A lecture by Darryl Li (University of Chicago), moderated by Lila Abu-Lughod (Columbia, Anthropology).
[Note: Due to recent events, this talk will include preliminary reflections on current contestations over the meaning and direction of the "War on Terror," and specifically the tensions between the technocratic and populist aspects of white supremacy and empire]
Two decades into the Global War on Terror -- as well as of standard liberal and left critiques -- the animating specter of "jihadism" remains as obfuscatory and violent as ever. This lecture attempts to clarify the stakes and the harms of this invidious category. Believers call many things jihad -- from personal struggles for self-improvement to armed violence -- and debate over proper uses of the word. The concept of jihadism, however, designates only a subset of these many diverse activities. Yet the very act of delineating which invocations of jihad count as jihadism and which do not is an intervention into a debate among believers using criteria from outside the tradition. Jihadism inevitably gives rise to the implicit residual category, of "non-jihadist" jihads. What can we learn from this (non-)category and what are its stakes for thinking about radical politics more generally?
Darryl Li is an anthropologist and attorney working at the intersection of war, law, migration, empire, and race with a focus on transregional linkages between the Middle East, South Asia, and the Balkans. He is the author of The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge of Solidarity (Stanford University Press, 2020), which develops an ethnographic approach to the comparative study of universalism using the example of transnational "jihadists" -- specifically, Arabs and other foreigners who fought in the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia Herzegovina. Li has participated in litigation arising from the "War on Terror" as party counsel, amicus, or expert witness, including in Guantánamo habeas, Alien Tort, material support, denaturalization, immigration detention, and asylum proceedings. He is a member of the New York and Illinois bars.
Lila Abu-Lughod is the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science in the Department of Anthropology, Columbia University. A leading voice in the debates about culture, gender, Islam, and global feminist politics, her books and articles have been translated into 14 languages. Her scholarship, strongly ethnographic and mostly based in Egypt, has focused on three broad issues: the relationship between cultural forms and power; the politics of knowledge and representation; and the dynamics of women’s and human rights, global liberalism, and feminist governance of the Muslim world. Current research focuses on museum politics in Palestine and other settler colonies, security discourses and Islamophobia, and religion in the global governance of gender violence.