EJCS is going negative this issue. Walters kicks things off by introducing the issue's theme: 'anti-policy' (measures against things; like poverty, drugs, corruption or terrorism). The framing of policy goals in the negative (even as outright 'wars') - superficially linked to liberal technocratic and depoliticizing impulses - should still be viewed as political, substantive and constitutive (think governmentality).
de Goede looks at the fight against terrorist financing: behind the seemingly unobjectionable goals and technocratic instruments lie a highly political web of means and ends which serve to regulate and undermine forms of Muslim affiliation, communication and philanthropy. Non-state actors are enrolled through legal threats, and those economically excluded are dismissed as collateral damage on the way to bigger terrorist fish.
What comes after anti-racism? Anti-anti-racism and post-anti-racism, obviously. Lentin leads us through the anti-racism scene and its critics on the left (race is a flawed or imaginary concept, a 'US folk concept' (.pdf), or a backdoor from 'real' economic issues). She offers a defense of the anti-racist cause against these voices, 'post-race' ideologies, and obscuritan state multicultural-wonkery.
Nyers discusses terrorism detainees' appeals for the release of hostages in Iraq. Rancière is deployed, as the detainees' statements rub up against the norms and aesthetics of dialogue and subject-hood at stake in their detention.
Simon offers the US (and NAZI) war on cancer as an antidote to the wars on crime and terrorism. A new war on cancer could - as it permeates government practices, Foucault-style - bring a new and more causally sophisticated focus upon problems of poverty, education, pollution and incarceration. Maybe...
