Preventing extremisms, taming dissidence: Islamic radicalism and black extremism in the U.S. making of CVE

Cybersecurity, race, and the politics of truth

“…Viana and Da Silva (2021) note that recent US law enforcement discourses surrounding ‘Black racial extremism’ reproduce in the United States what Krishna (2019: 292) has identified as the tendency to frame the Third World as ‘a space of ontological deficit rather than an historical outcome of First-World colonialism’. Similar emphasis on Black deficit has dominated the politics of truth in contemporary cybersecurity discourses.…”

“…Like Foucault’s judge, physician, and psychiatrist, cybersecurity shifts power ‘away from the subject as authority on the self’, while seeking not only to ‘describe what is normal and what is abnormal, but also to define what is true and what is false about that individual’ (Salter, 2007: 58). The normative identification of Black activists as ‘duped’ or ‘disinformed’ thus provides disenfranchisement with a paternalistic gloss, what Viana and Da Silva (2021: 25) elsewhere identify as the counterinsurgent tendency to ‘treat dissent as disinformation’.…”

Racial Contestation as Extremism: The Making of Black Radicals as a Threat to the Global/Local Political Order

“…As Vitale (2017, p.208-209) underlines, the combination of an expanded counterterrorism architecture, the weakening of the exact mechanisms the Bureau understands as constraining, and the unending professional necessity of reinforcing its importance culminated in the incorporation of "political extremists" to the Bureau's database on violent gangs and terrorist organizations. Thus, the judicial and institutional reform led to an expansion of the CT architecture, but also in the realm of possible threats: the broadening in resources in conjunction with pressure to prevent another 9/11 pushes professionals and institutions to assess possible threats, which, in turns, furthers a cycle of threat-making that justifies more expansion (Donohue, 2001;Viana & Da Silva, 2021).…”

“…To support these claims, the Bureau referred to six "targeted attacks" on police officers between 2014 and the finalization of this first report on BIE (Ibid., p.4). People had committed these events in distinct places and from different ideologies, then hardly provided the evidence for a cohesive group (Winter;Weinberger, 2017); then, albeit not explicitly mentioning the BLM or the M4BL, this label (BIE) amplitude enabled disruptive actions against members of these and other social movements (Viana;Dos Santos da Silva, 2021). Thus, rather than being a push to reconsider the racist nature of the police, Brown's death was a trigger for framing antiracist protests as "black extremist" violence.…”

“…As argued by the Bureau, this violent contestation of racism is a possible ground on which "terrorism" might flourish (Viana;Dos Santos Da Silva, 2021), a claim that intrinsically relates to War on Terror's (WoT) emergence in the early 21 st century. In this context, 'domestic' antiracist politics is read through similar lenses as those used to deal with 'foreign' threat of "terrorism", particularly the so-called Islamic radicalism, just as the same FBI feared anti-communism spread in the civil rights and Global South's national liberation movements during the Cold War.…”