Domestic Violent Extremism in Colonial Capitalism's Perpetual War

This study examines the reorientation of the post-9/11 counterterrorism infrastructure from a primary focus on Foreign Islamic Terrorism toward the political policing of Domestic Violent Extremism, tracing the evolution of terrorism threat construction in federal counterterrorism strategy documents between September 2001 and June 2023. This project interprets these threat narratives as prose of counterinsurgency, drawing heavily on McQuade’s (2019) elaboration of prose of pacification. As such, the language constructing these threats is interpreted – drawing on additional primary and secondary data – as rationalizing particular strategies, resources, and tools within the repertoire of ongoing and evolving counterinsurgency. These contemporary trends in US domestic counterinsurgency are then further analyzed within colonial capitalism as a historical-interpretive framework, elaborated herein following Glenn’s (2015) similar methodological deployment of settler colonialism. Interpreted within the framework of colonial capitalism, the targeting of Domestic Violent Extremism by liberal US state apparatuses can be understood as part of a perpetual, border-spanning modern war driven by the fundamental imperative of the colonial capitalist order to pacify threats to capital accumulation. Additional implications of the evolving US domestic counterinsurgency infrastructure are considered in light of major contemporary historical trends.