According to the Department of Homeland Security's webpage (2020), countering violent extremism (CVE) “refers to proactive actions to counter efforts by extremists to recruit, radicalize, and mobilize followers to violence.” Yet while “violent extremism” runs the political and ideological gamut, the program (founded in 2011) has unequivocally singled out Muslims as its primary targets. As a result, CVE is widely viewed with suspicion and disdain in U.S. Muslim communities.
In Suspect Communities: Anti-Muslim Racism and the Domestic War on Terror, Nicole Nguyen offers a sharp and often illuminating analysis of CVE policy, with a specific focus on how CVE actors—many who are U.S. Muslims themselves—advance its frameworks, while rationalizing and negotiating criticisms of CVE policies. The book's main argument is that despite reformist strategies, such as community policing and community-led monitoring and surveillance, CVE is designed to “shore up support for the very institutions that historically have criminalized, demonized, and dehumanized communities of color” (p. 11). Thus, CVE produces and perpetuates the production of anti-Muslim racism in the United States through “intensified racialized surveillance, policing, and confinement” of U.S. Muslims (p. 7).
Drawing upon fieldwork and analysis conducted over a 2-year period, Suspect Communities tracks CVE's history, implementation, and effects, and draws upon the author's participation in CVE trainings across the country, observation of CVE events, interviews with CVE actors, analysis of CVE documents and policy, and her own engagement with activist organizations working against the criminalization of Muslim communities. The book is framed through histories of surveillance, counterterrorism strategy, and radicalization theory, and examines how their discourses have been utilized in state security as well as in scholarly work. Nguyen explores how CVE programs distinguish themselves from counterterrorism (Ch. 2), utilize radicalization research (Ch. 3), target youth (Ch. 5), and employ Muslims to implement their policies (Ch. 4). The last point is central to Nguyen's study: how CVE “incorporate(s) Muslim leaders into the domestic war on terror,” thus, “cast(ing) Muslims as both terrorist threats and coproducers of public safety” (p. 7). By identifying such contradictions in CVE policies, Suspect Communities hopes to offer “new understandings of anti-Muslim racism, documenting openings ripe for political contestation and reimaginations” (p. 11).
The book's main strength is in how Nguyen articulates the “reformist” nature of CVE, namely in how it has worked to transform the global War on Terror into a “non-coercive,” self-policing mechanism. For U.S. Muslims, CVE enters local cultural, religious, and educational spaces by proclaiming itself as community engagement with federal and state law enforcement, thus rendering the state an omnipresence in U.S. Muslim life. Her research reveals how Muslim leaders who engage in CVE work rationalize their choice as the “better” way to do domestic terrorism prevention (as opposed to FBI stings and entrapment), and generally state they are motivated by the desire for “safety” in their communities and larger society. Importantly, Nguyen situates CVE within a larger framework of U.S. empire and settler colonialism, astutely comparing how CVE's justifications resemble colonizing logics that justified Indigenous boarding school across North America.
While it rightly names anti-Muslim sentiment as a form of racism in the United States (as opposed to “Islamophobia,”), Suspect Communities would have been made stronger by considering how logics of antiblackness—and specifically, antiblackness historically directed at Black Muslims—informs and produces contemporary anti-Muslim racism. There is a long history of state repression and surveillance cloaked in “national security” discourse directed at African American Muslims, who made up the vast majority of Muslims in the United States prior to the 1960s; they currently still make up 20–25% of the U.S. Muslim population. While Suspect Communities acknowledges that the United States has long “surveilled, monitored, and punished political organizing by communities of color” (68), the book does not examine state targeting of Black Muslim organizations like the Nation of Islam, and Black Muslim leaders such as Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad, and boxer Muhammad Ali, which is instrumental to understanding anti-Muslim racism in the United States (Johnson, Reference Johnson2015; Curtis, Reference Curtis2019),
In addition, the book would have been enhanced by a discussion of racial, gender, and class differences in U.S. Muslim communities, and how they impact interactions with and understandings of CVE, particularly when exploring the complex personhood of CVE actors (Chapter 4). As a growing corpus of literature has shown, these categories are critical in understanding how U.S. Muslim identities are lived and expressed (Karim, Reference Karim2008; Grewal, Reference Grewal2013). In this regard, Suspect Communities reflects a broader trend in much of the post-9/11 scholarly literature on U.S. Muslims and the security state, in which racial, gender, and class differences are under-analyzed, perpetuating false tropes of Islam and Muslims in the United States as a largely “immigrant,” post-1965 presence in America.
Despite these omissions, Suspect Communities offers an important critique of CVE work and institutions. Written in a clear and concise fashion, the text will appeal to undergraduates and graduate students alike. It should be of special interest to scholars working in the burgeoning fields of critical security and surveillance, critical policy, and carceral studies, as well as to advocates and activists organizing against anti-Muslim racism. By illuminating how anti-Muslim racism is produced at the nexus of “inclusion” into the U.S. security state and Islam's interpellation as the enemy Other, Nicole Nguyen exposes CVE work as a central driver of anti-Muslim animus in the United States that renders the nation considerably less—not more—safe from “terrorist” threat.
