Extensively researched and grounded in abolitionist politics, Terrorism on Trial: Political Violence and Abolitionist Futures by Nicole Nguyen illuminates how domestic US courts support and contest the global war on terror. By centering the figure of the terrorist, Nguyen outlines the discursive and juridical processes by which concepts such as terrorism pathologize Muslims as exceptionally and inherently prone to violence while simultaneously occluding the material conditions engendering violent resistance (21–23, 26–28, 35–36). Rather than locate the emergence of Muslims in US political imaginaries and legal discourses in moments such as 9/11, this study places terrorism trials in the longue durée of legal race-making such as the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century naturalization/citizenship trials (145–153, 326–328). Likewise, Nguyen incorporates Black and Indigenous perspectives to decenter “the Muslim” as the essential terrorist, recognizing that anti-Black and anti-Indigenous suppression mutually constitute structural Islamophobia (27–33, 56–57). This conceptual framing indexes the relational yet incommensurate ties...

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