Benjamin Studebaker

Yet Another Attempt to Make the World a Better Place by Writing Things

Tag: Terrorism

April 17, 2023

Citizen-Eject

I have a new piece out for Sublation on the failure of liberal and left-wing conceptions of citizenship to adequately protect citizens from denationalization. Prominent recent cases include Shamima Begum in the UK and Suhayra Aden in Australia. Both liberal and left-wing accounts increasingly center individual agency, and this emphasis makes it easy for states to deny the role they’ve played in creating the conditions for terrorism and to concretize this denial in the form of denationalization. There are discussions of Althusser and especially Balibar, whose book Citizen Subject is referenced in the title. It’s available here, with no pay wall:

https://www.sublationmag.com/post/citizen-eject

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February 22, 2018

I’m Ready to Give Up On Gun Control–But Let’s Close the TSA

I know, right? Depressing headline. But it’s true. After some years of writing about gun control, I can’t do it anymore. As a society, we’ve made our choice–we’ve decided that it’s worth it to have a much more dangerous society in the name of freedom. But if that’s the principle, I want to abolish the TSA and go back to 90s airport security. Remember the 90s? You could just walk into the airport and go straight to the gate. No lines. No fuss. Sure, 2,996 people died on 9/11. But guns were used in 13,286 homicides in 2015 alone. There were zero terrorist attacks involving passenger planes in the 17 years before 9/11. But guns kill another 13 or 14 thousand people every year. Gun rights advocates might think the right to travel unmolested by the TSA is worth only a fraction of what the right to own a gun is worth. But we sacrificed our travel rights over only a tiny fraction of the number of lives guns take from us. I’m giving up on taking people’s guns, but I want them to give me back my airports.

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November 3, 2017

How to Usefully Distinguish Terrorism From Other Forms of Violence

I’ve noticed there’s been a bit of an uptick in think-pieces about what counts as “terrorism”. These tend to be built around a common observation that white mass murderers tend not to get the “terrorist” label and that the Trump administration reacts very differently to mass violence when the perpetrator is Muslim, an immigrant, a refugee, or a close relative thereof. Perhaps the most strident example is Matthew Walther’s piece in The Week in which he claims that there is “no such thing” as terrorism. It’s the return of a conversation we saw in 2015 and which has tended to repeat whenever some high profile mass violence occurs. This debate results from a lack of clarity in the way we think about violence. Let’s fix this.

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September 6, 2017

Everyone Missed the Point of Charlottesville

Over the past couple weeks, I’ve been digesting the narratives swirling after the tragic violence in Charlottesville, Virginia. I’ve waited to write about it because I noticed that so many people’s emotions were running so high, even people who usually seem pretty level-headed to me. Nearly all the reactions I’ve seen have left me dissatisfied. This will take a minute to unpack, but I promise you it’s worth it. Read the rest of this entry »

August 23, 2017

The War in Afghanistan is not a Reasonable Way to Save American Lives

President Trump plans to continue the War in Afghanistan. His reasons don’t make sense. Here’s why.

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