The state uses frames of war and “progressive” policies to mask the expansion of more insidious forms of violence like Islamophobia – ensures that certain populations are slated for violence and death

Precariousness and precarity are intersecting concepts. Lives are by definition precarious: they can be expunged at will or by accident; their persistence is in no sense guaranteed. In some sense, this is a feature of all life, and there is no thinking of life that is not precarious-except, of course, in fantasy, and in military fantasies in particular. Political orders, including economic and social institutions, are designed to address those very needs without which the risk of mortality is heightened. Precarity designates that politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death. Such populations are at heightened risk of disease, poverty, starvation, displacement, and of exposure to violence without protection. Precarity also characterizes that politically induced condition of maximized precariousness for populations exposed to arbitrary state violence who often have no other option than to appeal to the very state from which they need protection. In other words, they appeal to the state for protection, but the state is precisely that from which they require protection. To be protected from violence by the nation-state is to be exposed to the violence wielded by the nation-state, so to rely on the nation-state for protection from violence is precisely to exchange one potential violence for another. There may, indeed, be few other choices. Of course, not all violence issues from the nation-state, but it would be rare to find contemporary instances of violence that bear no relation to that political form. This book considers the "frames" of war-the ways of selectively carving up experience as essential to the conduct of war. Such frames do not merely reflect on the material conditions of war, but are essential to the perpetually crafted animus of that material reality. There are several frames at issue here: the frame of the photograph, the framing of the decision to go to war, the framing of immigration issues as a "war at home," and the framing of sexual and feminist politics in the service of the war effort. I argue that even as the war is framed in certain ways to control and heighten affect in relation to the differential grievability of lives, so war has come to frame ways of thinking multiculturalism and debates on sexual freedom, issues largely considered separate from "foreign affairs." Sexually progressive conceptions of feminist rights or sexual freedoms have been mobilized not only to rationalize wars against predominantly Muslim populations, but also to argue for limits to immigration to Europe from predominantly Muslim countries. In the US, this has led to illegal detentions and imprisonment of those who "appear" to belong to suspect ethnic groupsalthough legal efforts to fight these measures have proven increasingly successful in recent years. 12 For instance, those who accept an "impasse" between sexual rights and immigration rights, especially in Europe, have failed to take into account how ongoing war has structured and fissured the subject of social movements. Understanding the cultural stakes of a war "against Islam" as it assumes a new form in coercive immigration politics challenges the Left to think beyond the established frameworks of multiculturalism and to contextualize its recent divisions in light of state violence, the exercise of war, and the heightening of "legal violence" at the border.