(Counter)Terrorism and the Intimate

Abstract

Much of the contemporary scholarship reproduces a disembodied approach to (counter)terrorism that fails to account for bodies, experiences, and subjectivities “at the sharp end.” To broaden the empirical focus and the ensuing blind spots, this article analyzes the varied and interdisciplinary approaches that put to the fore the intimacies of terrorism and the responses to it. It asks: What can the conceptual and methodological framework on embodiment and affect tell us about (counter)terrorism and terror threat? The conclusion argues that this framework does not merely extend the apparatus of terror/security to lived experience, but rather seeks to reframe the dominant notions of what terror/security is, how it is practiced, by whom, and with what effects.

Introduction: Lockdown and the intimate

“…The following pages place the pandemic response into a conversation with feminist literatures on the relationship between the intimate and the geopolitical, for three main reasons: (a) the intimate geopolitics analytic enables connecting everyday fears and experiences of insecurity and vulnerability to globalized accounts of health, risk and emergency governance (Laketa, 2021;Pain and Staeheli, 2014;Pratt and Rosner, 2006;Mountz and Hyndman, 2006); (b) this approach emphasizes the corporeal and the affective dimensions of the geopolitical in ways that show how these relations of power are not merely imposed upon intimate lives, experiences and practices, but rather how the sphere of the intimate plays an active role in the very construction of the geopolitical (Barabantseva et al, 2021;Berlant, 1998); and (c) it enables extending the spatial politics of the lockdown beyond the governing of the health crisis and into addressing their entanglements with embodied histories and racialized, gendered and classed experiences of immobility and confinement (Conlon and Hiemstra, 2017;Gökarıksel and Secor, 2020;Sudbury, 2005;Tyerman, 2021). Finally, the intimate geographies of lockdown uncover the lived, felt, and experienced realities of places, thus connecting and grounding accounts of global health (Ingram, 2008) and everyday struggles for well-being (Butler, 2022).…”

Lockdown and the intimate: Entanglements of terror, virus, and militarism

“…Here, we draw on feminist approaches to geopolitics that centre on the role of the body in geopolitics as a way to highlight how geopolitical relations are lived and experienced, grounded and embodied in particular ways. The body becomes a site of intimate geopolitics (Pain and Staeheli, 2014; Zaragocin and Caretta, 2021; Barabantseva et al, 2021; Laketa, 2021), where the intimate does not simply refer to individual or private (Berlant, 1998) but is instead implicated in a multiscalar analytic that disrupts the binary contours between public and private, global and local, macro and micro (Mountz and Hyndman, 2006; Pratt and Rosner, 2012; Hergon, 2021). Moreover, this literature shows the centrality of the emotional, affective, sensorial, and atmospheric realms (Pain, 2009; Woon, 2013; Gökariksel and Secor, 2020; Fregonese and Laketa, 2022) in the process of the active making and remaking of spatial politics.…”