In what Comaroff took as ‘an almost occult attempt to stuff the djinn of radical Islam back into the bottle’ (link, p. 387), the various fronts on which the Bush administration sought to meet the limitless threat with an equally limitless retaliation were collapsed into a single narrative; that of the so-called ‘global war on terror’.
As the United Status extended ‘its reach internationally to capture terrorists, its grip tighten[ed] domestically for the same purpose.’ (link, p. 530) This was to be a ‘war’ without limits, in which the (in)security of the American homeland was conflated with that of the entire planet or, at the very least, the ‘entire civilised world.’ (link)
Even within this narrative of post-territorial warfare, however, there is still a distinction between strategies of containment enacted ‘there’, in the sands of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the strategies pursued ‘here’, through border control and the counter-terrorist activities of Homeland Security.
