Description
This paper unpacks a theoretical framework wherein contributions from decolonial theory, racial capitalism, and postcolonialism are combined to reconceptualise a critical approach to contemporary political conflicts. Applied to the case of the war against Islamic State (IS), this framework moves past existing attempts to explain the violence of IS as deriving from either primordial or instrumental impulses, or some reconciliation between the two. Instead, it posits that the discursive justifications for and kinetic practices of IS violence can be productively reimagined by placing them into conversation with the Combined Joint Task Force (CJTF) military interventions in Iraq and Syria. Decoloniality, racial capitalism, and postcolonialism offer powerful theoretical bases for situating IS and CJTF violence together, in terms of their respective epistemic, material, and semiotic dimensions. Decoloniality’s focus on episteme visualises how threats are constructed within the Eurocentric imaginary, amplifying IS violence as monstrosity whilst simultaneously naturalising and domesticating CJTF violence into appearing unthreatening. Racial capitalism’s focus on materiality visualises the perpetuation of a colonial hierarchy in the global division and forms of labour, as well as the keen interest of IS and the CJTF in preserving the economic status quo in Iraq and Syria. Postcolonialism’s focus on semiosis visualises how violence constructs racial differences between colonial and colonised subjects, producing IS and the CJTF as Manichaean avatars of good and evil, whereas an emphasis on their relationality yields firmer footing for critical interventions to oppose the violence of both. Normatively then, this paper establishes a theoretical space for critical scholars to use in grounding the violent legacies of colonialism within understandings of contemporary neo-colonial conflicts.
