Bombs and Global Punitive Surveillance
Sanaullah Khan
Sanaullah Khan is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Hunter College, City University of New York. His work explores health inequities, religion, global health, security regimes, and psychological anthropology, with a particular focus on Pakistan and urban United States contexts. He holds a PhD in Anthropology and a Graduate Certificate in Global Health from Johns Hopkins University.
We find ourselves
in a world with rising authoritarianism, where the possibility of conflict has also meant the disintegration of global peace, ushered by a period of decline in US power and the ever-growing realities of a multipolar world. In this emerging context, the effects of US dominance are still felt occasionally through acts such as the capture of Maduro, the strikes on Iran, as well as the renegotiation of trade deals with countries around the world (often through coercion, if needed). In all these events, what the US has to continuously reckon with is the projection of power abroad, when inequality within the home continues to widen. I have been studying the inequalities in Rust Belt cities in the US, which suffer from the chronic impacts of deindustrialization, poverty, drug use, policing, and rising costs of care, especially with the expansion of the care economy.
When approaching this decline, and the arbitrary ways in which the US has begun to exert itself internationally, it is important to appreciate the long history whereby the US and its allies have employed the language of legality, which is still there but is giving way to the brute force that it previously concealed. Notions of "self-defense" and "preemption" are increasingly used to exert control extraterritorially. The threat of terror has now made it possible for states like India, Pakistan, Israel, the United States, and Russia to exert control beyond their borders as a way to manage perceived threats—in that the protection of the homeland has become dependent on the maintenance and safety of areas beyond it. The use of calculative reasoning means that civilian deaths are now considered “necessary losses,” even if a few supposed enemies can be eliminated (e.g., even if a single enemy target who could potentially inflict harm on the state and its people can be eliminated at the cost of tens of civilian casualties, it is considered morally justified). If the target is high value, civilian death somehow becomes acceptable and framed as a necessary cost.
This violence has deep colonial roots. The bombing of Waziristan in Pakistan isn't new; it has persisted since colonial times. British troops used aircraft to bombard Waziri and Mahsud villages and to bombard tribal areas to bring the conflict under control. These bombings were meant to suppress resistance and restore colonial authority along the North-West Frontier.
Meanwhile, we are seeing a rise in muscular politics that has recourse to law, but is increasingly relying on religious logics—scriptural and divine violence—that relies heavily on scripture or an eschewed interpretation of divine justice, whether in the references to Amalek, the notion that violence is necessary as a sign of love (with the imagery of Sindoor invoked by the Indian state), or the Augustinian notions of just war that have shaped American counterinsurgency doctrines—in all these instances, law isn't absent but is operationalized in a very particular way to make violence morally necessary, and this is precisely the reason why the scale of violence in today's world is increasing. This is the new punitive regime of global surveillance. Despite the claims to being rational, the violence states are inflicting is also religiously sanctioned. The just war tradition, which has roots in the Augustinian tradition, is routinely invoked to justify action, but its pacifist tendencies are downplayed when it is invoked to think about the “Christian” state’s role in global politics.
I’d like to draw the reader’s attention to a few events in particular—the meeting between Netanyahu and Modi in 2026, where, by sympathizing over the two countries’ shared tragedy of losing innocent civilians to terror attacks, there was a silent sanctioning of Muslims and Palestinians as sacrificial subjects for the state’s peace and stability. When pushed further, the same logic also shapes how the Pakistani state has referred to Afghan refugees, creating an actual equivalence in which a single Pakistani life is treated as equal to a thousand Afghan lives. In this framing, the stability of national hierarchies within an increasingly authoritarian context relies upon punishing an outsider, and here self-defense, which is inherently aggressive in nature, is made possible through a selective recourse to religion, as in the imagining of Pakistan as a wall of believers (as if it is made from lead), drawing from the Quranic verse (bunyan um marsoos), especially in the country’s recent conflict with India. Religious righteousness is increasingly conflated with the protection of postcolonial hierarchies and systems of surveillance and control.
Further, we also see a rise of civilizational discourses that often help to otherize an enemy, and once the enemy is stripped of any legal protection, any form of violence can become justified. Here, the imagination of the enemy in territories abroad also taints the way minorities are viewed at home. Beneath these civilizational tropes of the West as in Marco Rubio’s speech, “we will always be a child of Europe,”
And here one must ask the important question about how the rational violence inflicted by the allies, too, is just as senseless as the violence that it protects people from—the only way to overcome this resurgence would be by fundamentally changing the vocabulary through which we talk about war and peace—expunging any attempt to justify global violence through forms of necessity, and by recognizing the histories of violence, colonial and post-colonial, that generate the threat of militancy, and then moving to a shared recognition of humanity that exceeds nationalistic borders, where instead of resorting to finding new national myths, it is perhaps time to recognize the fictions on which these are often based.