Description
The cliché goes that one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter but, in this article, I explicate a related but more complex aphorism that one person’s terrorist could be another’s counterterrorist and that rather than a given, terrorist and counterterrorist labels are assigned through various institutional and discursive practices which are spatially and temporally situated. First, through my own conceptualization, I suggest the concept of ‘vigilante (counter-)terrorism’ to conceptualize a long-standing but overlooked aspect of counterterrorism and counterinsurgency. Second, using some data from the ongoing counterterrorism projects in Nigeria and in particular, various vigilante groups across Northwest, Northcentral and Northeast Nigeria, I argue that rather than ‘see it, say it, sorted’, where citizens are enlisted as citizen-informants, the citizen that the ‘citizen-warrior’ category which the ‘vigilante (counter-)terrorism’ produces is a violent subject. The sanction engenders a more violent subjectivity, i.e., ‘see it, strike it, sorted’ which enlists the ‘citizen-individual’ as a ‘sovereign’ in as long as the expression of this sovereignty serves the state’s purpose. The erratic nature of such arrangements makes it particularly problematic especially where the lines between the ‘citizen terrorist’ and the ‘citizen vigilante’ are irreparably blurred and their relationships entangled, both spatially and temporally.
