Political violence and abolitionist futures.
You're asking your audience to change the questions that we ask.
Nicole Nguyen:If we wanna think about abolition inclusive of Muslim and Arab folks in The United States, but also beyond, that we actually have to think more seriously about the role of empire and war and their relationship to globalized punishment.
Narrator:Rather than functioning as a final arbiter of justice, US domestic courts are increasingly seen as counterterrorism tools that can incapacitate terrorists, maintain national security operations domestically, and produce certain narratives of conflict. The book Terrorism on Political Violence and Abolitionist Futures examines the contemporary role that these courts play in the global war on terror and their use as a weapon of war, hunting, criminalizing, and punishing entire communities in the name of national security. A retheorization of terrorism as political violence, Terrorism on Trial invites readers to carefully consider the role of power and politics in the making of armed resistance, addressing the root causes of political violence with a goal of building toward a less violent and more liberatory world. Author Nicole Wynne was joined in conversation with Nadine Neber on 08/18/2023.
Nicole Nguyen:Hi. I'm Nicole Wynne. I'm an associate professor of criminology, law, and justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the author of terrorism on trial, political violence and abolitionist futures.
Nadine Naber:Hi. I'm Nadine Neber. I'm professor of gender and women's studies and global Asian studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago. And most of my research focuses on transnational Arab feminism and anti imperialist feminist of color activism. And I'm also founder of Liberate Your Research workshops.
Nadine Naber:So, Nicole, thank you for producing this masterpiece. I believe this book is the book that those of us studying or interested in prisons, racial justice, war, empire, The Middle East, the Arab region, and anti Muslim racism have been waiting for. So thank you. Thank you. You know, I'm just gonna launch the conversation by highlighting how your book is about how The US security state has mobilized the courts in the service of its warmongering geopolitical agenda.
Nadine Naber:And in many ways, you make an abolitionist argument that the courts, as a result, were never and were never meant to be impartial or neutral. So you're developing this abolitionist argument about courts and the war on terrorism by showing that legal actors like judges or prosecutors are showing up to these terrorism cases with a variety of biases, whether it's their racist ideas about the South Asian, Arab, or African countries targeted by the war on terror or just mere ignorance. And at the same time, terrorism on trial, your book, does so much more than this. Now how about if you tell us about the book in your own words and why you wrote it and maybe expand on why, you know, we've talked, you and I, about how your book provides an abolitionist perspective on the war on terror and you also weave abolitionist analyses throughout the book. So could you just talk about the book and its abolitionist analysis?
Nicole Nguyen:For sure. I mean, thank you for that generous, overview of the book. Yeah, so I really wrote the book for two main reasons. As you mentioned the courts play a really critical role in the global war on terror, but most of us actually have no idea what goes on in a terrorism trial. We We don't know about the logics and narratives legal actors use to justify criminal prosecution or the outcomes of these cases and the impacts on their families and on communities.
Nicole Nguyen:I often think of this, in terms of the school to prison pipeline like II would follow young people who are pushed out of school and into the criminal legal system. But once they were arrested, I was never asking questions about what happens when they go to court, what happens to their families when they go to court, and so on. And I really only came to this issue of the terrorism trial by following young Somalis who had been targeted by this elaborate sting operation in Minneapolis, and that landed them in court for expressing interest in fighting president Bashar al Assad's brutal regime in Syria. In the same ways, some, you know, war volunteers have gone to Ukraine to fight the Putin regime. So I wanted to understand in the context of those cases how an affable young man who had never committed an act of violence could be sentenced to thirty five years in prison, marked by the court as extraordinarily dangerous, and described by federal prosecutors as unfixable.
Nicole Nguyen:So I wanted to understand how the courts reduced such young people to disposable enemies of the state who are undeserving of living and loving in society. And then the second reason I wrote the book is more as a community organizer. So the first set of questions really came as a social scientist really wanting to understand what are the role of the courts, what are these terrorism trials, what goes on in them. And the second was really with my sort of community organizer hat on, noticing that we often focus on defending quote unquote the law abiding Muslim, so, you know, really challenging the unwarranted surveillance and detention of sort of just general Arabs and Muslims in this country, you know, by really sort of contesting the use of law enforcement to criminalize individuals who have not yet committed a crime. But I also was wondering about what about people who go to Syria to fight or who express support for militant groups who are trying to challenge oppressive regimes.
Nicole Nguyen:And I really saw this as connected to our ongoing abolitionist work, here in Chicago. Abolitionists often talk about abolition as this positive project that's aimed at reducing violence in our communities and responding to harm differently, particularly by addressing the root causes of violence by building different kinds of systems and structures in our communities. But as an abolitionist, I was really struggling to figure out what does this mean for people who enact political violence to affect political change even if we disagree with their politics or their use of violence. In other words as one defense attorney explained to me through this project, the criminal legal system isn't designed to win wars and we can't prosecute our way out of the global war on terror. So I wanted to study the courts to understand how can we understand political violence and its root causes differently and how can we respond to this political violence in ways that don't rely on the criminal legal system.
Nicole Nguyen:To do that, this book really explores all kinds of terrorism cases from kids who are ensnared in elaborate sting operations, to people who are sending clothes and money to refugee camps controlled by al Shabaab, to people who went and fought for militant groups. It looks at how judges and jurors understood or misunderstood geopolitical conflicts like the Syrian war and the impacts of those understandings on the outcomes of those cases. One judge, for example, didn't understand the difference between Shia and Sunni Muslims and therefore didn't understand why like an undercover agent posing as a Hezbollah operative recruiting ISIS fighters actually made no sense and like a young person ensnared in that kind of sting operation actually really didn't have an interest, in political violence. I also look at how terrorologists, so these terrorism scholars who are funded by the US security state, often were admitted as expert witnesses who are granted more authority than lay witnesses and defendants to explain the facts of the case. So I look at all of these different parts of terrorism trials to show how the criminal legal system, as you mentioned, is not equipped to respond to political violence in a meaningful way.
Nicole Nguyen:And so how do we engage abolitionism to think about alternative ways of one, understanding political violence, and then two, responding and reducing political violence that exists in our lives?
Nadine Naber:Wow. That was incredibly powerful. I mean, I think you're one of the few people who has, you know, just gone beyond existing analyses of the racism that justifies targeting of Arab and Muslims to, you know, just actually get into the nitty gritty of the structures and the processes and the systems that enable the continued targeting of folks who are held into the war on terror by merely because they happen to be Arab or Muslim or were in the wrong place at the wrong time or look a certain way or act a certain way or enacted acts of violence that get defined, through racist framings versus an understanding of the conditions that might have inspired that violence. You know, and here I mean how, you know, the entire war on terror is based on, you know, this clash of civilizations idea that the reason why certain people have participated in acts of violence is merely because they were born into a religion that trains them or demands that they enact violence, versus thinking about the material realities that folks are living in, after decades of living in the face of the destruction that the US empire has bestowed on their lives and lives of their loved ones, which kind of gets me into this next question is how a core abolitionist argument you know, just kinda what I'm trying to do here is link our conversation about the war on terror to discussions about prison abolition, which is one of the key contributions of your book is helping us think about the war on terror through an abolitionist framework.
Nadine Naber:So it kind of brings me to this core abolitionist argument about how reforming policing and prisons, you know, as abolitionists have argued, doesn't lead us to ending the violence the carceral system promotes. But not only because the carceral system is racist and classist by nature and therefore can't be reformed, you know, is always meant to be an extension of histories of enslavement, but also because reforms do not get at the root causes of crime, such as poverty, addiction, homelessness, mental illness, etcetera. You know, so that's one of the core arguments that prison abolitionists have made. And I'm also thinking, you know, about leading black feminist abolitionist, Angela Davis, who's been insisting on radical solutions to injustice that she refers to as grasping things at the root. So this kind of root cause analysis is one you've helped us envision in relation to the war on terror.
Nadine Naber:So expanding prison abolitionist framings to the war on terror context, and you show us how we need a root cause approach to not only think about the violence of the carceral system and the, you know, what's happening in the courts, but also the violence that has emerged out of the context of the war on terror. So in several sections, you map how the criminal courts rely on a racist discourse in adjudicating terrorism related cases, you know, and there's a section where you talk about the dominant framing in the court, the racist discourse that this is merely jihadists driven by a jihadist ideology. So the analysis of, you know, acts of violence that come to this courtroom are just reduced to these sweeping generalizations about Islam. And so you say that your approach necessitates rejecting dominant conceptual frameworks that reduce political violence to the mere expression, as you write, of an individual defendant's perverse pathologies, such as religious fanaticism or psychological disturbance, which kind of removes the violence out of the social context in which it circulates. And you also write that most judges, these aren't your words, but you talk about judges often not having a clue about what's going on in the region.
Nadine Naber:What are the material realities? What are the historical political conditions surrounding these cases? And so what I really appreciate immensely about your book is that you don't only offer a critique of these racist discourses that don't work, that constrain the court's, capacity to do justice, but you also put forward an alternative lens, an alternative way of understanding these cases that, again, uplifts this abolitionist root cause approach. So you offer instead to take seriously the material conditions that incite political violence or armed resistance, and in doing so, you suggest that this can help us recognize the criminal legal system's limited capacity to address the context in which the violence circulates. So can you tell us more about this critique of the racist discourses that are ahistorical or depoliticize these cases, as well as the alternative lens you offer for the racist framing versus the root cause framing?
Nicole Nguyen:Yeah. Yeah. For sure. That's a that's a great question. It's a very big question.
Nicole Nguyen:I'll say the the outset that, you know, the courts are in a really tough position. I mean, they're sort of designed to be in this tough position that they're not intended to examine the root causes or geopolitical context. They are designed to look at individual actors and decide if what this person did or believed or said constitutes a crime. And so, you know, what I encountered was a lot of dismissing of defendants trying to explain, you can't just say I went to Syria because I watched Isis videos that there's actually a set of material conditions that have incited armed resistance, which The United States has supported militarily financially politically over the last, you know two decades. So you know that's that's one thing.
Nicole Nguyen:The other thing is that I think judges understand that they don't know very much about Syria, The Middle East political violence in general and they as well as prosecutors call on terrorism scholars to help explain to them and to jurors these geopolitical contexts. And as I mentioned before, oftentimes these terrorism scholars have the most sort of epistemic authority that their sort of interpretation of political violence carries the most weight in the court. And they have this very individualizing approach to terrorism or to political violence, which is to root it in these sort of cultural, theological, psychological pathologies, similar to what we see about sort of blaming black culture for so called crime in our communities, right? This is like sort of the racist reductionist approach to thinking about violence. And if you look at specific cases, right, so there's this case of this kid, Az Al Jaiab, who in 2013 traveled to Syria to fight with Ansar al Islam's campaign against, Assad.
Nicole Nguyen:And his defense team essentially said, like, you can't understand why a person went to Syria if you don't understand the the person's biography and how that biography interacts with a set of geopolitical context and material conditions. And so, you know, they argued in court that properly contextualizing Al Jeyab's experiences requires considering the impact of multiple wars, international conflicts, humanitarian crises, foreign policies of different nations, and political motives that undergird this and every federal national security prosecution. They go into Al Jhaib's history. Right? He's a Palestinian refugee who's raised in Iraq, where his childhood under president Saddam Hussein involved seeking shelter from bombs, witnessing the death of friends and relatives, being jailed and tortured.
Nicole Nguyen:So that's you know one set of experiences and then The United States invades Iraq and during this time Al Jaira is also fleeing from rocket attacks, from seeking shelter with others in crowded rooms as bombs are raining down, seeing corpses in the street, you know, fearing death on a daily basis, and this is all as a child. And so The United States invades and then there's a power vacuum, you know, after this forced removal of Saddam Hussein that led to years of bloody sectarian violence in the region, and which left Sunni Palestinian refugees like Al Jaira really vulnerable to targeting. And in fact, in 2012, Al Jaira was actually kidnapped and tortured by Iraqi police for twenty two days. And so after he was released from prison, he and his family fled to a Syrian refugee camp in early twenty twelve. And if folks remember this this era, this was sort of when Assad's sort of attack on civilians really escalated.
Nicole Nguyen:And it was during this time that Al Jair came to identify with Syrian civilians opposed to the Assad regime and felt this sort of affinity with their struggles and really wanted to stay in Syria as a result of those experiences. But, you know, despite this desire to stay and fight in Syria, he and his family immigrated to The United States. Obviously, as a as a young person in a new country, he still kept in touch with family and friends back in Iraq and back in Syria, and they were reporting to him all of Assad's atrocities, and this was really fueling his desire to return. Having experienced and survived war as a civilian and then hearing continued reports of this, in The United States. And so we all learned about, Assad's chemical weapon attack in 2013, and this is really what drove, Al Jaira to return to Syria.
Nicole Nguyen:And so he left in 2013 to go back to Syria to fight. And he wants to fight for a for a militant group that at the time was not considered a foreign terrorist organization. And folks have written about how, you know, in Syria, there's all this fragmentation, disintegration, and rise of all these, like, splinter groups. You couldn't really tell who is fighting with whom, who is in alliance and allegiance with others. This is something the courts try to figure out if you're fighting for an organization that you know is supported by The United States that then sort of gets absorbed into what's considered a foreign terrorist organization?
Nicole Nguyen:Are you then a terrorist essentially? But I think it's really important that you know all of those shifting allegiances and alliances are really messy and they're also a direct results of the essential collapse of all the social and political structures under the weight of Assad's tyranny combined sort of with US intervention, foreign intervention, all the proxy wars that were going on in Syria. And so for me, if you hear Al Jairab's story, you don't hear a story of some kid who was, like, tricked by propaganda to go back to Syria. There's actually a politics, there's a context, there's a set of conditions in which he and many others including The United States are trying to challenge through the use of violence. And so we can't reduce this desire to go and fight the Assad regime to these psychological, cultural, or theological pathologies that are often advanced by terrorism scholars.
Nicole Nguyen:Right? They're actually located in a set of very clear material conditions that give rise to armed resistance and so we would never say US Soldiers who joined the military after the September eleventh attacks were just like some kids who got duped by US propaganda. We understand why people went to fight just like we understand why people are going to Ukraine to fight Putin. Right? Like this sort of is a clear set of sort of political motivations.
Nicole Nguyen:So we see in this case this relationship between US War, empire, and globalized punishment at work in the arrest, prosecution, and incarceration of Al Jhaab. But instead most of the terrorism research we have to pull from to make sense of this story might acknowledge that these material conditions exist but ultimately would blame his culture, his religion, his psychology for his turn to violence. So in part, you know, this book is trying to show how expert knowledge shows up in the courtroom to illustrate the harm that it does by reducing political actors to to quote unquote craze fanatics. But it's also like showing that, you know, I was trying to figure out how do we understand political violence on our militants own terms and I realized that even as a critical scholar I didn't have a sufficient lens to interpret their politics and I think this is reflective of how US approaches to abolitionism often disconnects the domestic from the transnational. And Al Jair's story shows shows us how the global war on terror fight in Iraq is also waged in The United States through the criminal legal system.
Nicole Nguyen:And so we have to really broaden our scope of analysis to think about these intersections of war, empire, and globalized punishment. And if we're talking about ending, you know, prisons and sort of building alternative communities that reduce harm and violence, you know, how do we also, like, think about military campaigns, military incursions, occupation, repressive regimes as central to the work of abolition? And how do we build a framework for understanding those interconnections of the domestic and the transnational?
Nadine Naber:What you've said is similar to community based knowledge that exists and circulates among Arab communities and communities in the region you're referring to, as well as diaspora communities that are in The US bearing the brunt of the war on terror in The US, but who could never really say what you're saying out loud because it is a risk to call into question or even have a discussion on violence that gets deemed to be terrorist violence. What you're doing in the book is giving us language and a way of actually challenging what is defined as terrorism. You're asking your audience to change the questions that we ask, you know, like the media frames this type of political violence as, say, like you're saying, you know, horrific evil Muslims. And then the response of society is, like, they're bad. So it becomes a moral discussion on good versus evil.
Nadine Naber:Or people say, I condemn the violence or I agree with it or I disagree with it. But in a way, it's like you're saying we're asking the wrong questions. This isn't moral. It's not, you know, about culture or religion. It's about the conditions that people are living in, and you're asking your audience to pay attention to that and shift the lens and the way that they think about it.
Nadine Naber:So given that it also seems like what you're putting forward in this call for looking at the conditions that produce political violence, You're saying in your book that the problem is not only the, you know, this racist approach that just says, oh, they're doing this because they're Muslim, but also that universities and researchers are reinforcing this reductionist lens. So the counterterrorism frameworks that have been produced by researchers are essential part of the problem and that these tools are used by the criminal justice system. So could you talk a little bit about that as well as and and I know you've done a great deal of work outside of this book about the role researchers play in counterterrorism that, you know, reproduces racist, targeting of of Muslims around the world and especially in The US. But and then also, could you talk about what you think researchers should be doing, that there's a role here of researchers as well to challenge the dominant ways that research is being used to reinforce racism and carceral targeting of people deemed to be Muslim or terrorists?
Nicole Nguyen:Yeah. Thank you for that question. I think before I dive into sort of the role of academics, I wanna be really clear that in the courts, this is of critical importance because when expert witnesses get called to testify and to explain facts like what is Jihad, that research has shown that jurors afford prosecution witnesses, expert witnesses, more credibility and more weights than lay witnesses or defendants themselves who are explaining the same process. So that's important to note, right, that it's not just there's academic research that sort of exists out in the world. It's that there's a particular uptake of that research in the courts, and it's a very narrow perspective that gets offered and one defense attorney told me what jurors here in the news is sort of this dominant image of sort of the fanatical jihadist whose religion dictates that they kill Americans.
Nicole Nguyen:Right? And he said, they'll just recite this over and over again. They hear this recited over and over again in the media, and then they get to court and the prosecution calls expert witnesses who rehearse the same kind of narrative. And so, you know, he was saying they could say the Brooklyn Bridge is a gamma ray shield. And if the expert witness said it over and over again, it's a gamma ray shield.
Nicole Nguyen:It's a gamma ray shield. It's a gamma ray shield. The jurors would say, oh, the Brooklyn Bridge is a gamma ray shield. I think, one, it's important to note how expert knowledge confirms what jurors think they already know about terrorism, even if it's not evidence based, even if it's not empirical. And that's why it's especially powerful in the courtroom.
Nicole Nguyen:The second reason why it's especially powerful in the courtroom is that the kinds of defenses that are available to terrorism defendants is based on whether or not they were predisposed to commit a crime. And the way that terrorism research says you can show predisposition to terrorism is by illustrating that they were interested in terrorism, that they can consume terrorism propaganda, that they watch some YouTube videos. And so then it becomes really difficult to say, well, I watched some ISIS videos, but I'm not a terrorist. When their dominant research says, if you consume ISIS videos, you're more likely to become a terrorist. Right?
Nicole Nguyen:So in the courts, terrorism expertise, you know, takes on unique form in that it is it is enormously powerful in shaping the outcomes of court cases. And, you know, to take a step back to think about, well, what is terrorism research trying to do? It's trying to show how is it that, you know, a lot of people can have radical ideologies, but only one or two people actually turn to violence. In this approach, the question is there must be something unique about individual actors that we can sort of figure out a terrorist profile or set of characteristics that are shared among terrorist actors. And so this is looking at psychology, it's looking at theology, it's looking at culture.
Nicole Nguyen:And so it's sort of at the exclusion of any other kind of explanation. Even if a terrorism scholar says, sure, Palestinians living in occupation have the occupation to contend with, they're still asking, what are the psychological traits of someone who does go on to commit an act of violence and so it always has a sort of psychology approach that then pathologies and then criminalizes Muslim and Arab folks as uniquely vulnerable to becoming terrorists. And this is sort of the narrative that gets picked up in the courts. It gets picked up in the media and there's really no way to like prove a negative. How can you prove that like this isn't a pathway to terrorism?
Nicole Nguyen:It becomes very difficult to sort of challenge. And so one of the things that I struggled with was I recognized that this sort of framework is very similar to the way that we talk about immigrants, black folks, right, as sort of violence coming from particular culture, particular beliefs, particular ways of raising families, right, fundamentally racist and classist, but also not having another way of understanding terrorism. That essentially terrorism scholars have become so dominant because they're funded by the US government, they get millions and millions of dollars, you know, they have control of academic journals, so it becomes very difficult to have any other conversation. And if you try to have another conversation, Lisa Stemnity writes about how you're seen as a terrorist sympathizer, you're not gonna get funded, and so it becomes enormously hard for any other alternative way of thinking about political violence to gain traction. And so for me, I was trying to reject this dominant approach to terrorism, but then didn't have a root causes analysis that was available to me.
Nicole Nguyen:And so this book is really trying to push and say we've talked about the criminalization of Muslim and Arab folks but we haven't had the conversation about the root causes of political violence. And as abolitionists and as critical ethnic scholars we have to have that conversation. We have to have a sort of root causes analysis that is transnational, and that also centers the sort of over policing of Muslim and Arab communities simultaneous to sort of the military imperial campaigns that are going on across the Middle East and the Arab region.
Nadine Naber:Yeah. You brought so many themes up in what you said, and I have so much to say, but I I'm just gonna bring up where you talked about the amount of funding that researchers who are creating these counterterrorism frameworks, receive. I wanted to juxtapose that with a study that I recently read from a group of philanthropy folks who are working to increase philanthropic support for Middle Eastern, Muslim, and South Asian organizations in The United States, and they documented that these communities receive 1% of US foundation funding. And they even say that that figure is an overestimate. That's a side note in a way, but it also isn't because you're talking about how organizations and researchers who are responsible, you know, for creating the frameworks that are leading to incarceration and militarism that's devastating these communities are dominating the frameworks that we have to rely upon.
Nadine Naber:And if you compare that to the capacity for communities to create their own knowledge and frameworks, and and we're looking at the funding, you know, less than 1% of of funding to even do work that can challenge it, we see this huge discrepancy. And so it's not only about the research, but it's also about the whole system of of funding and, an erasure.
Nicole Nguyen:I mean, I have a slightly funny story of how I was, there's a defense attorney who's defending a terrorism client, and he had called me to talk, on background based on my research. And he said something like, you know, you could be a confidential expert informant or something like that. And he's like, there's no way that you could ever testify. Right? You can never be an expert witness.
Nicole Nguyen:In the courts, the sort of viewpoint that I offer would never be seen as legitimate in the eyes of the courts because the courts have sort of decided through their decisions to admit certain experts as experts, essentially saying this is the kind of knowledge we view as valid and anything else is not valid. Right? And there have been a lot of critiques about how these same experts get qualified to testify even when they have admitted that they incorrectly testify on different kinds of terrorist groups. You know one defense attorney said that one of these experts doesn't know the difference between Hamas and Hamas, but still gets you know paid to be an expert witness in these court cases. So that's one part and then the other part is that you'll see defense attorneys call witnesses or defendants themselves to essentially explain.
Nicole Nguyen:Here's why I did what I did or there are two people on Guantanamo who said this defendant has nothing to do with Al Qaeda, and their testimony doesn't count for anything. Like, no one sees it as legitimate. And so if you call those witnesses or you have Guantanamo folks making written statements because they can't come and testify, it's not treated as legitimate and so it doesn't carry any actual legal weight in the courtroom. And so this idea of who gets to explain someone's story, you know, plays out profoundly in the courts and that, you know, essentially the courts have said defendants family members community members even other political actors can't actually explain the phenomenon that they are enacting. It can only be this set of experts that the courts have conferred expert status on and so I've you know, I think that that's really damaging in the courts and then it's also really damaging to social movement work because you know a lot of folks then sort of buy into this idea that terrorists are like we don't wanna talk about terrorists or terrorists are if we include so called terrorists, then we muddy or or taints the work that we wanna do and you see this a lot when people get arrested for terrorism crimes.
Nicole Nguyen:One of the things that people talk about is how they lose their communities. They lose any support because people are either afraid to be associated with people charged with terrorism crimes because they're afraid that they themselves will get arrested on terrorism crimes, but two, they don't wanna be associated with those kinds of people. Right? And so there is again this sort of repathologization, recriminalization, and really disposability of certain kinds of defendants that that we don't necessarily see when we're talking about putting money on the books for other kinds of folks who are locked up. And so I think that that's also damaging outside of the courtroom because it's really it really fractures communities.
Nicole Nguyen:And I saw this in Minneapolis, within the Somali community that had a lot of counterterrorism policing, that had a lot of terrorism trials, that you know the the community was left fractured, the Somali community was fractured, and that's a strategy of the US government. You know people were collectivizing and really challenging counterterrorism initiatives during the Bush sort of Obama Trump years and Obama was like alright we have to respond to this this resistance by coming up with something else and this something else was about fracturing communities to fracture collective power. There's so many effects of these cases that are about individual people, their families, their communities, really about the sort of amassing of political power and the destruction of it by the state.
Nadine Naber:Wow. That was incredible, Nicole. I'm you're reminding me of the renowned Palestinian American case of Resmiya Awadeh, who was deported. Was that 02/2017? And it was on immigration charges, but the immigration charges were directly related to an experience she had in Israeli prison where she was, forced through torture into a confession.
Nadine Naber:The, judge determined that the torture expert was forbidden from providing their testimony in court. What you're saying seems to be an extension or part of a broader practices related to anyone who comes from communities that are responding to or challenging US empire. You were just talking about how certain individuals are excluded from, say, testifying or how certain individuals whose stories really matter to these cases are excluded. And you're also talking about the broader impact of these cases in communities. I would maybe call that a bit of a feminist approach in the sense that you're not only looking at the individuals who are targeted, but you're looking at the broader ripple effects of the systems targeting of the individuals.
Nadine Naber:You're looking at the ripple effects of that on their families, on their communities, on their loved ones by integrating an analysis of community and parents of these individuals and their families. You talk about the parents, for example, of those who are criminalized within terrorism related cases, and you talk about how they've lost their children and what that means. And you've also talked about, in your book, how that's led to other losses, like the loss of their businesses, friendships, like you just talked about community fracture and health outcomes, people losing their homes, in light of these cases. This reminds me of a project that I'm part of called MAMAS, where we work with mothers of incarcerated police violence survivors. And it draws upon, like your work, abolitionist research and activism that comes from a feminist perspective that takes into consideration how the carceral system extends outwards beyond courtroom, beyond prison walls, into communities, into the loved ones of those targeted.
Nadine Naber:And so you're talking here about these ripple effects in the lives of those connected to those targeted as terrorist criminals. I would like to talk about that as a feminist intervention that challenges masculinist approaches to prison studies or studies of the criminal justice system that tend to focus more on men victims, you know, the ones who are the direct victims or targets in the courtroom or those living inside prison walls, who get uplifted as if their story is the only story that matters here. By talking about the parents, who are essential part of your focus, I'm wondering what did you find when you looked into the parents here and the losses that they face?
Nicole Nguyen:Yeah. I think before I directly answer, I wanna say that, you know, I think the criminalization of Muslims and Arabs looks really different than, say, the policing of Black and Latinx communities, and that it doesn't lead to the same kind of mass incarceration in sort of incarceration in sort of traditional prisons and jails and that sort of the blanket surveillance, the suspicion is sort of something that stalks people in their everyday lives. It creates a sense of distrust between community members. Know there's a documentary called watched that looked at the surveillance of Brooklyn College and how Muslim young people who are like going through this rite of passage of going to college while also being infiltrated by undercover FBI agents left them feeling like who can I ever trust ever again because my best friend or my partner in college was actually an FBI agent? And so, you know, I wanna just name first of all that much of the criminalization of Muslims and Arabs doesn't result in the same kind of incarceration that we see with other communities.
Nicole Nguyen:They're definitely distinct and interconnected phenomenon, but in the cases that do go to trial and that end in incarceration, I don't know how much I ever really thought about terrorism prosecutions beyond the individual person because the the cost of of going to trial and getting convicted is, you know, you're in prison for thirty five to life. Some people are detained in places where they can't communicate with the outside world. They don't have access to phones and things like that. You know, I was doing court support for Adil Dawood, who was sort of the victim of a sting operation here in Chicago, and he's actually been back in court all summer. His parents talk very publicly about their son getting arrested on terrorism charges, meant that they lost friends, they lost their family business at a car dealership because no one wants to buy a car from a terrorist, You know, the father had a heart attack because of the stress of the trial.
Nicole Nguyen:And so there are these enormous costs. Adul's father said in court recently, you know, you kidnapped my son. And to to think about what, you know, what does that mean for the state to have kidnapped their their son through this sting operation and the enormous consequences, I mean that family counts the number of days their son has been out of their house, and so to really think about the profound consequences that has just on a family itself and then also to think about the community, The school where he attended has all kinds of sort of suspicion cast on it, community members, who do I trust, who do I not trust, is this religious leader to blame? So the the sort of sense of suspicion and distrust sort of ripples out into entire communities. And I think across the country, you yeah.
Nicole Nguyen:You just see enormous distrust about who's in our community, who's policing whom, who's in alliance with the police, who can we trust, who can we turn to. Once you get locked up on terrorism charges, people are so afraid, like, there's campaigns across the country. Right? Right? Do pen pal letters, put money on people's books so, you know, that they can buy supplies.
Nicole Nguyen:All of that is seen as potentially threatening because if you put money on someone's books are you gonna get charged with material support to a terrorist? There's all kinds of layers and levels of effects that these prosecutions have on individuals, on families, on communities, on people's willingness to engage politically, how vocal and public they are, you know, to what extent do they engage in the media that I think is it's really hard to quantify and communicate, except that if you go to court and you sort of see the effects, you can't help but be affected by it.
Nadine Naber:So it sounds that you have an expansive concept or definition about who the targets of these cases are or who the targets of, say, anti Muslim racism are, that they're not only the individuals who the case is about, but it's also their loved ones. It's not just that their loved ones are affected, maybe in terms of, like, mental health or their health or the losses, but they're also directly targeted by The US state or the media.
Nicole Nguyen:You know, a key project of The US Security State is to fracture Muslim and Arab communities because folks have been so successful in challenging the security state. And so part of it is broadly trying to foment distrust in communities, but also that scooping up individual people is a way of demobilizing parents. Right? So, you know, people talk about not sending their kids to Islamic schools anymore, not wearing hijab. Right?
Nicole Nguyen:Sort of deculturizing kind of moment as a part of the political project of the US security state. And so folks have written about how there's a genocidal logic to the policing of Muslim and Arab communities because you're you're essentially saying it is Arab culture or it's Muslim religion that's to blame for political violence. And so if you wanna get rid of political violence, then you essentially have to get rid of Islam and Arabs. Right? And so that's that's essentially a genocidal project.
Nicole Nguyen:And so fracturing families, fracturing communities, fracturing community knowledge, fracturing trust is a part of that project.
Nadine Naber:Yeah. I just wanna pause for a moment because that's really profound what you're saying here. You're taking us from the individual case to the fracturing of communities. That's really devastating. And in doing so, you're also contributing to growing discussions and literature that extend beyond discussions of the war on terror, and Arabs and Muslims to the growing literature, even feminist literature on family separations and reproductive injustices that come with state violence.
Nadine Naber:I'm thinking of Laura Briggs' fantastic book, Taking Children, about forced separations among, say, undocumented families, what we saw with the Muslim ban, with the Yemeni families, with babies stranded in Djibouti with their parents in The United States. So I wanted to ask you to reflect also on the way that your book is helping us make connections across struggles and across communities out of this. To me, what you're saying about the impact on families and communities is is part of this broader discussion that scholars and activists are having about family separations, fracturing of communities happening as a result of US state violence. And it also inspires me to think about expanding research about the criminal justice system that's insisting on more coalitional and intersectional approaches. I mean, you've talked about how the war on terror has allowed for using the courts to expand practices like indefinite detention and torture or has legitimized new surveillance practices.
Nadine Naber:But you've also insisted that we need more research and activism to integrate analyses of prisons and war. So I wanted to ask you to talk a little bit about the work that you do around making connections across the struggle of communities who are, you know, labeled as terrorist supporters and then indigenous communities, black communities, migrant communities that are in similar but also distinct ways roped into US empire, in ways that are connected to each other. I mean, you you have a quote about carceral regimes that articulate with racialized systems of war and empire. And you also write about how abolitionist visioning requires us to understand how war and empire and prisons cohere. So could you talk about what you mean by that?
Nicole Nguyen:Yes. I often think about this. So I don't I don't have an answer. So part of this book is wanting to have a conversation about these carceral regimes, right, and the interconnections between war empire and prisons. I think Guantanamo is a really good example because there's been this sort of closed Guantanamo push, and I'm not objecting to closing Guantanamo, but sort of the question was, like what happens after we close Guantanamo?
Nicole Nguyen:So a lot of the work around closing Guantanamo is reclassifying detainees so that some people would be deported, some people would come to The United States to face criminal prosecution in The United States and some would get sent to second countries to be prosecuted there. And so for me, it was like we can close a prison. That doesn't mean we're ending the things that brought Guantanamo into renewed existence. Right? And and seeing Guantanamo as a place that used to detain migrants is now being used to detain global war on terror suspects.
Nicole Nguyen:And that closing Guantanamo is the closure of a physical site, but it's also connected to why The United States needs Guantanamo in the first place. Right? And so that is thinking about US imperial warfare that necessitates sort of the the indefinite caging of folks, the consistent production of this idea of this internal enemy, the sort of threat, to The United States that could be inside of our borders, could be in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, many other countries. And so that to me, I think what the the demand to close Guantanamo shows that you can't just close a prison or a detention facility. You actually have to think about why does that prison actually exist.
Nicole Nguyen:And then we can see Guantanamo as connected to, for example, what's called Guantanamo North units in The United States, which are these secure communication facilities where you're not only locked up, you can't communicate with the outside world and so is it we're just shifting people from Guantanamo proper to Guantanamo North prisons and is that what abolitionists see as a solution and I think most abolitionists would say no, but I'm not sure that we sort of collectively as abolitionists have an end game for closing Guantanamo and everything that sort of brought it into being because that means we have to deal with war. We have to deal with empire. And so how do we think about those interconnections? And then what is abolitionist organizing look like? So for example, I think I've told you this story that, you know, oftentimes in The United States, we talk about abolition as getting to know your neighbor and meeting people's economic needs to reduce violence and ensuring people have access to healthy food.
Nicole Nguyen:And if you bring that up to someone's in Baghdad, for example, people are saying like, you know, there are really serious security risks. And there's also the police there's security forces. There's the US military. There's the Iraqi forces. Just saying defund the police isn't actually a viable solution that mirrors people's realities.
Nicole Nguyen:And so I think that of it in itself sort of shows if we wanna think about abolition beyond The United States and inclusive of Muslim and Arab folks in The United States, but also beyond, that we actually have to think more seriously about the role of empire and war and their relationship to globalized punishment. I
Nadine Naber:mean, you hinted at how this relates to activism and social movements. But in the book, there are several sections where your analysis of the connections between the way the figure of the terrorists, the figure of the migrant, the figure of the indigenous water protector, the Black Lives Matter protester, the Al Qaeda soldier, suicide bomber, you know, how these figures are already interconnected with each other or have been associated with each other through US state policy and practices. And so in a way, it sounds like you're saying social movements don't have a choice but to coalesce since The US has already connected these communities by hailing them into carceral practices and punishment. And in a way, what you say is combining them together into the state's idea of new terrorist threats. So it's not only that the struggles are connected or their experiences are connected in terms of their experience of oppression in The United States, but also that they're connected through the concept of the new terrorists.
Nadine Naber:So in a way, you're saying that the war on terror has is actually so broad that it hails multiple communities into its orbit, even if researchers, critical researchers, you know, people who work on racial justice, as well as social movements challenging different forms of oppression, even if researchers and social movements have not yet caught up with this analysis. You're saying that we don't have a choice. We need to catch up because it's already happening.
Nicole Nguyen:Yeah. I mean, I think the The US security state is trying to maintain power and white supremacy. And so it's not careful in who it marks as a terrorist. And in fact, the terrorist marker is, by its nature sort of elastic. It's like a rubber band and it's sort of shape shifting to fit each political moment and so you see during the sort of standing rock protests that you had, you know, FBI agents sort of infiltrate protesters who are defined as jihadists with a a quote unquote strong female Shia following.
Nicole Nguyen:And they essentially said they're like jihadists in Afghanistan, and so we're gonna use the Afghanistan playbook as standing rock. Then you had, Black political protesters or the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement marked as Black identity extremists, BIE. So again, creating another category of terrorists. We also see this with the rise of sort of the COP City protests in Atlanta. So folks who are challenging the creation of a police facility in the middle of a Atlanta forest, who had been targeted as terrorists, who have been charged, and prosecuted as terrorists that then sort of unleash a set of policing practices that sort of combine intelligence gathering, police enforcement, and just utter violence essentially.
Nicole Nguyen:And so we can see the use of the terrorism label to criminalize any kind of political dissidents, anti racist, anti oppressive political dissidents, to then sort of justify the unleashing of an enormous amount of police force, military force, prosecutorial, force, while also simultaneously showing, look, there are so many terrorists among us. We need these policing practices. We need sort of this show of force because there are security threats sort of lurking everywhere that can bubble up. And so I think the more we realize The US security state is willing to sort of treat any political dissident of color as a potential terrorist shows that we need each other in these struggles and that you know trying to end anti black police violence is intimately tied to trying to undo sort of the blanket targeting of Muslims as potential terrorists. That there are certainly distinct right social phenomenon but they're deeply deeply interconnected and you can't really get rid of one without another.
Nicole Nguyen:And I also think in Minneapolis for example, right, Black Muslims, Somalis, we're being policed because we're Black, because we're Muslim, because we're refugees, and because we're poor, and you can't sort of separate out the policing practices at work from their sort of intersectional identities and so people's lived experiences are also sort of working at these interlocking systems of oppression that we can't just say oh we're fighting for you because you're black when that experience is tied to being Muslim as as well. And so we we definitely need each other because these systems are interlocking, and we also need each other because we as the saying goes, none of us are free until all of us are free.
Nadine Naber:As we wrap up, I'm thinking that in a way you're calling for broader coalitions, for abolitionist politics that are global in scope, for activist movements that connect prisons and war. And another way that you do that so it's not only that you're saying that The US state is integrating multiple communities into its war on terrorism, framework, and that that becomes kind of like a strategy for justifying the policing and containment and control of multiple communities. But you're also saying that the war on terror itself has justified the expansion of the carceral system so that people who are striving to, say, dismantle the prison industrial complex would also need to pay attention to the war on terror because it's played a crucial role in what we talked about earlier, like changing the way detention works or using prisons and courts and police as weapons of war. So could you talk a little bit as well about that as we wrap up your call for broader approaches to prison and anti militarism activism?
Nicole Nguyen:Yeah. And I think I mean, to be honest, this part of the book is really an invitation to think more seriously about how to end these sort of interlocking systems of military, of empire, and of policing and prisons, largely because I think we haven't thought about, you know, abolishing ICE, abolishing prison, abolishing the military, abolishing empire together in a sort of cohesive kind of way. And so part of the purpose of the book is to say these terrorism cases show that we can't separate out, you know, an anti US empire, an anti US military, and an anti prison. So they're actually deeply inter interconnected and we haven't really thought about this, let alone strategize around it. I think people who live at these intersections right the defendants in these cases intimately know that my life has been a I mean if you take the case right he lived under US occupation and US intervention and knows what that produced how it incited our resistance how it led to his jelly and and incarceration in Iraq and then in The United States So following these sort of individual folks who get who get locked up in The United States really shows us we can sort of end the policing of political violence in The United States, but we're never gonna get rid of political violence.
Nicole Nguyen:I mean, this goes back to our earlier conversation if we don't get at the root causes of where political violence comes from or where particular political ideologies come from. At the very heart of that question is US war and empire and occupation and intervention. And so in that way, like, if we're taking a root causes approach, then we have to actually contend with, war and empire. But if we're also talking about this in terms of sort of coalition building, that these are also interconnected social forces, right, that we can't, again, talk about these things sort of operating in vacuums or in isolation from one another. You know, I think there's groups like the dissenters who are who are essentially saying, yeah, we have to talk about ending the military the way that we've been talking about ending policing and prisons.
Nicole Nguyen:And so, yeah, I I don't really have a a solution to that other than to say, I wanna bring that conversation to abolitionists in The United States. And that's part of this book is kind of showing the urgency that we can't continue to treat sort of these things in isolation. And we can't be afraid of the question of violence. Like I think abolitionists often talk about reducing and eliminating violence in our communities which then sort of doesn't leave room for a conversation around the role of violence in particular places and so in the Palestine context does that mean we can't talk about political resistance to the to the Israeli occupation. And I think you know this this has been like a historical question if if you think about sort of slave abolitionists in the in the early days right, they're garrisonites who are who said we can convince white people not to be slave owners.
Nicole Nguyen:And enslaved people were saying like, okay, we've tried that. That doesn't work. How we're gonna get free is through revolts. Right? And that there was a role of violence in black liberation.
Nicole Nguyen:And so, you know, I'm not cosigning violence, but it is a question to ask of when people live in a you know under tyrants and under repressive regimes. What is the role of violence for enacting social change, political change, and I think that's a conversation that we often shy away from as abolitionists because we often talk about how the job of abolitionists is to really reduce harm and violence in our communities and this is actually saying while people are enacting violence for these kinds of reasons, how do we take it seriously as a form of political action in order to address its root causes? And so I think I think that's also part of the conversation is taking violence seriously.
Nadine Naber:That makes so much sense. I mean, that goes back to you and your work changing the questions that we're asking. You're calling on us to avoid shying away from analyzing the conditions that are producing that violence so that we can understand it and take it seriously. So I just wanted to thank you for terrorism on trial and your study of the judicial system and armed resistance as a means towards expanding our analyses about the global war on terror, globalized punishment, prisons, courts, war making, and empire building. This was incredibly rich, and I'm just so grateful for your work.
Nadine Naber:Thanks for the conversation.
Narrator:This has been a University of Minnesota Press production. The book Terrorism on Trial, Political Violence and Abolitionist Futures is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.