). Considered a relic of the past in purportedly ‘post-racial’ times, it is held by many inside and outside academia that ‘racism belongs to a bygone era and that remaining racist attitudes and behaviours are the preserve of unbalanced or uneducated individuals’ (Lentin, 2015: 2). This expunging of race from public legibility under post-racialism, underpinned primarily by the denial of the ongoing legacies of colonial violence, is challenged by David Theo Goldberg’s seminal work: The Threat of Race (2009). In this work, Goldberg incisively charts how neoliberal commitments to ‘privatising property, utilities, and social programs, to reducing state expenditures and bureaucracy, increasing efficiencies, and to individual freedom from state regulation’ (2009: 337), have been accompanied by the development of ‘novel modes of demographic management’; specifically, the ‘enactment, enlargement, and (re)enforcement’ of mechanisms of state violence and repression (2009: 333). The dialectical tension between post-racialism and the development of these mechanisms is summed up well by Nisha Kapoor, who argues that:

race has become increasingly de-politicised as the state has more vehemently attempted to separate it from structure. At the same time, in order for the state to progress its imperialist objectives, the necessary opening up of borders to flows of capital and commodities required increased securitisation against the flows of human bodies, legitimated as a necessary safety precaution from (racially perceived and defined) threats. (2013: 1030)

Race, then, despite having been ’socially desacralised [and] rendered part of the profane’ (Goldberg, 2009: 334), is invoked within neoliberalism to ‘silently reference those who threaten the fiscal wellbeing (notably the perpetually unhealthy) or the social security of the nation’ (Goldberg, 2009: 336). As Goldberg continues to point out, at this contemporary juncture, the spectral phenomenon of the radicalised, extremist Muslim ‘other’ serves as the exemplar of the latter mode of racial reference across a range of western contexts: the US, the UK, continental Europe and the Antipodes (see Goldberg, 2006; Kundnani, 2014; Poynting et al., 2004, 2006).¹ In sum, under conditions of post-racialism, neoliberalism ‘avoids any acknowledgement of racialisation and state racial arrangement’ while simultaneously enforcing ‘racial structures through policing and militarisation, legitimising such actions under the banner of the threat of terror’ purportedly carried in the spectre of the Muslim ‘other’ (Kapoor, 2013).

Against this post-racialism, it is crucial here to assert a definition of ‘race’ that foregrounds its materiality.² It is not an identity that exists independently of structure, it exists in a dialectical relationship to it. Paraphrasing Patrick Wolfe (2016), it is constructed in the process of its enactment; its identitarian stipulations simultaneously produce material consequences and vice versa. Furthermore, race is not only (artificially) mapped onto melanin and cranial size, as proponents of post-racialism would have it – it is deployed to reference cultural inferiority as well. This point is important when considering the raced figure of the Muslim ‘other’: the common (and predictable) objection that it cannot be properly considered a form of racism due to it indexing religion rather than race cannot be sustained if one is to consider the ways in which race has been put to work historically (see Balibar, 1991).

Stuart Hall, ‘mugging’ and ‘authoritarian populism’

Goldberg’s intervention is a crucial first step in identifying how race is implicated in the functionalities of the neoliberal state, particularly with regard to the spectral figure of the Muslim ‘other’. This relationship between race and neoliberalism in the empirical space of domestic anti-terrorism, I argue, can be further illuminated with reference to the critical work undertaken by Stuart Hall et al. (1978) on the social phenomenon of ‘mugging’ in the UK during the 1970s, along with Hall’s later work on the development of ‘authoritarian populism’ under the Thatcher government in the late 1970s and 1980s (1988).³ These works, in two different respects, are critical in setting out the theoretical grounds on which I build a critique of radicalisation and anti-terrorism in this article under conditions of racial neoliberalism: first, in unveiling the kinds of socio-political conflicts and grievances elided by the very term ‘radicalisation’; second, in the identification of the kinds of work that modes of ‘authoritarian populism’ accomplish within the contested processes of neoliberal structural adjustment. In the following paragraphs, I address these sequentially.

Hall et al.’s work on the phenomenon of ‘mugging’ in Policing the Crisis (1978) is crucial in highlighting how a term like ‘radicalisation’ may function to suppress or elide the socio-political conditions which it indexes. In the context of early 1970s UK, ‘mugging’ ostensibly referred to a ‘certain manner of robbing and/or beating of a victim by petty professional operators or thieves who often work in touring packs of three or more’ (Hall et al., 1978: 19). Against this usage of the term to denote a ‘particular form of street crime’, Hall et al. argued that ‘mugging’ required problematisation as a ‘social phenomenon’: a particular ideological construction that stood to benefit certain social forces while constraining and containing others, mobilised certain fears and anxieties, and was buttressed at least in part by the material force of the state (1978: viii). Its ostensibly ‘common-sense’ referencing of a particular strain of crime masked its existence as a term that produced not only a sense of fear and ‘moral panic’ within British society and its media organs, but also a certain kind of response. ‘Mugging’, Hall demonstrates, had a number of connotative dimensions that its uncritical, ‘common-sense’ usage did not trouble: ‘the race conflict; the urban crisis; rising crime; the breakdown of “law and order”; the liberal conspiracy; the white blacklash’ (1978: 27). The embeddedness of ‘mugging’ in these frames invited an assertive response from the police and the courts; these ‘apparatuses of social control’, respectively, mobilised for a ‘war on mugging’ (Hall et al. 1978: 38–52), and began meting out harsher sentences in an effort to appear ‘tough on crime’ (Hall et al., 1978: 33–9).

This concern with interrogating the conditions under which ‘law and order’ and ‘tough on crime’ discourses gain prominence was carried by Hall into his later work on Thatcherism (1988). In this work, Hall suggests that the effectiveness of Thatcherite neoliberalisation in the UK rested ‘precisely on its ability to articulate different social and economic interests within this political project’ (1988: 4–5). This need to harness a range of popular discontents with the neoliberal project, held across different divisions within society, gave rise to the assemblage that Hall would term ‘authoritarian populism’: a ‘contradictory and overdetermined formation’ that linked together ‘Thatcherism’s strategic interventions in popular life, the reactionary character of its social project (socially and sexually regressive, patriarchal and racist) and its directive and disciplinary exercise of state power’ (1988: 7). In authoritarian populism, the ‘anxieties of the public and the perceived threats to the state coincide and converge’, enabling the state to ‘provide just that “sense of direction” which the public feels society has lost’. In other words, the ‘anxieties of the many are orchestrated with the need for control of the few’ (Hall, 1988: 35).

The relevance of Hall’s work on ‘mugging’ and on ‘authoritarian populism’ to the current conjuncture in Australia, characterised as it is by the prominence and sheer banality of phrases like ‘national security’ and ‘strong borders’, is striking. First, his analysis of ‘mugging’ provides cause for critical reflection on the near-analogous use of the trope of ‘radicalisation’ as a guiding logic within domestic anti-terrorism, and a potent rhetorical weapon in legitimising ever-harsher and more invasive law-and-order interventions on the part of the police and the courts. Instead of taking terms like ‘mugging’ at face value, we are prompted to interrogate what they invisibilise and what they produce: which social forces stand to benefit, and which are constrained and contained? Second, the concept of ‘authoritarian populism’ points us towards an analysis of the broader structural context within which the authoritarian and disciplinary interventions of the state in social life. From Hall’s work, I argue in the third and final part of this article that ‘radicalisation’ within anti-terrorism in Australia today functions in an analogous way to ‘mugging’ in the UK during the 1970s: ‘radicalisation’ does not only function to invisibilise the conditions that produce the kinds of socio-political conflicts and grievances embodied in extremist violence; it also is productive insofar as it produces and legitimises the innovation of ever-harsher authoritarian interventions, which, in turn, ensure the ongoing virility of neoliberal structural adjustment in Australia.

Domestic anti-terrorism and the ‘problem of radicalisation’

Before applying this theorisation of race, authoritarianism and neoliberalism to the empirical space of domestic anti-terrorism in Australia, I develop in the second part of this article an overview of what this empirical space entails. First, a caveat: as of 2014, 64 separate pieces of anti-terrorism legislation had been passed into law (Lynch et al., 2015: 3). I do not pretend to have the space in this article to offer a comprehensive overview of these pieces of legislation and the policies to which they give legal expression. Instead, I focus on three particular legislative/policy events: the passing at federal level of the Counter Terrorism Legislation Amendment (Foreign Fighters) Act 2014 (Cth) in October 2014 (hereafter the Foreign Fighters Act) and the \Australian Citizenship Amendment (Allegiance to Australia) Act 2015 (Cth) (hereafter the Citizenship Act) in December 2015, and at state level the announcement by the New South Wales state government in November 2015 of a range of new measures under the rubric of ‘Countering Violent Extremism’. These particular moments in domestic anti-terrorism post-September 2001 are chosen primarily for their emphasis on ‘radicalisation’ as a key guiding logic and rhetorical device, secondarily for their temporal proximity to the time of writing.

Domestic anti-terrorism at federal level

I will offer a brief explanation of each act, before highlighting relevant aspects in detail. First, the Foreign Fighters Act introduced a number of new criminal offences and granted broader powers to police and intelligence agencies in dealing with the threat ostensibly posed by ‘homegrown terrorism’. The Foreign Fighters Act included amendments that, inter alia, endow police with expanded powers to arrest a person without warrant for a range of terrorism-related offences, criminalise the advocacy of terrorist acts (and ‘conduct reckless as to whether another person will engage in a terrorist act’), and enable the Foreign Minister to refuse or cancel a passport on the request of ASIO (Australian Security Intelligence Organisation) or the AFP (Australian Federal Police) without notifying the person. The act, crucially, also enabled the continuation of control orders and preventative detention orders, both of which allow the AFP and ASIO to act on suspicions of potential terrorist activity by imposing on an individual a variety of obligations, prohibitions and restrictions (Lynch et al., 2015: 171), or by arbitrarily detaining an individual for up to 14 days (this varies across state jurisdictions) (Lynch et al., 2015).

The Citizenship Act, passed in December 2015, was devised to strip the rights of Australian citizenship from dual citizens who had engaged in terrorist activity. The explanatory memorandum for the first bill was revealing for not only its functional, but also symbolic value:

The cessation of a person’s Australian citizenship will also have a deterrent effect by putting radicalised persons on notice that their citizenship is in jeopardy if they engage in terrorist-related conduct contrary to their allegiance to Australia. (Minister for Border Protection and Immigration, 2015: 14)

The amendments within the Citizenship Act collectively enabled the Minister for Immigration and Border Protection to unilaterally revoke the Australian citizenship of dual citizens who have been convicted of a terrorist offence. Critically, this measure allows the minister to order the deportation of individuals with dual citizenship for terrorism offences committed abroad or domestically without judicial sanction. The functions of this for the government are threefold: first, it addresses moral panics around the phenomenon of (predominantly) young Muslim men, born to first or second-generation migrants in Australia and holding Australian citizenship, leaving Australia to join the forces of the Islamic State (IS) in Syria and Iraq. Second, it would ostensibly reduce the possibility of attacks on home soil by barring ‘radicalised’ individuals from returning to Australia after their participation in overseas conflicts. Third, it was held that the revocation of citizenship (and thus the ability to re-enter Australia) would prove useful as a deterrent against radicalisation itself. The raced logic of radicalisation that underpins these measures is discussed in more detail in the third section of this article.

Domestic anti-terrorism at state level

The above policies, focused as they are on areas of federal responsibility, have been met with similar extensions of governmental power into areas of state responsibility. Under the rubric of the $47 million ‘Countering Violent Extremism’ program (hereafter ‘CVE’), initiatives funded by the NSW state government have included the following: the provision of training, case management tools and an incident reporting system for school teachers, counsellors and parents in order to ‘identify and manage violent extremist behaviour by students’; the development and funding of a number of preventative ‘community cohesion programs’ delivered through community and non-governmental organisations, with the ostensible aim of ‘promoting youth engagement in an effort to strengthen community resilience to protect young people from violent extremist influences’;⁴ and the establishment of CVE training programs for front-line public servants, among other measures (New South Wales Government, 2015a). This is not an entirely new set of policies: in fact, similar programs have been taking place at federal level since the release of the Rudd-Gillard Labor government’s counter-terrorism White Paper in February 2010.

Notwithstanding, it is important to note, as the media release accompanying the announcement of the measures did (New South Wales Government, 2015b), that these particular measures were rolled out with special urgency in the aftermath of the shooting of police accountant Curtis Cheng by 15-year-old Farhad Jabar outside New South Wales Police Force headquarters in Parramatta, Sydney on 2 October 2015. After that shooting, the AFP had also conducted a series of counter-terrorism raids across west and north-western Sydney (Levy et al., 2015), and the NSW government had requested federal legislation to enable control orders to be applied to children as young as 14. Although this legislation is yet to be passed into law, there is little doubt that it will eventually pass – especially given that the Labor opposition has proven especially keen to forge a bipartisan consensus with the federal government on all matters ‘national security’.

Beyond this bipartisan consensus in the halls of parliament, it is clear from the above that there is a strong degree of confluence between the ratcheting up of domestic anti-terrorism at federal and state levels. As I will illustrate below, they can only be problematised as part of the same, interdependent assemblage: the surveilling arm of the state monitors schools and communities for signs of ‘radicalisation’; its carceral arm arrogates to itself the power to extrajudicially detain and interrogate persons of interest, often without a warrant; its punitive arm has the final say on who must be expelled or barred from re-entry in order to protect the population. These three primary mechanisms within domestic anti-terrorism – surveillance, incarceration and deportation – together exemplify the invisibilising and productive potential of the logic of radicalisation.

The logic of radicalisation under racial neoliberalism

The invisibilising potential of ‘radicalisation’

Before unpacking the three primary mechanisms of domestic anti-terrorism, we must first identify the assumptions that underpin them. These overwhelmingly stem from the concept of ‘radicalisation’, which has been critiqued at length by Arun Kundnani (2012, 2014). He argues that the very logic of ‘radicalisation’, upon which the legislative instruments and policy interventions of domestic anti-terrorism are built, contain a number of built-in, limiting assumptions (Kundnani, 2012: 5):

that those perpetrating terrorist violence are drawn from a larger pool of extremist sympathisers who share an Islamic theology that inspires their actions; that entry into this wider pool of extremists can be predicted by individual or group psychological or theological factors; and that knowledge of these factors could allow government policies that reduce the risk of terrorism.

As Kundnani continues to outline, the logic of ‘radicalisation’ relies almost exclusively on the development of theological and socio-psychological models of behaviour, which spur the policing and military apparatuses charged with maintaining national security to ‘believe that they can pre-empt future terrorist attacks through intensive surveillance of the spiritual and mental lives of Muslims’ (2012: 21).⁵ Recalling the discussion of racial neoliberalism above, these modes of surveillance and policing deploy race through the invocation of the spectre of essential violence and rage in the figure of the Muslim ‘other’.⁶ Via models of radicalisation, this figure is perpetually locked into a sort of racial continuum wherein ‘culture can also function like a nature, and it can in particular function as a way of locking individuals and groups a priori into a genealogy, into a determination that is immutable and intangible in origin’ (Balibar, 1991 cited in Kundnani, 2014: 58). This racial continuum renders the Muslim ‘other’ as always suspect, always located somewhere between two opposing poles: acceptable, docile ‘moderate’ and violent, dangerous ‘radical’ (Kundnani, 2014). The raced figure of the Muslim ‘other’ is not a new phenomenon in Australian racial politics: as Scott Poynting has argued, the Muslim ‘other’ has since the mid- to late 1990s been caricatured as a ‘folk demon’; who is ‘backward, uncivilised, irrational, violent, criminally inclined, misogynistic and a terrorist threat’ to the wellbeing of white Australia (Poynting, 2006 cited in Morsi, 2015: 3–4). As Yassir Morsi points out (2015: 4), this antipodean raced caricature fits with the broader western ‘idea of the Muslim’ as described by Goldberg (2006: 346):

The Muslim image in contemporary Europe is one of fanaticism, fundamentalism, female (women[’s] and girls’) suppression, subjugation, and repression. The Muslim, in this view, foments conflict: violence, war, militancy, terrorism, cultural dissension.

This raced figure of the Muslim ‘other’ is a key component of the logic of radicalisation. Ostensibly concerned with combatting the ‘threat posed by homegrown terrorism’ and discouraging members of the population from ‘travelling overseas to participate in conflicts’ (Attorney General’s Department, 2015), the logic of radicalisation, while avoiding explicit modes of racial reference in keeping with purportedly ‘post-racial’ conditions, subtly invokes the spectral racial phenomenon of the Muslim ‘other’ as an especially fertile host for the pathogen of radicalisation. That many of the instruments and policies derived from prevailing models of radicalisation – particularly those included under the rubric of CVE – read like public health interventions further reinforces the subtle utility of race within the logic of radicalisation: a particular group of people is singularly marked out racially as most susceptible to transmission. This has the effect of pathologising what is essentially a political phenomenon; by racially constructing the Muslim ‘other’ as essentially prone to violence and rage, and locating the development of this violence and rage strictly within the confines of the spiritual and mental lives of Muslims, radicalisation negates the potential for the political content of terrorist violence to be reckoned with.

By mapping the process of radicalisation via the interactions of its purported hosts with ‘hate preachers’ at mosques or on online forums, or by surveilling and monitoring their communications and web searches for a sudden upsurge in piety or hints of anger at ‘the West’, advocates of this approach adopt a reactive disposition towards terrorist violence that depends heavily on police and intelligence agencies being able to anticipate any ‘signs of radicalisation’ that might indicate to them that a particular individual is about to take part in an attack. Given that many of those who have carried out or sought to carry out attacks in Australia have been known to police and intelligence agencies for some time (Chalkey-Rhoden, 2017; Kidd, 2017), the effectiveness of this approach is debatable. For the arguments of this article, however, the more immediately salient consequence of this approach is that Muslims, loosely defined as an ‘ungovernable’ (Hage, 2011), threatening group are, by virtue of their ‘Muslimness’, held to be particularly and individually susceptible to contamination by the pathogen of radicalisation. Furthermore, as Kundnani argues (2012, 2014), any recourse to the presence within this violence of the collective anger generated by decades of western intervention in the Middle East and North Africa (especially relevant here is Australia’s involvement in contemporary conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, and its support for Israel’s violence against Palestinians), to the inability of Muslims to express dissenting political or cultural views without being labelled ‘extremist’ and on the path to radicalisation (Kundnani, 2015: 28), to the punitive and often invasive surveillance and policing of the wider Muslim population, or to the shared experiences of racism as migrants and refugees fleeing to the same western countries that are engaged in military campaigns in their countries of origin, is swiftly negated and rendered invisible.

The productive potential of ‘radicalisation’ under racial neoliberalism

The invisibilising potential of radicalisation under racial neoliberalism is, however, only half of the story. The racial construction of the Muslim other as essentially prone to violence and rage within radicalisation can be located within the ongoing reproduction of neoliberal capitalism via the three primary mechanisms within domestic anti-terrorism described at length above: surveillance, incarceration and deportation. In other words, race within radicalisation not only functions to mask the conditions that produce the very phenomenon that the logic of radicalisation purports to describe; it is also crucial in producing the ‘subjectivities, social relations and collective representations’ necessary for the reproduction of neoliberal capitalism. I argue that this can be illustrated with reference to three key functionalities within domestic anti-terrorism: the fashioning of neoliberal subjectivities via increasingly invasive modes of surveillance, the salving of collective anxieties at the effects of neoliberal restructuring via authoritarian populism, and the innovation of new – and augmentation of existing – opportunities for profit and accumulation, domestically and globally.

Fashioning neoliberal subjectivities

The logic of radicalisation within domestic anti-terrorism functions to fashion subjectivities that are amenable to the ongoing reproduction of neoliberal capitalism. Through the remarkably invasive and authoritarian measures of surveillance and discipline that have been enacted by the state within schools and the broader community – all legitimated by racial classification – the atomised cult of individual rationality that is so ontologically central to neoliberal structural adjustment is reinforced This has two consequences: first, as argued above, in conceiving radicalisation strictly in terms of certain individualised theological/psychological pathologies, the collectively held political motivations and grievances that invariably underpin terrorist violence, conceived within the logic of radicalisation as almost strictly wearing the cloak of Islam, are actively suppressed and ultimately rendered invisible (Kundnani, 2014).

In rendering invisible the political motivations and grievances of potentially ‘radicalised’ Muslim/Arab subjects, race within radicalisation functions to discipline individual subjects into adopting modes of behaviour deemed acceptable by the state; potentially ‘radicalised’ subjects are compelled to make the right ‘choices’ within a strictly delimited market of acceptable ideological commitments. This market is strictly policed through the presence of school counsellors, training of teachers and deployment of ‘Specialist School Support Teams’ in schools: all tasked with the explicit goal of identifying young people who are purportedly ‘vulnerable’ to radicalisation. This leads to suspicion ‘falling upon thousands of law-abiding individuals’ in the crucial, formative years of their education (Kundnani, 2016). The very profile of what constitutes a ‘radicalised’ individual is hazy at best (Nasser-Eddine et al., 2011; Yusuf, 2017), and as such it is difficult to find information on what behaviours the state deems to be too ‘radical’ and thus in need of its attention, or discern exactly what such behaviours are. The federal government’s ‘Living Safe Together’ website provides some indication, though very general, of what these behaviours might involve (Commonwealth of Australia, 2017b):

[The elements of radicalisation] include significant behavioural changes in major areas of a person’s life including ideology, social relations, and criminal activity.

As the radicalisation process builds, some people will promote an increasingly strict and literal understanding of a given belief. They may increasingly use ideological language that vilifies or discriminates [against] others. […] The use of the internet to view, download and spread material promoting violent extremism is often part of the radicalisation process.

It is reasonable to contend from the above that these measures tend to deploy an individualised ontological framework that aims to ensure compliance with existing institutions and structures. The compulsion to avoid recourse to political solutions which challenge the institutions and structures that make up the existing order exposes those already placed on the continuum of radicalisation to the threat of arbitrary detention for non-compliance emanating from the carceral arm of domestic anti-terrorism: the control order and preventative detention order regimes to which I now turn.

Salving collective anxieties at the effects of neoliberal restructuring

Second, the logic of radicalisation functions to optimise the necessary social relations for the reproduction of neoliberal capitalism through its capacity to salve collective anxieties at neoliberal restructuring; especially via what Loïc Wacquant has evocatively called ‘law-and-order pornography’ (2014: 1695). Wacquant explains this phenomenon further:

at the close of the twentieth century the neo-liberal state bolstered and redeployed its policing, judicial and carceral apparatus to stem the disorders caused by the diffusion of social insecurity at the bottom of the ladder of classes and places, and staged the garish spectacle of law-and-order pornography to reaffirm the authority of a government wanting in legitimacy due to having forsaken its established duties of social and economic protection (2014: 1695).

In other words, under neoliberalism the state has redirected its protective capacities from collective welfare to perpetual warfare, adopting increasingly as core praxis the ‘protection’ of the population against the ‘enemy within’ in a manner analogous to that discernible under Hall’s ‘authoritarian populism’ (1988: 2). As Poynting et al. (2004) demonstrate, the key (but by no means the only) constitutive figure of the ‘enemy within’ in Australian politics has long been the Muslim other, the spectral figure of ‘bin Laden in the suburbs’. In a manner analogous (but not identical) to the raced figure of the ‘mugger’ under Thatcherism in the UK, the ‘imagery of alien violence and criminality’ personified in the figure of the radicalised Muslim ‘other’ has ‘become an important card in the hands of politicians and police officers whose authority is undermined’ (Gilroy, 1982: 48) by the now seemingly perpetual spasms of global economic crises, spiralling government debt (Commonwealth of Australia, 2017a), slowing wage growth and growing inequality (OECD, 2017), and unemployment and underemployment under neoliberal capitalism. It is important to note that this card can be played in subtle ways: being seen to be equipped to ‘protect’ the population against the so-called ‘enemy within’ can, in some cases, arguably be of more value than the actual exercise of these powers. Note, for example, the spectacle of large convoys of well-armed cops conducting counter-terrorism raids, or the fact that, as of 2015, the control orders and preventative detention orders discussed above had only been used four times each since their inception in 2005 (Lynch et al., 2015: 172; Tyulkina and Williams, 2015: 738).

Innovating new – and augmenting existing – opportunities for profit and accumulation

Lastly, the third mechanism through which the logic of radicalisation reproduces neoliberal capitalism lies in its ability to innovate new – and to augment existing – opportunities for profit and accumulation. In the context of domestic anti-terrorism in Australia, this is particularly evident in the measures taken by the federal government under the Citizenship Act to criminalise the participation of dual citizens in overseas conflicts – especially those currently occurring in Iraq and Syria – and to enable the deportation of these dual citizens under the sole authority of the Minister of Immigration and Border Protection. This measure explicitly links the urgency of combatting the threat of ‘radicalisation’ at home with the maintenance of consent for Australia’s involvement with and support for ongoing western military interventions in the Middle East; those who take part in such conflicts on the opposing side are deemed so far down the path of radicalisation that they are even beyond criminal trial in Australia.

The logic of this move is quite clearly to appear ‘strong’ on the threat of radicalisation to a domestic audience, in a manner analogous to that of the control and preventative detention orders discussed above. Less obvious, however, is the way in which these measures function to legitimise a range of foreign interventions – particularly in Iraq and Syria today – that have been demonstrably beneficial for transnational and national fractions of capital (Bieler and Morton, 2015; Doran, 2008, 2012; Harvey, 2005). These imperialist interventions have been particularly instrumental in the reproduction of global capitalism; not only in maintaining US access to resources and markets, but in innovating new – and augmenting existing – opportunities for investment and profit for national and transnational fractions of capital, in the process ‘providing temporary relief from the problems of over-accumulation and the crisis tendencies in the general rate of profit raised by the contradictions of capitalism’ (Bieler and Morton, 2015: 124).

To be sure, the US model of capitalism is arguably much more overtly militaristic. However, the question of what corporations gain from the ongoing prosecution of the War on Terror within Australia is a salient one. The continued prosecution of the instruments and interventions devised under the raced logic of radicalisation, coupled with the drive under neoliberalism to contract and tender out areas of government activity and provision, have ensured new opportunities for profit for a range of transnational and domestic corporations that provide services in consultancy, security and training, or engage in the development and sale of weapons, electronics and surveillance tools. These can involve activities as mundane as the construction of a directory of CVE intervention services for the federal government (Commonwealth of Australia, 2015), or they can involve the provision of security for and surveillance of public spaces, transport and other critical infrastructure, the supply of equipment to counter-terrorism agencies (Commonwealth of Australia, 2013a, 2013b), and the supply of weapons and other military technologies to the Australian Defence Force by transnational corporations like Raytheon, BAE Systems and Northrop Grumman (see Abernethy, 2017; Greene, 2017; Pearson, 2017). The links between the logic of radicalisation and these areas of potential profit each merit further research in their own right.

Conclusion

I have argued in this article that race – reconceptualised against the post-racial logic of racial neoliberalism as a material relationship rather than simply an identity – functions within the logic of radicalisation in domestic anti-terrorism to reproduce neoliberal capitalism. Taking theoretical cues from the arguments of Goldberg, Hall and Kundnani, I have argued that the logic of radicalisation within this process, imbued with the raced figure of the essentially violent, extremist Muslim ‘other’, manages this feat in two primary ways: first, by rendering invisible the political motivations and grievances underpinning the actions of those who commit terrorist violence; second, by fashioning neoliberal subjectivities, salving collective anxieties at the effects of neoliberal restructuring, and innovating new – and augmenting existing – opportunities for profit and accumulation.

These arguments are altogether embryonic, and are no doubt in need of building out. Further attention is needed, in particular, to locating the who behind the logic of radicalisation within neoliberalism in Australia. How, for example, are corporations exercising influence over the policy-making process in the space of domestic anti-terrorism? That said, in this article, I hope to have demonstrated that the nexus between race, domestic anti-terrorism and the logic of radicalisation that underpins it, and neoliberal structural adjustment merits further critical and emancipatory research in an era where ‘national security’ increasingly seems to form the key guiding logic of contemporary politics across multiple sites.

Footnotes

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

Author biography

Cameron Smith is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Macquarie University, Sydney. His research interests broadly lie in critical political economy, race and racism, and multiculturalism and migration. He tweets at @cmrnsmth and more of his work can be found at .

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