Khalili - Ezra

      In the opening chapters of Time in the Shadows, Laleh Khalili considers the role of liberalism in implementing and expanding the field of counter-insurgency. Khalili demonstrates how contemporary humanitarian discourse's appeal to a universalism of democracy and modernity has enabled and legitimized the imperial reordering of war, confinement, deterritorialization and hyper-surveillance. She argues that liberalism has lead to the rise of incarceration as a method of governance, attempting to blunt and conceal the viscerality of state violence under a guise of restraint and protection. She contextualizes these phenomena by reviewing the history of assymetric conflict, revealing its continuity with earlier periods of colonial conquest and administration.

     Through a series of multisited examples, Khalili connects the expansionist paradigm of the European 'civilizing mission' to the current mode of conceptualizing war as an extension of protection via liberal politics. These insights relate directly to my research project, allowing me to envision trajectories of social change which are undermined, rather than take shape within state-centric liberal discourse. Khalili's description of counter-insurgent contexts as micro-social rearrangements that generate complicity rather than foment confrontation with target populations, sheds light on the methods by which reformist capitulation can foreclose and isolate insurgent resistance. By recognizing the ways in which counter-insurgency functions to recuperate and pacify rather than diametrically oppose intransigent populations, Khalil's interventions can help describe how anarchist challenges toward nationally sanctioned practices of sex and affect have been neutralized through acts of decriminalization and legalization. On the other hand, they can also help clarify how processes of racialization and disavowal functioned in these instances to minoritize and thereby more effectively liquidate insurgent forces.

Question:

1) How can an analysis of counter-insurgency and imperialism help inform an account of the 'lavender tide', and more concretely, the way in which liberal discourses elaborated in US and European courts have exported a rubric of gay rights and the recognition of gay marriage?

2) If the logics of incarceration and containment, central to the continuation of war under liberalism, require 'concealment in broad daylight' for their rational solvency, then how can one disrupt processes of disappearance? Will an unmasking merely embolden a putative violence of sovereignty as evidenced in the current presidential administration's disregard for any 'rules of engagement'?