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| Article |
| On Terrorists and Freedom Fighters |
| Khaled Beydoun |
| 136 Harvard Law Review Forum 1 (2022) |
| Open Access | Library Access |
|
Abstract: The Russian invasion of Ukraine in late March of 2022 ushered in a new chapter of war on the European continent. For a Russian regime intent on actualizing its imperial vision and an accosted Ukrainian community fighting in the name of self-determination, this war is far more than a theater of war. Ukraine evolved into real-time drama for racial understandings of “terrorism†and “freedom fighter,†and their political ascription in Muslim-majority nations where parallel struggles either continue to rage or are violently crushed.By interrogating the centrality of race within the dialectic of “freedom†and “terrorism,†this Essay examines how realpolitik driving law and its accompanying discourses is powerfully abetted by racial difference and charged by the indelible resonance of whiteness when it concerns the role of freedom fighter. The War in Ukraine, distinctly unfolding alongside similar campaigns in the “Middle East†and Muslim-majority contexts, is a powerful case study illustrating this dissonance. This dissonance colors the framing of nonwhite Muslims vying for self-determination as terrorists and white Ukrainians, engaged in the same exact acts of resistance, as freedom fighters. This racial interplay saturates media discourses and scholarly literatures, across screens on walls to the smaller ones in our palms as new wars converge with preexisting crusades. One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, the slogan holds; a credo that rings a broad truth, yet falls short of qualifying how race and racism dictate how these labels are politically imagined, then practically and legally assigned. |
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