Cop City, State Terrorism Statutes, and the Construction of Violence
Cop City, State Terrorism Statutes, and the Construction of Violence
Some have accused police of "redefining" terrorism in charging forest defenders in Atlanta. Below, how we might think about what political work is actually being done.
In late January, in the first lecture of my terrorism class this term, I brought up the police killing of Manuel Terán, an activist protesting the construction of the United States’ largest police training facility on woodlands near Atlanta, Georgia, colloquially known as “Cop City.” No one amongst my British students had heard of the Cop City protests, which is perhaps predictable being on this side of the pond. But a larger lack of attention in the US—and I am admittedly inferring from a distance here—mirrors larger trends of marginalizing stories of environmental activism within larger terrorism/counterterrorism discourse. This happens in the mainstream even when activism is explicitly brought into counterterrorism spaces, as it has been via domestic terrorism charges levelled at 19 Cop City protesters.
I think this marginalization is a serious mistake: US government actions against environmentalists, taking place within a frame of counterterrorism, can tell us a lot about what the counterterrorism apparatus is actually for. This is especially true when these actions take place at the state rather than the federal level, where there is considerably more latitude for police and courts to consider actions “terrorism” but considerably less general knowledge about what counterterrorism law looks like.
I want to make two points here. The first, more utilitarian, is that we don’t pay nearly enough attention to state-level terrorism statutes within the US counterterrorism apparatus, but they are both sites of government violence and fascinating expressions of the malleability of the “terrorist” classifier. The second, more philosophical, is that allegations that the police are trying to “redefine” terrorism by charging forest defenders miss the point. Though we may have some intuitive sense of what is and isn’t terrorism from the perspective of regular people, the state does not apply the “terrorist” classifier in a uniform, systematic way that aligns perfectly with legal definitions. The surface-level capriciousness of the term is the point—and masks its utility as a political tool for damning challenges to the status quo.
State-level counterterrorism statutes
It is relatively common knowledge at this point, at least among scholars and practitioners, that there is no federal crime of domestic terrorism in the United States. The overwhelming majority of terrorism charges at the federal level are for “material support” (including one’s person, in the form of membership) to a “designated foreign terrorist organization.” I won’t explain right now the US’s truly labyrinthine collection of statutes and processes surrounding terrorist designation—maybe another time—but for the sake of brevity, these are your al-Qaedas and Islamic States and FARCs and Hizballahs and a whole range of other organizations based overseas. The bottom line is that, for instance, you can’t be charged with domestic terrorism for being an incel and committing a mass shooting or beating Capitol Police officers while breaking into a government building on behalf of the Proud Boys (cough).
At the state level, everything changes. Thirty-four states and the District of Columbia have their own terrorism statutes. The content varies (see the table at the link for the exact provisions of each statute), but on the whole, terrorism under state statutes is more broadly defined, easier to prosecute, and comes with heavier sentences than at the federal level. In Louisiana, for instance, a conviction for terrorism, which includes arson and property damage, carries a life sentence; a federal terrorism conviction only carries a life sentence if someone was killed.
We can see the startling breadth with which terrorism is defined at the state level quite clearly in the case of Georgia. Since December, 19 forest defenders at Atlanta’s Cop City have been charged with terrorism under Georgia’s state terrorism statute. While I don’t think it’s helpful to go through different actions and discuss which ones are more or less worthy of being called terrorism, it can be useful to review the sheer breadth of what is legally classifiable as “terrorism” in Georgia.
For instance: five protesters face terrorism charges for throwing rocks at police cars and first responders. Nine face terrorism charges for trespassing. One is accused of nothing except belonging to the group Defend the Atlanta Forest, which the charge claims has been designated by the Department of Homeland Security as "domestic violent extremist” (a designation DHS denies—and this would not be legally binding in any case, because “domestic violent extremist” is a law enforcement investigation category, not a legal category of criminal). Whatever you think about these actions, they are incredibly varied.
Moreover, it’s not clear that some of them in fact qualify as terrorism in Georgia. The state statute allows for attempts to destroy or disable “critical infrastructure” or a “state or government facility” with the intention to “alter, change, or coerce the policy of the government” via the use of “destructive devices, assassination, or kidnapping.” Is throwing rocks at a police car targeting a government “facility” with a “destructive device”? The statute doesn’t clarify.
The Intercept, which has done more reporting on state terrorism statutes than virtually any other media outlet (read: any reporting at all), claims Cop City is the first time such a statute has been used against an environmentalist or anti-racist protester. I’m skeptical that that’s true,[1] but then again, we don’t have a comprehensive list of everyone charged with domestic terrorism at the state level, so who knows. What we do know is that the use of domestic terrorism charges at Cop City is a blatant exercise of state violence that is usually more hidden: the application of a “terrorist” frame to social justice and/or anti-neoliberal protesters as “terrorists,” this time in that exact language.
It remains shocking to me that there isn’t more research on state terrorism statutes—not even in law journals, which is where this sort of thing usually starts. Add it to the list of projects to get to…at some point, because these are powerful legal mechanisms that, even if not used often, tell us something about how state politicians view the meaning of “terrorism.”
“Redefining” terrorism?
(or, there are a lot of quotation marks in this post; whoops)
“The police are trying to redefine terrorism to mean ‘sitting in a treehouse’ or ‘breaking windows,’” an Atlanta activist told The Intercept in response to charges against Cop City protesters. Embedded in this statement—certainly not a sentiment unique to this activist—are a number of assumptions. First is that “terrorism” had a stable definition to begin with. Second is that, if such a stable definition did exist, it was robust enough that police usually followed it rather than trying to stretch it.
Both assumptions get the idea of terror fundamentally wrong. Though there are indeed legal definitions, these vary not only across government agencies at the federal level, but also, as we’ve seen, across state lines. The sense of “stability” has always been a false one, based more on intuitions and media archetypes than anything grounded in statute. More importantly, however—and we all know this on some level, even if we sometimes forget it when talking about terrorism—is that police and other government agencies regularly and consistently massage legal definitions as they see fit. Mary Mourra Ramadan of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee put the problem quite succinctly in a 1995 Senate hearing, when discussions about terrorism statutes were just taking off. Regarding proposed legislation that would have given the federal power to designate terrorist organizations solely to the President (this did not pass), Ramadan said: “Since the President is not compelled to designate every entity meeting the definition [of terrorism], he necessarily must be applying some other unstated criteria to do so.”
We can see glimpses of what these unstated criteria might be in statements from Atlanta police. “None of those people live here,” assistant police chief Carven Tyrus said of the forest defenders. (This is true of some, but not all, forest defenders.) “They do not have a vested interest in this property. That is why we consider that domestic terrorism.” For Tyrus, involvement in an issue that does not immediately impact your daily life is indicative of some sort of larger political/ideological motive—and that motive itself constitutes terrorism, irrespective of specific actions forest defenders may take. Ideology, then, governs what is or is not terrorism, which is not a rocket science-level deduction: the construction of Islam as the primary source of political violence explains far too much domestic and international policy over the past 20 years. In the case of Cop City, so, too, does the construction of anti-capitalism as a serious threat to the state (perhaps because, if taken seriously, it would be).
Speaking of rocket science, police chief Darin Schierbaum has some thoughts on that: “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist … to tell you that breaking windows and setting fires is not protest. It’s terrorism.” Schierbaum is obviously not referring to police breaking windows to gain entry to someone’s home, nor to run-of-the-mill arson, so there’s something else at work here, something that clearly tells us about what is considered a legitimate state monopoly on the use of violence as well as the intention behind that violence. Again, ideology matters (as does the way that ideology is understood through lenses of race and ethnicity).
Funnily enough, it’s ideology, or at least a variant of it, that appears explicitly in Georgia’s state terrorism statute: to “alter, change, or coerce the policy of a government.” What’s terrorism, then, is not agreeing with the status quo and choosing to act upon it. What’s terrorism, then, is a challenge to power. And if cops are redefining terrorism, they’re simply doing what constitutes the practice of counterterrorism: pushing and pulling at the term in whatever ways are needed to reassert that power.
The University and College Union (UCU) in the UK has paused strike action for this week and next due to alleged progress in negotiations. This decision was taken unilaterally, without consultation with members. You can guess from my phrasing of the last two sentences how I feel about this. I’ll leave it there, except to note that the current progression of strike action—10 piecemeal days if strikes in March go ahead—is the exact plan put forward by the General Secretary back in January and that was when soundly rejected by the Higher Education Committee. Guess who decided to pause negotiations? Just sayin’.
Another week, another rallying cry against reflexivity in research from people who didn’t do the reading. This time, it’s an article in Perspectives on Psychological Science arguing that positionality statements aren’t necessary because bias in research doesn’t come from researchers’ identities and other similarly strange things. Setting aside the clear negative connotations attached to “bias” here and the subsequent disregard for the impossibility of objectivity, the idea that researchers’ identities don’t affect their research is…well. Say it with me: bias is not a bad word! We all have it; let’s think it through rather than pretending we can remove it. Here is a really good response thread on the history of decolonial and critical psychology research on this very topic.
My former grad school mentor Helen Kinsella, along with Maria Sanchez, has done a shit ton of research on the effects of the pandemic on women and/or faculty of color in terms of tenure and promotion. There is so much good stuff in their report, along with concrete recommendations for changes departments and universities can make.
Shameless self-promotion corner: The excellent Dr. JPB Gerald and I chatted on his podcast, Unstandardized English, about racism in the UK vs. the US, different shades of white supremacy, and the intersections of capitalism and academia in a supposedly postcolonial world. It’s unfiltered and a lot of me processing my own confusion, but Justin has some smart things to say, promise! That’s here, and also wherever you get your podcasts.
Also! I’m speaking at the virtual launch of Tech Against Terrorism’s new report on terrorist designation/proscription on March 23, 12 pm Eastern/5 pm GMT. It’s the former director of the US State Department designation office, the former chief censor of New Zealand, and moi, so I suspect I’ll play my usual role of Person Actually Concerned About the Expansion of the Security State. Everyone is welcome, but you need to register first here.
Opportunities
‘Tis the season to apply to PhD student conferences in the UK! Edinburgh has one for political theorists in early June; my own department has one for IR postgrads in mid-June.
[1] One could note, for instance, that two environmental activists in Louisiana were charged with the crime of “terrorizing” for delivering boxes of plastics to oil and gas lobbyists. But one should also note that, legally speaking, “terrorizing” and the more ubiquitous “terroristic threat” charge are not equivalent to “terrorism.” The former two charges are much broader and disconnected from larger counterterrorism infrastructure, despite employing the language of “terror.”