White Supremacy and the Racial Logic of Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism: What the US’s Approach to “Far-Right Extremism” Reveals about the Global Counterterrorism Agenda

Following the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol by far-right extremists, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) revised their approach to domestic terrorism and violent extremism to focus on terror wrought by racism and white supremacism. Previously, the US’s anti-terror infrastructure, sanctioned by the US Patriot Act and consolidated within DHS, primarily targeted Muslim and Arab American communities as the intended subjects of its domestic countering violent extremism (CVE) agenda. Now, the very racist ideologies that enabled post-9/11 policing and surveillance of minoritized communities worldwide have themselves come under the purview of counterterrorism agendas. While some have celebrated the condemnation of far-right extremism and white supremacy as politically progressive, others have argued that this rhetorical move attempts to render certain iterations of white supremacy as abject, while consolidating the whiteness of the US liberal security state and continuing to perpetuate violence against minoritized communities. In our article, we analyze what the naming of white supremacy as violent extremism reveals about the racial logic of the global Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism (P/CVE) agenda—Obama’s rearticulated global war on terror with a focus on soft, preventative measures and yet trained on Muslim communities both domestically and abroad. We explore P/CVE as a racialized system of governance which cannot imagine its “target community” as anything other than non-white. Based on analysis of interviews with expert practitioners in the field of P/CVE, we analyze the P/CVE agenda for the enmeshment of peacebuilding and development,, which are all directed toward Global South populations. Even while the P/CVE agenda is presented as a new, softer approach to counterterrorism, it contains colonial logic of counterinsurgency and small wars, modes of racialized violence which have always privileged whiteness both as property and identity. We then turn to the current shift in the US’s approach to right-wing extremism, namely white supremacy, to ask: what does this suggest for the future of the global counterterrorism agenda, which has only ever imagined terrorists and violent extremists as nonwhite?