Since the attacks of 9/11, the banner of national security has led to intense monitoring of the politics of Muslim and Arab Americans. Young people from these communities have come of age in a time when the question of political engagement is both urgent and fraught.

Since the events of September 11, 2001, Muslim and Middle Eastern communities have increasingly been viewed through the prism of national security, and young Muslim, South Asian, and Arab Americans in particular have become objects of heightened scrutiny and surveillance. The U.S.-led global War on Terror has defined Muslim youth as objects of the counterterrorism regime, based on the presumption that young people are a cohort that is vulnerable to “radicalization” by Islamist movements and so they are increasingly in the crosshairs of intelligence agencies. The racialization of Muslims and Middle Easterners as terrorists is not new, however; there is a long history of constructing the Muslim and Arab as the “enemy” of the U.S. state, given its strategic interests in the Middle East during the Cold War and its enduring alliance with Israel. Post-9/11 repression also extends the imperial state’s policies of surveilling and containing radicals or leftist “subversives,” especially during wartime and the Cold War.

The 9/11 generation

Image via Coco Curranski/Flickr.

My new book, The 9/11 Generation: Youth,  Rights, and Solidarity in the War on Terror, is an ethnographic study of the forms that politics takes for South Asian, Arab, and Afghan American college-age youth in Silicon Valley who have come of age in the post-9/11 era. It examines the range of political critiques and identifications among South Asian, Arab, and Afghan American youth and explores the new, cross-racial alliances forged through civil rights and antiwar activism in northern California. The identities of these youth have been shaped by the racial and religious profiling of Muslim and Arab Americans under the PATRIOT Act, which has continued under the Obama administration, with Islamophobic and anti-Arab discourse persisting in the U.S. mainstream media. The politics of Muslim Americans, more than that of any other religious group, are viewed as necessary to surveil and contain. This constitutes the “new order of War on Terror” under the Obama regime, which relies on mass surveillance, clandestine cooperation between law enforcement and intelligence agencies, and programs that police political and social lives ( see Deepa Kumar 2012). Repression in the domestic War on Terror often remains invisible, however, for it is conducted through covert means, such as the use of undercover FBI informants, infiltration, and entrapment.

Youth politics is a central target of the counterterrorism regime as the religious and political “radicalization” of youth variously defined as Muslim, Middle Eastern, Arab, Afghan, or South Asian has come to represent a threat to Western, secular, liberal democracy and to U.S. military and economic interventions. The framework of securitization defines Muslims as always a potential threat to U.S. homeland security and views this generational cohort as bedeviled by disaffection, cultural and political alienation, and psychological and social maladjustment. Muslim and Arab American youth, in particular, are viewed as susceptible to indoctrination and recruitment by Islamist movements, that is, as ripe for becoming enemies of the state. Muslim youth are also perceived as being vulnerable to “self-radicalization,” as in the case of the Chechen youth charged with the Boston marathon bombings in 2013. This is also a gendered form of surveillance as young Muslim males have been the major focus of counterterrorism programs, but young Muslim women are also, increasingly, objects of surveillance, especially in the wake of incidents such as the San Bernardino shootings.

The focus on “homegrown terrorism” was ratcheted up after the July 7, 2005 bombings by British Muslims in London and occurred in tandem with shifts in U.S. wars and counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen. In 2007, Senator Joe Lieberman, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security, held a series of hearings on the “homegrown threat of violent Islamic extremist terrorism,” focusing almost exclusively on Arab and Muslim Americans and dwelling on the role of the Internet in fostering Islamic “extremism”; in 2011, hearings on radicalization were also held by Congressman Peter King ( see American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee 2008, 39). Yet strikingly, the very real threat posed by white supremacist organizations and right-wing paramilitary movements is not at the center of debates about “homegrown” extremist violence, despite events such as the Oklahoma City bombings of 1995.

Racial, religious and political profiling

The homeland war on terror has increasingly focused on monitoring and prosecuting ideological and religious beliefs of Muslim and Arab Americans, not just terrorist activities, so this is a form of political, not just racial and religious, profiling. This strategy of pre-emptive prosecution and preemptive surveillance mirrors the doctrine of “pre-emptive war.” One problem with ideological profiling and the criminalization of beliefs is that political dissent is increasingly fragile and risky, especially for Muslim and Arab American youth. Despite this repression, youth in the 9/11 generation have mobilized in response to the War on Terror and the experience of collective profiling has, inevitably, politicized Muslim, South Asian, and Arab Americans. It has propelled new, cross-racial coalitions based on shared experiences of Islamophobia and racism. New cross-ethnic categories have emerged, such as AMSA (Arab, Muslim, and South Asian) and MESA (Middle Eastern and South Asian), as Muslim and Arab Americans became engaged in or led civil rights campaigns and antiwar organizing. For example, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Network Group, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, and the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee have all led national civil rights efforts, in addition to numerous grassroots groups and coalitions, for example, the Arab Resource and Organizing Committee  (AROC) and the Asian Law Caucus in the San Francisco area, in which youth have been involved. Progressive-left campaigns against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and drone wars in Pakistan have also involved Muslim and Arab American activists and connected Muslim and Middle Eastern communities to overseas homelands, U.S. war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the U.S-backed occupation in Palestine.

There has also been a major push to engage in interfaith coalitions, focused on Muslim-Jewish-Christian dialogue and outreach, on the one hand, and in transnational solidarity activism, on the other. Campaigns have linked communities with shared experiences of police violence and surveillance, for example, during the Black Lives Matter movement and the Ferguson 2 Gaza campaign. So the racial profiling by the state has provoked new forms of racialization and affiliation on the ground, even if some of these are not entirely new but recreate earlier forms of cross-racial and international solidarity.

The surveillance state

The surveillance and counter-radicalization regime that has emerged in the U.S., as well as in the UK and Europe, is increasingly preoccupied with Muslim youth cultures and with cultural codes that presumably signify “radical dissent” and “youth alienation” (see Kundnani 2014). Obama’s domestic War on Terror drew on counter-radicalization practices in Britain in a transnational circuit of ideas and policies that focused on surveilling and entrapping Muslim American youth, through programs such as Countering Violent Extremism. While the emergence of ISIS/ISIL may have somewhat reconfigured this, it has long been the case that vocal critics of Israel were associated with “terrorist” movements and subject to surveillance. It is important to note, as Arun Kundnani has observed, that the template for the War on Terror was manufactured in the 1980s to demonize those resisting U.S. hegemony and U.S. allies in the Middle East, particularly Israel.

In the current moment, as my research demonstrates, Palestine solidarity activism is a fraught terrain where youth have to contend with surveillance, censorship, including on college campuses, as well as harassment, allegations of anti-Semitism, smear campaigns, and blacklisting by right-wing organizations such as David Horowitz’ Freedom Center and Canary Mission. At the same time, this encounter with the exceptional lockdown on open discussion of Palestine-Israel leads to a process of what I call “Palestinianization,” that is, a process of politicization and racialization that is endemic to U.S. national culture given unconditional U.S. support for Israel and the power of the Israel lobby. Palestine solidarity is also a unifying hub for Muslim, South Asian, and Arab American youth and activism.

I consider surveillance a technology of disciplining and managing racialized populations within neoliberal capitalism. The culture of surveillance highlights the tension that emerges between the police state’s repression and exceptionalist notions of U.S. democracy and “freedom” in the War on Terror. This tension is deeply felt by those who experience the brunt of policing and the curtailment of freedom in their daily lives. Nearly all the young people I spoke to as part of my research talked about the climate of permanent surveillance and the chilling effect it had on understandings of what it meant to be “political” and also “social.” Arab, South Asian, and Afghan American youth have to self-consciously regulate, or re-narrate, their social and political lives, including on social media. Given the state engages in warrantless wiretapping, monitors private emails and Facebook, and infiltrates mosques and activist groups with undercover informants, it is not just not those who are involved with formal political organizations who have reason to be anxious and self-conscious about their identities and sociality.

In 2012, the stunning investigation by Associated Press of the NYPD’s surveillance program revealed that “mosque crawlers” and undercover informants, called “rakers,” (generally Muslim or Arab themselves), had been deployed to ferret out suspicious Muslim and Arab Americans, including students and youth, “monitoring daily life in bookstores, bars, cafes, and nightclubs” in “suspect neighborhoods”; this was part of a “human mapping program” in cooperation with the CIA and drawing on Israeli surveillance techniques, with a reach extending beyond New York state (Associated Press 2012, 5). The NYPD also infiltrated the Occupy Wall Street movement and Palestine solidarity rallies. The revelation of this infamous “demographics unit” sparked the first mainstream discussion of surveillance since 9/11, which increased with the revelations by WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden’s expose in 2013 of mass surveillance by the NSA and CIA. Some youth at campuses that had been surveilled by the NYPD used social media, including Twitter, and subversive humor to challenge this secret program; the Yale MSA created a Facebook page, “Call the NYPD,” with photos of Muslim college students holding signs declaring, “I am a . . . Blonde, Call the NYPD” (cited in Khabeer and Alhassen 2013, 308).

Surveillance effects

The social and cultural registers through which surveillance becomes a part of daily life are what I describe as surveillance effects, through which surveillance becomes normalized, even as it is resisted. Surveillance effects shape political culture and also ideas of selfhood. Many youth are aware that they are the exemplary objects of surveillance, because they fit a racial, religious, political or national profile. Law enforcement agencies, such as the New York City Police Department, have used behavioral models of “radicalization” based on profiles of youth subcultures, including markers such as clothing, religiosity, and activism (see American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee 2008, 39). This surveillance of everyday life has inevitably alienated many Muslim Americans even further while creating more distrust and divisions within targeted communities.

In a surveillance state, many engage in self-regulation and self-censorship because they believe that they must sacrifice their freedoms for the sake of defending the nation, and that “national security” is, indeed, their own security. Some Muslim Americans engage in self-surveillance or the surveillance of others, hoping to avoid profiling or prove they are patriotic, “good” Muslim citizens. Yet my research also uncovered “surveillance stories” about life in the everyday of surveillance that demonstrate that the surveillance regime also provokes the opposite effect, producing challenges to intelligence-gathering and tactics of counter-surveillance that enable survival. Youth who negotiate these tensions expose the contradictions that animate life in the post-9/11 security state, and the fragility as well as the radical possibility of living life as the “enemy within.”

The culture wars

Surveillance is key to the post-9/11 culture wars, focused on Islam, gender, race, and nationalism. In my book, I argue these culture wars are also racial wars and class wars as they rest on racial and class struggles and fissures in U.S. society. These culture wars have evolved since the Cold War and in the  “new Cold War,” as well as the many hot wars waged by the U.S. from Iraq and Afghanistan to Pakistan and Yemen. Trump’s presidential campaign and election has inflamed the culture wars, and brought renewed attention to the already existing fault lines of race, class, and religion with the nation. As Americans debate the horrifying possibilities of a “Muslim registration,” some may not be aware that this actually already occurred in the U.S. with the Special Registration targeting Muslim immigrant men after 9/11 and that mass surveillance was intensified under the Obama administration. The generation that came of age since 9/11, especially those from communities targeted in the War on Terror and from immigrant communities, were already aware of the “white rage” and extremism that existed within the U.S. and that has now provoked shock and horror among those critical of Trump’s racism, Islamophobia, xenophobia, and misogyny. There is much to be learned from the stories of the 9/11 generation.

Sunaina Maira is Professor of Asian American Studies, and is affiliated with the Middle East/South Asia Studies program and with the Cultural Studies Graduate Group. Her research and teaching focus on Asian American youth culture and the politics of cultural production as well as political mobilization and transnational movements challenging militarization, imperialism, and settler colonialism. She is the author of Desis in the House: Indian American Youth Culture in New York City and Missing: Youth, Citizenship, and Empire After 9/11. She co-edited Contours of the Heart: South Asians Map North America, which won the American Book Award in 1997, and Youthscapes: The Popular, the National, and the Global. Maira’s recent publications include a book based on ethnographic research, Jil [Generation] Oslo: Palestinian Hip Hop, Youth Culture, and the Youth Movement (Tadween), and a volume co-edited with Piya Chatterjee, The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent (University of Minnesota Press). Her new book project is a study of South Asian, Arab, and Afghan American youth and political movements focused on civil and human rights and issues of sovereignty and surveillance in the War on Terror. Maira launched a new section on West Asian American Studies in the Association for Asian American Studies and coedited a special issue of the Journal of Asian American Studies on Asian/Arab American studies intersections. She has been involved with various civil and human rights campaigns and antiwar groups in the Bay Area and nationally.

This interview was conducted by the Remote Control project. 

Dr. Jon Moran is Reader in Security and the School of History, Politics and International Relations at the University of Leicester. He is interested in the role of the state and military and intelligence agencies both domestically and internationally. He has conducted field research with police and security agencies and civil society activists in Western Europe, Eastern Europe, South Africa and East Asia. For three years he conducted training for the EU for security professionals on the reform of intelligence agencies as part of a programme on Security Sector Reform. He wrote a Briefing Paper on understanding and evaluating Remote Warfare in 2015 for the project. It is available here and organised a conference on remote Warfare in conjunction with the Remote Control project in February 2015.

Dr. Moran’s last book was ‘From Northern Ireland to Iraq: British Military Intelligence Operations, Ethics and Human Rights’ which covers the role of army intelligence and special forces since the 1970s. He is currently working on a book concentrating on the use of intelligence and special forces in the most recent phase of the War on Terror.

In this interview, Dr. Moran discusses the use of remote warfare in Libya, its effectiveness and some of the key problems yielded by the use of this tactic.

Q. In 2011, the UK took part in the NATO military intervention in Libya which led to the overthrow of Gaddafi. Official government statements suggest that the UK’s military operations in Libya both began and ended with this campaign. Since then, however, evidence has gradually surfaced suggesting that the UK has been conducting ‘remote warfare’ in Libya. What is remote warfare and how has this tactic been used in the case of Libya?

Remote warfare is a term used to describe a group of tactics that allow states to prosecute military activities from a distance rather than using conventional warfare. These tactics include:

1. the use of special operations forces (SOF) either directly, or as trainers or mentors to local forces
2. the use of airpower (including drones)
3. the use of intelligence assets to direct forces on the ground and
4. the use of local security forces, either official forces or militias or paramilitaries.

One important thing to note about remote warfare is that it is a set of tactics that can be very effective. Remote warfare was employed in Libya in 2011. United Nations Resolution 1973 called for the protection of civilians against threats by the Gaddafi regime. However, the use of airpower for this purpose was then expanded by Western and other powers into remote warfare in order to overthrow the Gaddafi regime.

In 2011 the civil war between Gaddafi and the rebels was in a stalemate. It was not just airpower that made the difference to the rebels. In addition to airpower, special forces from France, the UK and Qatar were deployed not just for forward air control, but to help the rebels become a more professional force. Special forces and UK intelligence assets were used to support the rebels as they advanced. This involved assistance to them in developing combat plans, gaining tactical skills, identifying Gaddafi forces, and supporting them with air strikes on Gaddafi forces. Foreign intelligence support was particularly important in the final operation to take Tripoli. It is my assessment that without this remote warfare support the rebels would have been unable to defeat Gaddafi.

However, this also highlighted one problem with remote warfare. Although as a set of tactics it can be very effective, it cannot by its nature involve long term planning. Following the overthrow and execution of Gaddafi, Libya descended into chaos. This chaos, involving the development of militias, organised crime, widespread general crime and the collapse of public services led to such instability that Islamic State (IS) identified Libya as a suitable base for its operations outside Iraq and Syria. Such has been the instability in Libya since 2011 that the West is now engaging in a second round of remote warfare to defeat IS forces in Libya and promote one of the competing governments as a stable political actor. This is having success in defeating IS but it still leaves the future of Libya in doubt.

Remote warfare can have strategic effect (in overthrowing Gaddafi and defeating IS) but it is not a strategy in itself. If it is not part of a long term strategy it may end up creating more problems than it solves.

Q. So what are the problems that remote warfare can create?

Remote warfare can have a short term strategic effect (e.g. in stabilising or overthrowing a regime). But by its nature it cannot have a long term strategic effect. Remote warfare involves small numbers of specialist troops (special forces, intelligence, air control) and air power which by their nature cannot be deployed over the long term and can only have a limited effect. Even if remote warfare operatives work with local security forces or militias they cannot control them over the long term since they are small in number and that is not the point of a remote warfare mission. With this is mind remote warfare can create a number of problems:

• Long term instability. The overthrow of Gaddafi in Libya in 2011 was a classic example of a successful remote warfare operation. But the operation had no plans for the aftermath. Libya descended into political and security chaos with rival governments, militias and criminal groupings all contributing to a situation in which citizens became more insecure. By 2016 Western and other states were again engaging in remote warfare in Libya, this time to try and stabilise the area and defeat IS – aiming to solve the problems created by the first phase of remote warfare in 2011.
• Perpetuating conflict. In places such as Yemen remote warfare may assist local forces but not in a game changing (strategic) way. It may end up creating a stalemate where no side is strong enough to prevail and ongoing conflict continues to cost civilian lives and create insecurity.

Overall, remote warfare is no substitute for a long term commitment, either politically (though aid and diplomacy) or militarily (large scale deployment in conjunction with local forces – itself a serious decision).

Q. Given the problems that remote warfare can create, why is the use of remote warfare by states on the rise?

For a number of reasons. One is the lack of success of long term deployments of regular troops by Western countries in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Iraq approximately 4500 US military troops were killed and over 30,000 wounded. In Afghanistan the casualties were fewer but the conflict dragged on for a long time. Both conflicts have to be judged as a failure. Iraqi security was only evident for a period after the surge in 2007 and then the rise of Islamic State showed how weak public security was, and is, in Iraq. In Afghanistan the Taliban remain undefeated and indeed the period after 2010 saw the UK and US negotiating with the Taliban and redefining them as insurgents rather than terrorists in the global jihad against the US. Remote warfare is a way for the US to maintain its pressure on jihadist groups without necessitating massive troop deployments and long term counter insurgency operations. It saves money also – both wars cost the US perhaps $3 trillion dollars.

For the UK, remote warfare is way of keeping up its security profile and assisting the US as its conventional power has declined. The UK military was, in a sense, exhausted after Iraq and Afghanistan and then military cuts imposed by the Coalition government further reduced its capacity for large scale deployments. Further, the UK public would not support any large scale ground force deployment for the next few years or in the absence of direct major terrorists attacks on the UK. They are more inclined to support remote warfare.

The French have used remote warfare in Mali and Libya because again it is way to maintain a security presence without the large deployment of troops that the French public might not support even after the IS attacks in France. The French already had a crucial experience with large scale troop deployments and drawn out conflict in Indochina and Algeria in the 1950s and 1960s, and since then have often relied on airpower and paratroopers to support friendly local regimes in Africa.

It should also be pointed out that although remote warfare by Western states has been patchy in its success, elsewhere countries are using remote warfare very effectively. The Russians have used remote warfare very effectively in Ukraine. They have used special operations forces, military advisers and local militias supported where necessary to take the Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine under effective Russian control.  Remote warfare seems to have been a success in Syria. The Iranians developed remote warfare against the Coalition forces in Iraq after 2003 and have been involved in remote warfare in the Lebanon supporting Hezbollah for a long period.  Recently, they have joined with Russia in using local or other forces (such as Lebanese Hezbollah) and their own operatives to stabilise the Assad regime, while Russia has employed surveillance, reconnaissance and airpower to batter the rebels. These are successful operations because they have been used by Russia and Iran not as an antidote to the failure of large scale operations – they have seen what disasters this can bring and they also want to avoid direct conflict with the USA. Rather, for them, remote warfare allows them to achieve their objectives – it’s a useful way of achieving foreign policy objectives. For the West, remote warfare is often a reaction to previous failures at invasion, occupation and nation building.

Q. So is remote warfare better at achieving political stabilisation or destabilisation?

I think overall remote warfare is better at destabilisation. This is not to say that remote warfare cannot stabilise countries. There are examples including the US in Afghanistan (2001-02), the UK in Sierra Leone (2001), and the French in Mali (2011) where remote warfare successfully defeated local militias or terrorist groupings and prevented the further development of conflict. In Afghanistan the Taliban, never viewed as legitimate and not in full control of the country, was deposed and a fragile democracy imposed; in Sierra Leone remote warfare helped to defeat the militias who were opposed to the UN brokered peace agreement; and in Mali remote warfare prevented the overthrow of the government by a combination of insurgent and terrorist groups.

However, remote warfare only started these processes. In all three cases extra support in the areas of security, aid, civilian assistance etc. was provided to make sure the stabilisation was secured in the longer term. In areas where remote warfare has been the start and the finish of the operation it has created far more instability. Libya is the prime example, where intervention successfully overthrew Gaddafi but left the country in anarchy. In Yemen it is also the case as is the remote warfare conducted on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Remote warfare operations in these two areas have ‘managed’ conflict and have not reduced it.

Remote warfare is only the start of any process of intervention. It might be seen as useful tactic but it cannot operate in a vacuum. Russian remote warfare has been effective because the Russians have been working with strong local forces to effectively wrest parts of the Ukraine away; these territories will now need continuing Russian support (like other breakaway areas such as Transdnistria). In Syria the Russians (and Iranians) have been able to bolster Assad’s exhausted but still coherent national army. But a long term peace process will determine the future of Syria and Russia and Iran realise this – they have just used remote warfare to ensure Assad will be a big player in this and that rebel forces will not be negotiating from a position of strength. In Iraq, the rise of IS exposed the weakness of the Iraqi security forces. The US could only work with the Kurdistan Peshmerga and the reliable US-trained Iraq Special Operations Forces, assisted by Shia militias. The disparate group of local forces has been able to stop Islamic State’s advance but with far more difficulty than should have been the case. US and UK remote warfare support has allowed this but this is not any long term solution to the weakness of the Iraqi state.

Q. Taking into consideration the mixed results of remote warfare, how do you see its use evolving in the future?

Remote warfare will not replace conventional warfare but it is likely to be the dominant form of warfare for the next decade at least. There are differing reasons for this depending on the country involved. In the USA, the UK and France there is little public support for any large scale conventional intervention in other countries. So remote warfare remains the main way that countries such as these can maintain some sense of control. Taking into consideration the limits of remote warfare, this will probably remain reactive and have limited success. (It will remain a response to the long term problems of the West ‘Losing Control’ of international security as Paul Rogers pointed out in his book of the same name some years ago). For other countries such as Russia and Iran remote warfare has been effective and is a sign of their gaining more control as the West loses it. Russia used remote warfare effectively in Ukraine and now controls a substantial part of the east of the country and will likely use remote warfare to intervene where it feels necessary to protect its security interests. Iran effectively used remote warfare to destabilise the US intervention in Iraq after 2003 and to support the Assad regime in Syria. Other countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar have employed remote warfare techniques in Yemen and Libya. It is possible that countries like China in its territorial disputes in Southeast Asia may use remote warfare to gain control of the islands involved.

 (This piece was originally published by Channel 4 News on  January 22, 2013 and is the first of two parts by Anna Alissa Hitzemann and Ben Zala)

Britain is on standby and the US is already transporting French troops into Mali. But a new paper says the west is “betting on the wrong horse” by intervening in the region.

Far-right terrorism has re-emerged as a serious security issue in the United States. What are is the drivers behind this phenomenon?

The recent violence in Charlottesville Virginia, perpetrated by white supremacists and neo-Nazis that had gathered for a “Unite the Right” rally, has refocused attention on right-wing terrorism in the United States.  During the rally, James Alex Fields Jr., a possible neo-Nazi sympathizer, drove a car into a crowd of counter-demonstrators, killing one person and seriously wounding 19 others.  The car attack has been described by U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Republican and Democratic elected officials alike as an (alleged) act of right-wing domestic terrorism, and the U.S. Justice Department has promised to open an official civil rights investigation of the incident.

What are the macro-causes of domestic right-wing terrorism in the United States?  In a published study, I attempted to address this question by statistically evaluating all identifiable “right-wing” terrorist attacks in the United States for the period 1970 to 2011.  My goal was to try to determine the economic, social and political factors that drive right-wing terrorism.  In the study, terrorism is defined as an act of premeditated political violence perpetrated by nongovernment organizations intended to influence a wider audience.  I identified domestic terrorist incidents as “right-wing” if they were perpetrated by groups or individuals that were motivated by racist, white supremacist, antiabortion and violent, extreme antigovernment ideologies.

It is important to distinguish the events in my analysis from hate crimes, which are spontaneous rather than premeditated or strategically-calculated acts, and from legal, nonviolent far-right political activities.  The groups and individuals in the analysis are outside of mainstream politics in the United States and have deliberately adopted the use of violence to achieve their goals, rather than nonviolent political strategies such as voting, lobbying and forming protest movements.

The drivers of US far-right terrorism

James Alex Fields, Jr., who conducted the Charlottesville car attack. Image credit: Rodney Dunning/Flickr.

It does not seem that right-wing terrorism is driven by economic grievances or distress.  Across the board, socioeconomic factors that are commonly argued to produce resentments that fuel right-wing terrorism were not significant.  For example, right-wing terrorism is not more likely to occur in U.S. states that have a larger percentage of their populations below the poverty line or that have higher levels of unemployment or income inequality.  I specifically examined two economic factors commonly argued by scholars to be associated with the rise of violent right-wing extremism: the structural decline of blue-collar manufacturing and the “Farm Crisis” that took hold of the United States in the 1980s.  Both of these are said to have produced strong resentments that violent right-wing groups exploited to garner recruits, thereby becoming more active and dangerous.  Neither of these factors, however, do a good job predicting when and where right-wing terrorism occurs in the United States.

States that have suffered heavy industrial manufacturing job losses in a given year or a decline in family farms due to foreclosure do not disproportionately experience right-wing terrorism.  The apparent lack of a direct relationship between economic distress in the United States and right-wing terrorism mirrors findings for terrorism writ-large, globally.  Other studies of economically-aggrieved countries or individuals have not found them to be more terrorism-prone.

I also examined a series of social factors.  The propaganda of right-wing extremist groups often mentions immigration, growing ethnic diversity and the decline of white demographic dominance in the United States as motivating threats.  Far-right protestors in Charlottesville illustrated this by chanting “You Will Not Replace Us!” and “Blood and Soil!”  However, I did not find actual racial and ethnic diversity on the ground to be a statistically significant driver of right-wing terrorism.

Nationwide, the increase in the nonwhite population, and the growth of the nonwhite Hispanic or Latino population, in the United States, bears little relation with ebbs and flows of right-wing terrorist attacks.  Similarly, states with rapidly growing nonwhite population were not found to experience more right-wing attacks.  This does not foreclose the possibility that growing ethnic diversity in the U.S. is a driver of right-wing terrorism.  However, it is possible that the perceived rather than actual threat of demographic change and growing diversity fuels violent extremism.  This effect might be better revealed by a study of individual attitudes as drivers of terrorism.

Related to fears among violent right-wing extremists that whites are being “replaced” by nonwhite immigrants and others is the belief among extremists that traditional male roles have been undermined by the empowerment and enhanced personal autonomy of women in contemporary America.  I investigated this by testing two measures of women’s status: the national rate of female participation in the workforce and the rate at which women seek abortions.  Both of these are frequently-used measures of actual women’s empowerment and are also potent political and cultural symbols of women’s equality.  I find both to be associated with a significant increase in right-wing terrorism.

Holding constant other factors such as past experience of right-wing terrorism at the state level, unemployment, income, population, urbanization, size and growth of the economy and region of the country, I found that for each five percent increase in women’s employment nationally, the U.S. states experienced a 50 percent increase in rates of domestic right-wing terrorist attacks.  Similarly, for every increase of 10 medical abortions per 10,000 live births, a state experienced a 24 percent increase in right-wing terrorist attacks.  Of course it is possible that this latter abortion rate finding is simply reflecting abortion clinics being targeted by anti-abortion extremists.  However, when I removed attacks on abortion clinics from the data, the abortion rate in a state still is a statistically significant predictor of terrorism. This suggests that the controversy of abortion itself is a driver of all types of right-wing terrorism.

Figures 1 and 2 help to illustrate these effects.

Figure 1. Impact of Women’s Employment on Right-Wing Terrorism

Figure 2. Impact of Abortion Rates on Right-Wing Terrorism

Finally, I considered some political and policy factors that have been hypothesized to drive right-wing terrorism. There are several schools of thought on the impact that partisan control of government might have on violent right-wing extremism.  One holds that when Republicans win elections and hold public offices, violent far-right extremists increase their activities because they feel emboldened.

The other school argues that Democratic Party control, and policies that Democratic politicians frequently seek to enact such as gun control or enhanced social policies that increase the size of the federal government, antagonizes right-wing extremists, prompting them to strike back by launching terrorist attacks.  I tested for both and found that right-wing terrorist attacks were more common when a Democrat controlled the White House, and increased dramatically after the elections of both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

In fact, Democratic control over the White House increases right-wing attacks by almost 73 percent.  Figure 3 presents the different projected rates of right-wing terrorism under Democratic versus Republican presidencies.  The partisan effect, however, seems limited to national politics.  Partisan control over state government does not significantly affect patterns of right-wing terrorism.

Figure 3. Predicted Right-Wing Terrorism Under Democratic and Republican Presidencies

This particular finding is interesting given the argument that U.S. President Trump has emboldened right-wing extremists through his rhetoric and his policies and policy proposals.  However, the impact of the Trump presidency cannot be assessed by the study as the analysis does not cover terrorism after 2011.  The data I used to conduct the original analysis has not yet been updated through 2017, when Trump assumed office.  It will be critical to retest the role of partisan control over the White House once this data is available.

While who controls the White House is found to affect patterns of right-wing terrorism, the national partisan effect seems to not be linked to specific federal government policies.  Policies such as increases in federal income taxes or the 1994 federal ban on the sale assault weapons – both of which were an anathema for right-wing extremists – are not statistically significant predictors of attacks.

Conclusion

The sum of these findings is that several of the more symbolic factors, such as reaction against the empowerment of women or control over the government by an ideological “enemy,” that are significant drivers of terrorism rather than structural economic factors, demographic change or government polices enacted.  This finding is, perhaps, not so surprising.  On a general level, symbolic issues are frequently important motivators for terrorists world-wide.  Consider, for example, the symbolic importance of cleansing Muslim society from the influence of Western culture for a movement like Boko Haram in Nigeria or reconstructing an imagined Caliphate for the Islamic State (ISIL) movement.  More specific to the phenomenon of right-wing terrorism, the results underscore the potency of the U.S. President as a (singular) symbol of government and political direction of the country as well as the cultural impact of changing women’s statuses.

It is also important to consider that the study is very much a preliminary investigation into the drivers of domestic right-wing terrorism.  The study focused on the most basic structural factors that precipitate right-wing terrorism.  Future research might look beyond structural precipitants to examine factors that facilitate the motivation, planning and execution of right-wing terrorist attacks, such as the role played by social media, hate speech online, etc.

Author’s Note: Graphs of marginal effects of a 5-unit change (Women’s Employment), 10-unit change (Abortion Rates) and 1-unit change (Republican to Democrat) on counts of right-wing terrorist events. In models, state unemployment rate, inequality, population, population growth, urbanization rate, area, gross state product per capita, growth of gross state product per capita, region (Midwest, South, West) and previous year right-wing attacks are controlled for.

James A. Piazza is Liberal Arts Research Professor of Political Science at the Pennsylvania State University. Piazza’s research focuses on terrorism, counterterrorism, political violence and intra-state armed conflict. His published work has appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics,International Organization, Comparative Political Studies, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Public Choice, Journal of Peace Research, Political Psychology, Conflict Management and Peace Science, Political Research Quarterly, Foreign Policy Analysis, International Interactions, Defence and Peace Economics, Southern Economic Journal, Security Studies, Terrorism and Political Violence and Studies in Conflict and Terrorism. He can be contacted at . His website:  http://polisci.la.psu.edu/people/jap45