Twenty-Five Years of the Global War on Terror (Episode 67)

In this episode of the Race and Rights Podcast , CSRR affiliate and Penn GSE faculty member, Ameena Ghaffar-Kucher , guest hosts an episode reflecting on the twenty-fifth anniversary of 9/11, a milestone that coincides with the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the United States. She is joined by Alka Pradhan , Human Rights Counsel for Ammar al-Baluchi in the Guantánamo Bay Military Commissions and adjunct faculty at Penn Carey Law, and Zainab Saleh , Associate Professor of Anthropology at Haverford College. Their discussion traces the legal and military machinery of the so-called Global War on Terrorism and how it continues to shape policy and daily life in the United States and abroad. The conversation situates the response to 9/11 within longer histories of policies and interventions rather than treating it as an aberration. Alka Pradhan examines this through the mechanics of law and the absence of accountability, interrogating the "terrorist" label and its effects, while Zainab Saleh grounds it in the human and material devastation of Iraq, and discusses the role of the media in the disappearance of both Iraq and Afghanistan from public memory. The guests consider how the Global War on Terror has come home: related logics of racialized suspicion that have justified detention and surveillance abroad also shape domestic policing and immigration enforcement. These practices are now drawing wider attention as they increasingly reach people's friends and neighbors, despite long-standing warnings from civil rights groups. The conversation also weighs the benefits and costs of the term Islamophobia itself against alternatives such as racism and anti-Muslim racism. It extends into the newer term anti-Palestinian racism, and into the "Palestinian exception" to free speech, where the same post-9/11 playbook of surveillance and suppression now targets people speaking out on Palestine. Together, the conversation asks what it means to reckon with how the response to 9/11 continues to shape law, policy, and daily life twenty-five years later. #WarOnTerror #September11 #Islamophobia #Guantanamo #CostsOfWar #AntiPalestinianRacism #CivilRights #HumanRights Further Reading Maduro’s Trial Follows the Twisted Logic of the War on Terrorism | Alka Pradhan. Foreign Policy (2026) On Forgetting, in a Democracy | Alka Pradhan. The Cambridge Journal of Law, Politics & Art (2025) "Head-On Into Peril": Connecting 9/11 and Law Enforcement Abuses in Portland | Alka Pradhan, Just Security, (2020) Shock and Awe Revisited: Legacies of the Iraq War 20 Years Later | Zaynab Quadri, Zainab Saleh, Catherine Lutz, Osamah Khalil, Carly A. Krakow & Moustafa Bayoumi. Passport: The Newsletter of SHAFR (2023) What Gen Z needs to Know About 9/11 and its Aftermath | Ameena Ghaffar-Kucher & Deepa Iyer. Chalkbeat (2023) Exit East? The Fight Against Anti-Muslim Racism | Ameena Ghaffar-Kucher & Thea Renda Abu El-Haj, The Assembly: A Journal for Public Scholarship on Education (2018) Guest Biographies Zainab Saleh , PhD is Professor