Their impact starts at zero, reinscribes racialized violence and surveillance, is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and ignores the root cause.

Sharma and Nijjar ’23 [Sanjay Sharma, Associate Professor at the University of Warwick. Jasbinder S. Nijjar, lecturer in sociology at the University of Surrey; “Post-racial politics, pre-emption and in/security”; 05-01-2023; European Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 27, no. 2; doi.org/10.1177/13675494231168177; accessed 07-25-2024] dliang

Pre-empting racialized terror

Discussions and critiques of predictive policing focus on ‘everyday’ types of crime and generally do not address state securitization, such as counter-terrorism. Predictive policing software programs algorithmically model ‘future’ crime by seeking to identify pat- terns of occurrence through analyzing historical data. Embedded in the martial logic of pre-emption, this militarized mode of policing has intensified under the WoT, which has mobilized a seemingly benign ‘community policing’ discourse to embed surveillance, data collection, risk analysis and pre-emptive action into the routine machinery of public policy and daily life (see Kalra and Mehmood, 2013; Kundnani, 2016; Webber, 2016). However, the heightened emphasis on pre-emptive national security policies and measures is complicated and problematized by the fact that terrorism is a high-impact, improbable event that is remarkably difficult to algorithmically model.

In professional security circles, attempting to predict acts of terrorism is commonly compared to the futility of ‘finding the needle in the haystack’ (Aradau and Blanke, 2017). For example, a large-scale study by Weisi Guo (2019) examined over 30,000 acts of terrorism in more than 7000 cities worldwide since 2002. The findings indicate that the frequency with which terror attacks occur is random and that such attacks are ‘memoryless’ (the chance of a new attack occurring is essentially independent of previous attacks). It is almost impossible to build accurate predictive terrorism models based on historical data because this would assume that terrorism has stable, discernable patterns of occurrence and is thus rhythmic and non-random (Munk, 2017).

Notably, Nassim Taleb (2010) has elaborated on how terrorism can be grasped as a ‘black swan event’, which has the following key attributes: First, as an exceptional event, terrorism cannot be easily anticipated and lies beyond our regular expectations; second, it is an event with extreme impact that can cause profound social change; and third, while an act classified as terrorism is rare, we are nonetheless compelled to ‘concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable’ (p. xviii).

The 9/11 attack and subsequent ones in Europe heightened a realization and a sense of fear that improbable events do occur, with devastating consequences. In response, the reactionary declaration of a WoT presented ‘Islam’ as a capricious threat to national security. Two decades of the ongoing WoT have made Islam synonymous with overlapping anxieties about extremism and the threat of terrorism (Kundnani, 2015). The ‘Muslim as a potential terrorist’ rationalized a racialized and militarized regime of state surveillance that has eroded democratic rights and civil liberties (Bunyan, 2010; Norris, 2017; Sharma and Nijjar, 2018). In addition, the WoT effectively legitimized state-sanctioned racial violence and death production, in the form of rendition, indefinite detention without trial and torture against ‘suspect’ Muslims, as exemplified by the notorious Guantanamo Bay military prison (Giroux, 2010).

Western states have abjectly failed to acknowledge that neocolonial domination and neoliberal global instabilities fomented what has been reductively labeled as ‘Islamic’ terrorism. Domestic deregulation, privatization and de-industrialization, alongside foreign bombardment, have reorganized racial order to produce ‘masses of surplus populations’ (Kundnani, 2021: 52). Rather than addressing terrorism as a complex geopolitical problem that implicates and incriminates Western states and their economic imperatives, the WoT has fixated on the failure of securitization alongside the perceived threat of Islam. In particular, the inability of intelligence agencies to predict the 9/11 terror attacks incited a turn toward a techno-solutionist ideology: ‘Intelligence, counter-terrorism, policing and counterinsurgency have been transformed by the promise of big data and predictive analytics to uncover unexpected patterns and pinpoint potentially suspect ‘needles’’ (Aradau and Blanke, 2017: 374).

However, if it is near impossible to accurately predict low-frequency improbable events, then upon what grounds do counter-terrorism predictive analytics operate? The deployment of such analytics to predict acts of terror has more to do with their performativity than their accuracy. That is, the ‘performativity of prediction’ can alter the space it inhabits and bring into being what it predicts (MacKenzie, 2015). This mode of prediction, premised on fabrication, is not strictly manifested as prevention based on identifying and managing determinate threats in a knowable world. Rather, it operates through a logic of pre-emption that confronts indeterminate threats in an unknowable world (Massumi, 2010, 2015).

Both prevention and pre-emption aim to neutralize threats and regulate the future, but Brian Massumi (2015) contends that they differ in operational logics. Prevention works based on a calculable threat existing prior to its intervention, with the possibility of identifying and addressing its causes to prevent it from materializing. In contrast, the WoT advanced pre-emption as a response to threats to national security that are yet to materialize, and that may not materialize, but are nonetheless imagined as always capable of doing so. The ‘black swan’ event of 9/11 instituted a ‘military doctrine’ of pre-emption that rendered terrorism a permanent, ceaseless threat, ‘tirelessly agitating as a background condition, potentially ready to irrupt’ (Massumi, 2015: 30). David Theo Goldberg (2009: 44) makes a similar point, noting how ‘the ordinary calculation of risks becomes the risk society’, how ‘threats to (a) society become the threatened society’ and how socio-political arrangements become predicated on (constant) fear.

We can further grasp the sense of permanency around the notion of threat through the work of Louise Amoore (2013) who maintains that the risk of terrorism has not necessarily changed. What has changed is the calculus of risk, in conditions of constant emergency, of ceaseless foreboding, of un-ending fear and, as we discuss below, of continuous dread over terrorism. This modality of risk is not expressly involved in the prevention of a probable future event based on existing knowledge. Rather, it looks to preempt an unfolding and emergent event in relation to an array of possible projected futures. It seeks not to forestall the future via calculation but to incorporate the very unknowability and profound uncertainty of the future into imminent decision (p. 9).

The perpetual, background, indeterminate threat of terrorism is the object of pre-emption and its associated practices. That is to say, the performativity of pre-emptive action imperiously makes an indeterminate threat determinate; it brings a threat into being to render it the focus of attention–in this case, the threat of terror. As Massumi (2015: 12) writes, ‘the most effective way to fight an unspecified threat is to actively contribute to producing it’.

Massumi reminds us that the WoT presented the nature and motives of the 9/11 attacks as ‘incomprehensible’, while the former US president, George W. Bush’s formulation of an ‘axis of evil’ framed terrorist states and actors as ‘inhuman’. We would stress that the discourse of the WoT animates a profoundly racialized account of a terrifying and terrorizing Muslim ‘other’, with Islam long deemed the deadly antithesis of white Euro- modern norms (Goldberg, 2009). While generating profound popular and political fear itself, the specious link between Islam and the threat of terrorism corresponds ‘the existential terror of not knowing what is going to happen’ (Wang, 2018: 238). That is, fear over Islam and potential terrorist violence interacts with acute anxieties over a funda- mentally unknowable and uncontrollable future. Deep insecurity over race and the future of civilization nonetheless fuels militarized and academic-driven counter-terrorism policies, which inform and institutionalize novel techno-solutionist practices to pre-empt impending terror and remediate racially-coded trepidation (see Martin, 2014).