A writer commenting on “slop” in 2026 is akin to a comedian opining on Donald Trump in 2016. The absurdity of the moment is self-evident, the punchlines practically write themselves, and people can’t get enough of it. Be it essays on “LLM-speak” or furious opinion pieces about AI winning prizes for fiction writing, we seem to be inundated both by slop and increasingly predictable responses from its detractors. Making sense of our tenuous cultural moment may require stepping back and situating the “slop” phenomenon within a broader context of American production.

Slop is often defined as low-quality digital content that is completely or partly generated by an artificial intelligence tool like Grok or ChatGPT. The tools are numerous, but the function—producing quick, automated output, often to turn a quick buck—is all the same. To understand the prevalence and significance of slop requires an assessment of where it comes from. If we look at slop as an approach to production, as opposed to the specific digital output of some AI tool, we can start to understand it with greater clarity, approach it soberly, curb it, and—as is necessary or possible—remove it.

Slop is what it is because it has been produced by a tool that, by design, attempts to flatten, homogenize and create simulacra of what humans may create. Yet these processes are not unique to AI and LLM tools. They exist in various other forms, and the examples are everywhere. Consider McDonald’s, fast-food’s poster child. It may be likened to AI slop in that it flattens, homogenizes, and produces a simulacrum of wholesome food. Be it fast fashion, fast food, or fast content, the urge to produce quickly, produce more, and produce at a lower cost is as American as apple pie. Perhaps we should have anticipated the prevalence of AI slop.

Put simply, slop is a product of American empire. America is where the technologies that produce slop originate—where the “hard science” happens, as it were. Yet even as the infrastructure of slop is American (for now, at least), its presence and effects are certainly global. In the cultural sphere, the same empire that pioneered formulaic cinema (a type of pre-AI slop) and was responsible for the Disneyfication phenomenon (a type of slop-city) was copied the world over. Is it any surprise that “slop content” has similarly exceeded its American locale into all corners of the globe? These are not minor developments; Disneyfication, for example, represents the soft power of American empire. It is therefore worth considering how slop might be more than an anodyne inconvenience.

If slop was not effective, it would not exist. Coco Krumme’s Optimal Illusions: The False Promise of Optimization may give us some clues as to where slop as a way of producing originates. Though written and published just before the slop explosion, Krumme’s central thesis is that the concept of “optimization”—which has its roots in mathematics and engineering—now plays an outsized role in society writ large. This fact is arguably much more visible now than when she first published her book; our algorithms are full of advice on how to optimize our bodies, our schedules, and our work. Through a case study on optimization in agriculture, Krumme argues that efficiency has been “deified” and that the specialization of food production that allowed forlower prices also made fast food possible. Analogously, cheaper, quicker methods of producing research, writing, and entertainment have made slop not only possible, but allowed it to proliferate. The problem here is not that a particular technology has made certain processes easier or more affordable. It is, rather, that the effects of AI are not isolated to the technology’s undeniably useful processes—they are totalizing. There is no life-saving AI-assisted medical diagnosis without disturbing AI cartoons aimed at children running endlessly on YouTube Shorts; these are of a piece.

An interesting distinction Krumme makes between optimization and capitalism is that the former is “top down” while the latter is “bottom up.” With optimization, we start off with the answer to which all processes, guardrails, and variables must combine to produce a singular optimized output. Contrastingly, in capitalism, the market is allowed to “decide” the allocation of resources such that the “answer” arrives at the end of the process. The parallels here to an AI prompt are almost perfect and prescient. Based on the constraints built into a prompt, an AI tool can give you a plethora of results—we start with the answer before the path is traced.

Krumme says that “the wrangling of the world into mathematical models required a set of conceptual shifts that settled into our mathematics over the past centuries.”1 The first of these shifts pertains to the atomization of reality, in which the world becomes something “divided, conquered, measured, and mined.”2 It is hard to ignore the Enlightenment roots of this way of seeing the world. Be it in a novel or a motion picture, many of us increasingly approach a great story less as the messy product of a flawed, unique, and visionary mind, but more as the sum of tiny parts for which we can optimize. Each scene transition—indeed, each word—can be optimized by AI. If the prompt we start with functions to “optimize”—to entertain, to win a literary prize, or to amass ticket sales—then the art itself is secondary. The entire culture becomes beholden to the prompts being written by those with the existing resources to distribute the outputs. As Krumme puts it, “optimization is agnostic to its context. Whether we want productivity or emotional connection, sweet lemonade or sour, the mathematics is the same.”3

The bifurcation of part and whole driven by the culture of optimization makes us lose sight of the hazy mystery of artistic production. In Krumme’s words, it casts aside “things that weren’t readily divisible.”4 So much of slop sits in this gray mean of easily divisible, digestible matter—ingredients just real enough to fend off starvation, but by no means a nourishing diet. Are we forever trapped in this false purgatory?

Given how increasingly health-conscious the public has seemed to become over the last two decades, and with the prevalence of food-critical documentaries like Supersize Me and Cowspiracy, one might be forgiven for believing that the end of fast food was near. In reality, McDonald’s still stands tall as among the most recognizable American brand names globally, and fast food remains a lucrative industry in most major economies. As public sentiment coalesced around the value and importance of healthy food, the market quickly responded with renewed advertising campaigns and met the pressure of documentaries like Cowspiracy, for example, by introducing an explosion of new dairy alternative products. But market adjustments arising from people reacting negatively to the ills of slop are arguably harder to achieve, in part because AI functions to metabolize and utilize all dissent; it will use our well-argued, angry writing about slop to produce refined slop that limits our understanding at best, or manipulates it at worst.

Limiting our consumption of slop is easier said than done, but perhaps one way in which the excesses of our AI-induced culture may be resisted is through the unglamorous halls of policymaking. Producers of fast food are in a seemingly endless tussle with domestic and international regulators regarding additives and ingredients. The pressure these legislative bodies put on producers to ensure better health outcomes, and the results that pressure creates, can often be taken for granted. Public discussions on ultra-processed food, sugar consumption, or specific additives find their way into policy or policy-adjacent arenas the world over. In this way, rigorous research, academic work, and public forums that expose the ills of AI can ensure some level of pushback against the gargantuan tech companies who make slop possible in the first place.

It is likely that we will soon see more research funded by Big Tech that conveniently argues that its own excesses and dangers are overstated, and that these slop-producing technologies possess “scientifically proven” benefits that will usher in an era of unheralded abundance for us all. Academics, activists, and researchers must therefore aim to leverage a well-funded counterattack (or perhaps a preemptive strike) that the main agents of slop may not be prepared for.

Aside from public criticism and struggling with regulators, fast food has also been a victim of the flattening it champions in its own kitchens. The slop cities and towns that produce gray blocks to house fast food restaurants and shops are becoming far less appealing than the colorful restaurants of the 1990s. The soullessness of the retail park mirrors the emptiness of LLM writing filling a gray book sleeve. Even without pushback or policy changes, the blandness of slop itself could be part of its undoing.

It may be that as the human spirit is increasingly tainted by slop, we will come to know that the technologies which produce it are gratuitous at best and ruinous at worst. This may be wishful thinking, and the damage of a numbed audience may already be done, but one can hope that there are enough people who remember a time before the reign of optimized culture took hold.

“We the People,” as the Preamble of the U.S. Constitution declares, are simultaneously sovereigns and subjects, a multitude of individuals that govern as a unified collective. Of course, despite its inescapable centrality to the American national project, social and political access to the category of personhood has never been a straightforward or settled matter. The question of who counted as a legal person, and especially the question of how one’s legal personhood could be rendered as legible and actionable, had been vigorously contested long before 1776—and both questions remain deeply fraught 250 years later.

Personhood was overtly bounded in the Constitution in 1788 by the delineation of slaves (“those bound to Service for a Term of Years”) as “three fifths of all other Persons,” in order to preserve Southern political privilege without extending the full privileges of citizenship to Black slaves. As James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 54: “We must deny the fact, that slaves are considered merely as property, and in no respect whatever as persons. The true state of the case is, that they partake of both these qualities: being considered by our laws, in some respects, as persons, and in other respects as property … The federal Constitution, therefore, decides with great propriety on the case of our slaves, when it views them in the mixed character of persons and of property. This is in fact their true character.” Such exclusion-based definitions of personhood, and the long fight to expand them across multiple categories including race and gender, are prominent features in mainstream U.S. political and historical discourse.

Yet here, I want to highlight a particular category of personhood that has evolved in a stealthier yet no less foundational form in American history: corporate personhood. Though the legal notion of corporations as juridical persons has deep roots in early modern European law, I trace two features of corporate personhood in the U.S. context: 1) the legal empowerment by the Supreme Court of business corporations as political actors with political rights, and 2) the emergence of defense contractors as a distinct class of corporate actors that have actively remade the practice of state sovereignty through insulation from liability. Corporations do not simply confound the well-known binary categories of governmental vs. corporate power, political vs. economic power, public vs. private spheres, and domestic vs. foreign spheres. Instead, corporations have functioned as the hinges operationalizing these distinctions. Further, through their pursuit of legal and political privileges to conduct business, I suggest that corporations continue to powerfully shape access to what I call the right to political corporeality—namely, the ability of non-corporate collectives to meaningfully challenge the corporate prerogatives of liability, profit-seeking, and resource extraction.

The Body Politic, Incorporated

The word “corporation” in our contemporary moment tends to evoke a particular assemblage of political imagery: large multinational companies, economic globalization, neoliberal capitalism, labor unions, and union-busting organizations. Corporations now are almost exclusively thought of as publicly-traded, privately-profiting entities that operate at an industrial and global scale. However, corporations have existed in varying configurations since the Roman Empire, as trading companies, monarchical charters, and sovereign grants. Especially in their medieval and early-modern European iterations, corporations represented what political theorist Joshua Barkan calls a “specifically liberal and decentralized” mode of sovereignty. “Corporations are fictions, created by states, but given such social power that they threaten to undermine the political sovereignty that created them,” argues Barkan. Corporations are one means by which states “attempt to marshal the collective power of individuals toward public ends by granting them a special legal status.” Therefore, as Barkan puts it, “corporate power should be rethought as a mode of political sovereignty.” Corporations and states have historically modeled each other’s defining features: nation-states have taken on corporate management techniques and embraced values such as market efficiency, while corporations have mobilized to build infrastructure, provide municipal services such as schools and hospitals, and conducted international diplomacy. Political and corporate governance can thus be thought of as co-constitutive rather than separate or adversarial modalities of power.

Indeed, though the U.S. Constitution is usually considered a social contract, political scientist David Ciepley argues that it is better understood as a “popularly issued corporate charter—an innovative but logical step in the tradition of sovereigns delegating governing authority by corporate charter.” The three components Ciepley identifies as essential to American constitutionalism—popular sovereignty, a written constitution, and judicial review—were in fact derived from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century corporate precedents. After all, as Ciepley points out, the two most politically significant and influential American colonies, Virginia and Massachusetts, “began as literal corporations,” as the Virginia Company and the Massachusetts Bay Company: “To catalyze modern, American-style constitutional government, only their chartering sovereign had to be changed (although more was changed than this).”

Reframing the Constitution in terms of a corporate charter is useful in locating the definitional character of corporations as a genre of political collectivity. To incorporate is to be given a body, a corporeal form—as indeed the Constitution does, incorporating “We the People” as both sides of the contract, the promisers as well as the promises of “Justice,” “Tranquility,” “the common defense,” “general Welfare,” and the “Blessings of Liberty.” This framing also illuminates the political stakes of corporate power: corporations, as collectives, have gained legal recognition of rights in the United States that empower their juridical persons in ways that violently supersede and suppress the rights of non-corporate individual and collective human persons. Four Supreme Court cases—from 1809, 1886, 2010, and 2014—together offer a glimpse into the broad arc of how American corporate personhood has evolved from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century.

Bank of the United States v. Deveaux (1809) was the first time the Court was asked to explicitly determine whether business corporations had access to constitutional protections—in this instance, to the right to sue in federal court on the grounds of diversity under Article III. As legal historian Adam Winkler shows, Chief Justice John Marshall’s majority opinion did not affirm corporate personhood outright; but the ruling’s conception of a corporation as an association of people “would prove far more influential” in “justifying the expansion of individual rights to corporations over the next two centuries.” Business corporations are fictional entities, not flesh-and-blood humans; but the corporation, under Bank of the United States, could have rights derived from those of its constituent members.

Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co. (1886) most significantly addressed (or, rather, declined to address) whether corporations were included in the Fourteenth Amendment right of citizenship and equal protection under the law. The case’s scope encompassed several interlocking developments in the immediate wake of the Civil War, as legal historian Evelyn Atkinson explicates: heated debates about the role of government in regulating profitable, federally-subsidized railroad monopolies, the social responsibilities of private companies, new general incorporation statutes that offered broader individual access to incorporation status, and of course, the scope and limits of the post-war Constitutional amendments enshrining the expanded legal personhood of former slaves. The Court’s unanimous decision in favor of the railroads did not substantively engage the question of Fourteenth Amendment protections. Instead, a headnote written by the Reporter of Decisions and approved by Chief Justice Morrison Waite explicitly declined to hear arguments on whether the Amendment applied, because “all of the Judges were of the opinion that it does.” This backdoor precedent, amending one of the most robust articulations of legal personhood in American history, was then cited wholesale in future Court decisions—enshrining the right to equal legal protection for business corporations without meaningful debate. Writes Atkinson: “Corporate lawyers quickly realized that an expansive interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment would benefit their corporate clients as well.”

These nineteenth century decisions were more or less upheld in their conceptual assumptions throughout the twentieth century, albeit to a complex multitude of ends. For example, Atkinson points out the role of corporate rights litigation in combating racial discrimination. But more often, modern business corporations have leveraged access to constitutional protections to strike down progressive economic reforms that benefited workers and organized labor. As a result, by the early twenty-first century, corporations have come to weaponize First Amendment rights to free speech and religious freedom in ways that curb individual and non-corporate collective exercises of those same rights.

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), decided in a controversial 5-4 ruling, affirmed a conservative nonprofit organization’s right to spend its money on political fundraising, contrary to century-long precedents restricting corporate and union lobbying on behalf of political campaigns. By rendering political spending limits as First Amendment violations, Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion equated capital to speech—which has empowered super PACs and “dark money” to flood the American electoral system. Four years later, the Court’s similarly contentious 5-4 ruling in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. (2014) exempted privately-held, for-profit companies from federal regulations to which owners object on religious grounds. This case, which concerned mandated contraception coverage under the Affordable Care Act, did not only extend First Amendment rights to corporate persons. It also indirectly lent legal cover to the politico-legal movement for fetal personhood, which contends that life begins at conception and, in its most extreme interpretation, criminalizes reproductive health care.

Both Citizens United and Hobby Lobby were widely criticized for, in the words of a 2014 statement by the Brennan Center for Justice, “once again [advancing] the personhood rights of some corporations to the detriment of actual human beings.” But corporate “persons” in the United States have access to more than expanding individual constitutional rights. As I demonstrate in the following section, corporations—more than individual citizens or any other kind of non-corporate collective—are able to make unique claims to sovereign status, which can shield them from accountability, transparency, and ultimately, responsibility for the consequences of their “personal” actions. Nowhere is this relation more vividly exemplified than in the case of U.S. defense contractors.

Sovereign Immunity, Incorporated

Modern U.S. defense contracting developed as a bureaucratic mechanism for industrial-scale military procurement of aircraft, weaponry, and raw materials during the Second World War. Throughout the Cold War, the “military-industrial complex” (as it was termed by President Eisenhower in 1961) continued to develop and produce increasingly sophisticated military technology of critical strategic value, while functioning as domestic engines of local and regional economic growth. Preceding and then dovetailing with the broader “neoliberal turn” of the 1970s and 1980s, outsourcing of governmental services across sectors through privatization became common practice. The twenty-first century, however, brought a sea change in the scale of defense contracting and public spending. The Bush administration’s Global War on Terror triggered a military sector bonanza that marshaled so many private contractors across infrastructure construction, research and development, technology and communications services, and military logistics that not even the Secretary of Defense could keep an accurate count of them. The Iraq and Afghanistan Wars were the most privatized in U.S. history, with a contractor-to-soldier ratio on the ground in both countries reaching and sometimes exceeding 1:1. Contemporary “Big Tech” giants such as Google and Palantir also benefited handsomely from this massive investment of public resources into national security.

Though precise numbers can be difficult to come by, the Costs of War Project estimates that from 2001 through 2022, U.S. post-9/11 war spending amounts to about $8 trillion total. Between 2020 and 2024—a period during which the U.S. was not formally declared to be at war with any nation—policy analysts William Hartung and Stephen Semler calculate that 54% of the Pentagon’s discretionary spending budget of $4.4 trillion went to military contractors, with $771 billion going to just five firms (Lockheed Martin, RTX/Raytheon, Boeing, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman).

Defense contractors seem ostensibly to occupy a niche among corporations for this institutional proximity to the military and the outsized U.S. defense budget. Private security contractors in particular gained notorious reputations as modern mercenaries, war profiteers, and obstacles to diplomacy during the Iraq War. Yet, that seemingly exceptional positionality of defense contractors is what makes them useful in mapping the outer limits and thus capacious possibilities of corporate power. As profit-driven businesses that often depend on government financing outright, or as a result of large government purchases, defense contractors can function as hybrid public-private entities capable of raising enough capital to invest in complex technological research and development. As government contractors, they can undertake functions of governance as delegates on the state’s behalf without being subject to the same regulations or standards of public disclosure. And, as important players in the national security sphere, the U.S. government and military have an especially vested interest in helping defense contractors succeed—an interest that defense contractors have leveraged to pioneer novel forms of liability protection.

One form of liability protection came through legislative means that quickly congealed into political and legal precedent. In 1971, Lockheed was the first private corporation to receive a federal bail-out through the Emergency Loan Guarantee Act to rescue it from bankruptcy with $250 million in bank loans. In heated Congressional debates, Lockheed’s skeptics accused it of poor management and argued that it should declare bankruptcy like any other failing company. Yet Lockheed’s supporters, such as Sen. Alan Cranston (D-CA), argued that the U.S. government had “considerable responsibility” for helping a company that answered “a call to arms to help equip the national for national defense.” The controversial 49-48 Senate vote to bail out Lockheed was championed by President Nixon as a measure “in the best interests of all the people,” on the grounds that it would save thousands of jobs and preserve a key strategic supplier. The bail-out was arguably a landmark progenitor for the “too big to fail” doctrine that later helped justify the 2008 Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, which bailed out auto industry corporations along with banks and credit institutions. The precedent set by Lockheed as a defense contractor allowed corporations of large-enough size to be able to claim that their financial well-being was so essential to the health of the nation that they deserved infusions of public capital to continue existing in their current form.

A second, possibly even more consequential form of corporate liability protection has been the legal doctrine of derivative sovereign immunity. The Supreme Court established precedent in Yearsley v. W. A. Ross Construction Co. (1940), a case in which petitioners sought damages for land erosion as a result of a government-contracted construction company building dikes in the Missouri River. The Court ruled that contractors carrying out work “authorized and directed by governmental officers” could not be held liable for “executing [the Government’s] will.” In other words, as long as contractors were acting on governmental authority within the scope of a Congressionally-valid contract, they were legally shielded by sovereign immunity, i.e., the common law doctrine under which the U.S. federal and state governments cannot be sued except under specific circumstances.

The Yearsley case’s understanding of derivative sovereign immunity mostly held over the course of the twentieth century. A 1988 Supreme Court case, Boyle v. United Technologies Corp., complemented Yearsley, ruling that wherever state law conflicted significantly with federal policy in “an area of uniquely federal interest,” the federal contractor could not be held liable under state law. But in the twenty-first century—arguably due to the dramatically increased role and visibility of federal contracting in contemporary American governance—several high-profile court cases tested the legal bounds of sovereign immunity for corporations under government contracts.

Recent decisions in Al Shimari v. CACI (2026), Hencely v. Fluor Corp. (2026), and GEO Group, Inc. v. Menocal (2026) denied blanket, preemptive immunity claims from major U.S. government contractors. Corporations cannot entirely preempt torts liability, even in a war zone, nor can they immediately appeal a district court’s denials of derivative sovereign immunity. However, a decade of protracted litigation against the Army logistics contractor KBR for exposing thousands of U.S. veterans and civilian contractors to toxic smoke from burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan set another precedent in 2019. In that case, the Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court ultimately ruled that because KBR operated its burn pits under U.S. military direction, the company was shielded by both derivative sovereign immunity and the political question doctrine. On the whole, even with nuancing restrictions, corporate persons retain the right to functionally act as federal sovereigns in order to avoid legal challenges from individual persons, and even from state governments and lower courts.

The expansive nature of the “sovereign shield” presents serious normative ramifications for what legal scholars Kate Sablosky Elengold and Jonathan Glater call the “delicate balance among the executive branch, the legislative branch, states, corporations, and consumers.” Private contractors and the federal executive branch, Elengold and Glater argue, symbiotically empower each other to circumvent torts exposure, legislative oversight, and regulatory regimes. Both parties benefit from outsourcing labor and dodging public transparency imperatives; and “these sly, sideways moves reduce the powers of individuals and states out of sight of public scrutiny or democratic accountability.” Put another way: derivative sovereign immunity allows corporations to fundamentally reorient the practice of political sovereignty in the United States, thus further granting corporate persons with legal technologies of governance beyond what individuals and non-corporate collectivities have been able to access.

The Right to Political Corporeality

The long legal and historical arc of corporate personhood in the United States is of course more textured and complex than this brief essay can address. Similarly, the myriad implications of corporate personhood on the present and future of American politics is beyond my current scope. By way of conclusion, however, I posit that corporate personhood is in part so potent as legal doctrine because it successfully establishes a right to political corporeality—a prerogative to imbue its collective body with rights of action (and sometimes inaction) that exceed the sum of its constituent parts. Corporations are not and have never been the only kind of associational vehicle available to human persons. Yet, as the rights of technology companies to build profitable data centers threatens to supersede the rights of low-income communities’ to clean water, and as the rights of the U.S. defense industry to export profitable weapons technology to Israel continues to supersede the rights of Palestinians to exist—the imperative to organize effective, life-affirming counter-collectives becomes that much more urgent.

Dear Readers,

America is in the news again—it always is. Headlines celebrating the 2026 World Cup and the nation’s semiquincentennial run alongside grimmer ones about Iran, Gaza, ICE, and other issues in which U.S. action and policy are continuously, and often violently, implicated. Americans are celebrating and grieving in the same breath, and they’re still debating what America means, where it ends, and what its future holds.

This issue is our small contribution to that debate. The essays here look at American militarism, foreign policy, technology, capitalism, and exceptionalism through the lens of a word we’re hearing with increasing frequency: multipolarity. And we’ve tried not to let the conversation stay inside America’s borders. Several pieces come from international writers whose lives are directly shaped by decisions made in America but felt everywhere else.

As always, we’re releasing these essays gradually over the course of the month. The first two are up now.

We’re ad-free and independent, which means we depend entirely on you, dear reader. If this issue is worth something to you, consider subscribing or donating to keep us going, and share these essays with others to help us grow. For more America beyond the America issue, you can also check out our podcast episodes on the U.S. border, the Christian Right, and the fabled fascism debate.

With gratitude,

The Muftah Team

Where Does America End?

Elizabeth Shakman Hurd

Mali and Syria: Similarities, Differences, and the War on Terror

Alex Thurston

Corporate Personhood and the Right to Political Corporeality

Zaynab Quadri

American Slop and the Empire of Optimization

Jamal Mehmood

For Syria’s Ahmad al-Sharaa and Mali’s Iyad ag Ghali, 2017 was a pivotal year. As skilled strategists and remarkable survivors, both men took leadership of new coalitions which led to profound change in the civil wars plaguing their respective countries. Al-Sharaa’s Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS, or literally “Syria Liberation Organization”), freshly decoupled from al-Qaeda, embarked on a “mainstreamization” effort by shedding its most radical commitments and embracing pragmatism and technocracy. It was this coalition that eventually toppled longtime Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in December 2024. Today, al-Sharaa is Syria’s head of state.

Similar to al-Sharaa, in 2017 Ag Ghali supervised the formation of a coalition called Jama‘at Nusrat al-Islam wa-l-Muslimin (JNIM, or literally “the Group for Supporting Islam and Muslims”) which focused its energies on attacking Malian and Burkinabè security forces, contesting the presence of French troops in the Sahel, and participating in brutal intercommunal wars. On April 25 of this year, JNIM unleashed an astonishing series of attacks across more than 1,500 kilometers of Malian territory, from the capital Bamako in the south to the storied town of Kidal deep in the Sahara. The attacks underscored the ruling junta’s weakness, killed the defense minister, and returned Kidal—whose 2023 conquest was the Malian military’s greatest accomplishment in recent years—to rebel hands.

Analysts and journalists have accordingly debated whether JNIM will soon follow the “Syria model.” Yet the discussion is strikingly narrow. What, after all, is the “Syria model”? Much of the recent debate has focused on whether JNIM would break with al-Qaeda, reduce its attacks on civilians, and seek to rule Mali in a way that neighboring states and Western powers might tolerate. While these features certainly defined HTS leading up to its overthrow of Assad, the “Syria model” is not just about ideological deradicalization; it is also about neoliberalism and the containment of revolution.

HTS: Coalition-Building, Technocracy, and Pragmatism

Al-Sharaa’s personal arc is fairly well established: the son of a doctorate-holding economist who worked for the petroleum ministries of Syria and Saudi Arabia, he fought in Iraq as part of the loose al-Qaeda affiliate there in the 2000s and led the expeditionary jihadist force Jabhat al-Nusra (“Support Front”) in Syria amid the early stages of the revolution. When Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and Ayman al-Zawahiri clashed over control of the insurgency in Iraq and Syria, al-Sharaa sided with al-Zawahiri and al-Qaeda against what became the Islamic State (ISIS). Eclipsed by ISIS in infamy and brutality, Jabhat al-Nusra nevertheless committed numerous war crimes in the early 2010s, including executions of civilians.

In 2015, Jabhat al-Nusra participated in capturing Idlib, a provincial capital in northwest Syria. In 2016, in a display of pragmatism meant to attract partners among Syria’s armed groups, Jabhat al-Nusra became Jabhat Fath al-Sham (“Syria Conquest Front”) and dropped all external affiliations, including any formal ties to al-Qaeda. In early 2017, the group renamed itself once again, to Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, and announced the formation of its “Salvation Government” later that year.

The Salvation Government had a self-consciously technocratic character. Senior officials, including both HTS members and non-members, often had university degrees, technical expertise, and a polished approach toward journalists, foreign researchers, and diplomats. These senior technocrats included figures such as Mohammed al-Bashir and Asaad al-Shaibani, who went on to serve in ministerial posts (currently, Energy and Foreign Affairs) after HTS’ overthrow of Bashar al-Assad.

HTS’ technocratic posture in Idlib foreshadowed some of the pragmatic choices that al-Sharaa would make as Syria’s transitional head of state. Technocracy, despite its promises of rule by and through apolitical expertise, often has a markedly neoliberal character. While al-Sharaa reshaped Syria’s political topography, he remains in many ways a conventional head of state: conciliatory toward Israel, the United States, the European Union, and the Gulf; friendly with Assad-era businessmen; courting foreign investors to finance and profit from reconstruction; and committed to slashing the public sector while privatizing state-owned enterprises.

As Riad Alarian and Mohammed El-Sayed Bushra wrote for Muftah last year, al-Sharaa faced tremendous pressure to make “a statement of allegiance to the free market” as one of many “incentivized rituals of compliance pursued in exchange for access to the material conditions that permit state-building.” Richard Solomon has similarly argued for Phenomenal World that there is substantial continuity with the era of Bashar al-Assad, who spent a quarter-century privatizing firms, cutting pensions, and empowering cronies. The fall of the Assad dynasty gave hope to millions of Syrians and altered many lives for the better, allowing people to return home, reunite with family and friends, and pursue long-deferred dreams and goals. Yet the new authorities offer a stability predicated on deference to the geopolitical status quo.

JNIM: Rejecting Foreign Intervention, Dominating Civilians, and Hammering Bamako

JNIM has constituted the central military and political challenge for both the civilian President Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta (who was in office from 2013 until 2020) and the military rulers, headed by Colonel-turned-President Assimi Goïta (who took power in a 2020 coup). JNIM and its antecedents have outlasted French counterterrorism operations (2013–2022) and pro-government deployments by the Kremlin-backed Wagner Group/Africa Corps (2021–present), all while JNIM veers between coexistence and conflict with the regional “province” of the Islamic State. JNIM is nothing if not tenacious.

JNIM has pursued a multi-faceted and even ambiguous project. On the one hand, JNIM exhibits a clear will to power. In central Mali and northern Burkina Faso—two sites of intensive jihadist operations—JNIM’s approach to rule has manifested clearly: the group’s field commanders impose “survival pacts” on local communities, dictating what can be taught in schools, what women can wear, who can carry weapons, and how economies will operate. Communities that resist can face economic blockades, one of JNIM’s favored weapons of war.

On the other hand, JNIM has appeared reluctant to bid for full control of Mali. JNIM can certainly capture major towns, and has done so temporarily on various occasions. But they have not planted their flag in any administrative capital, let alone a national capital. Is that because JNIM still heeds the lessons of 2012–2013, when some of its forerunners seized northern Malian towns and declared an Islamic Emirate, only to see French troops smash their positions and kill various top leaders just a few months later? Is it because JNIM’s fighting strength is enough to haunt a zone extending over 2,000 kilometers, but does not suffice to wield durable control? Or is it rather because JNIM does not want the responsibilities and liabilities that direct rule would bring? According to one frequently cited but perhaps unreliable estimate, JNIM may have as few as 5,000–6,000 fighters, hardly enough to run Bamako, let alone all of Mali.

In its statement claiming the April 25 attacks, JNIM said that they wanted to “bring about a genuine transition serving the interests of the religion, the country, and the faithful.” Such phrasing carries an implicit critique of the junta, which is managing an open-ended “transition.” But this phrasing does not necessarily mean that JNIM wants to rule Mali itself. As Jean-Hervé Jezequel of the International Crisis Group has commented, “In Mali, the jihadists’ goal is not to take power, but to change the people in power.” If that is accurate, then JNIM is not refashioning itself into a palatable governing entity but is rather leaving its options open. After all, JNIM can be both clinical and brutal: JNIM’s precision attacks on April 25 in Bamako and beyond were followed within days by massacres of civilians, particularly from the Dogon ethnic group, in central Mali.

Could the “Syria Model” Unfold in Mali?

There are serious reasons to think that JNIM might borrow elements of HTS’ approach. The journalist and analyst Wassim Nasr, who has interviewed both al-Sharaa and the senior leadership of JNIM, sees the “pragmatic Islamism” of al-Sharaa as a potential “blueprint for other jihadi groups, including in the Sahel.” The human rights activist and analyst Corinne Dufka concludes based on her interviews with Malians that “[m]uch like HTS, JNIM is trying to shed the terrorist label, distance itself from al-Qaida and evolve into a religious insurgency against Mali’s junta.” The analyst Héni Nsaibia adds that Syria is a major topic of discussion for JNIM fighters and sympathizers. A Syria “model” could appeal to JNIM as a path out of a successful but interminable insurgency and into a more robust and sustainable political future. Other analysts, such as Jason Warner, suggest that the “Syria model” is neither replicable nor desirable for JNIM, which may even see HTS’ compromises as too sweeping. These are not just diagnostic debates but also prescriptive ones, bearing on the question of whether big-picture negotiations with JNIM would be feasible and beneficial.

Many of the participants in this discussion acknowledge that the political conditions are very different in the Sahel than they were in Syria as of 2024; above all, JNIM lacks a powerful state ally akin to HTS’ reported (although widely debated) relationship with Turkey. Mali’s neighbor to the north, Algeria, is often accused in Bamako of supporting the northern rebels and JNIM itself, but hard evidence for such accusations is thin. Further, Algeria is more often accused of wanting to use northern Mali as a zone of strategic influence, rather than of abetting a national-level jihadist takeover. There is also no Malian equivalent of Ahrar al-Sham (“Freemen of the Levant”), a massive armed Islamist group that became a key coalition partner for HTS in Syria.

Another difference between HTS and JNIM is their different forms of political acumen. JNIM has not invested in the technocratic governance that HTS elaborated in Idlib, and has very little to say or indeed offer on questions of economic management, service delivery, or international diplomacy. In Idlib, HTS staged a dress rehearsal for how it would rule Syria. But in the areas where JNIM has ruled or exercised sway, its model has been more one-dimensional. Who would be JNIM’s finance minister, after all?

It is not that JNIM has no sophisticated minds in its orbit. There is wide debate about ag Ghali’s aims, but there is no debate about his intelligence. The upper echelons of the northern Malian political establishment, including JNIM’s old-turned-new allies in the Azawad Liberation Front, include numerous savvy and experienced strategists. Sitting down to interview the northern politician Ahmada ag Bibi on two occasions, for example, I had the sense of someone who was in subtle control of our conversations, emphasizing one core talking point each time. Yet these keen minds—whether on the battlefield or in Mali’s National Assembly, where ag Bibi and others served as elected deputies on and off—have dedicated their careers primarily to securing northern Mali’s autonomy and protecting their own positions within a complex and shifting social hierarchy in the north. There could even be a kind of inversion at work: whereas Idlib was the staging ground for HTS’ conquest of Syria, for some of JNIM’s leaders and allies, Mali and the Sahel are the broad theater in and through which the independence of Kidal (the home region of ag Ghali, ag Bibi, and others) is to be claimed.

The War on Terror: Permutations in Damascus, Bamako, and Ouagadougou

The contrasts between Syria and Mali underscore the latest permutations of the long-running, ambiguous “War on Terror.” Originating in anti-Palestinian policies and legislation and exploding into policy and public consciousness after the 9/11 attacks, the War on Terror has structured much of twenty-first-century life and politics. From unleashing devastation on Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, and other theaters, to the “imperial boomerang” that brings hardline counterterrorism techniques and power grabs back to the Western countries that first deployed them against the Global South, the War on Terror has suffused twenty-first-century life with surveillance and violence.

The case of HTS raises troubling questions about why Washington proclaimed al-Qaeda, ISIS, and all “terrorists” to be absolute moral enemies under every administration from George W. Bush through the second term of Donald Trump, yet so frequently makes exceptions of expediency. It is not merely that HTS and al-Sharaa were rehabilitated so quickly beginning in 2024; indeed, the option of pragmatic alignment with al-Qaeda-adjacent factions was on the table in American policy circles by 2015 (if not earlier), as David Petraeus championed working with elements of Jabhat al-Nusra against ISIS, Bashar al-Assad, or both. Other elements of the War on Terror were also flexible, including the many bilateral “partnerships” that Washington maintained with regimes suspected of playing “double games” on counterterrorism.

Watching the rehabilitation of al-Sharaa has made elements of the Western Left extremely jaded. Their critique is worth taking seriously, especially because very similar debates are playing out regarding the Sahel. Is al-Sharaa less the culminating figure of the revolutionary struggle against Assad, and more a Western-backed puppet turning Syria into a neoliberal playground and a pliant neighbor for Israel? When such skeptics on the Left argue that Assad’s Syria played a positive and decisive role in sustaining an effective anti-Zionism, I part company with them; Bashar al-Assad and his father Hafez al-Assad were both highly repressive and self-interested rulers guilty of sweeping crimes against the Syrian people, and their commitment to Palestinian liberation was ultimately cynical and symbolic. But the charge that al-Sharaa wittingly or unwittingly serves the interests of global capitalism and imperialism, and of Israel, has real bite.

In the Sahel, Burkina Faso’s military ruler Ibrahim Traoré and (to a lesser extent) Mali’s Goïta and Niger’s Abdourahmane Tiani have also garnered significant enthusiasm from some Western Leftists and pan-Africanists from New York to Johannesburg and beyond. In their view, Traoré and his colleagues in the Alliance of Sahel States, a new confederation of the three countries, are standing up to Western imperialism and neo-colonialism while fighting a war of survival against shadowy terrorists. Here, too, there is a mix of convincing and unconvincing arguments. Traoré, Goïta, and Tiani have indeed expelled French troops and have renegotiated more favorable terms for their countries vis-à-vis multinational firms in extractive industries. They are indeed wartime presidents making difficult decisions.

Yet the Sahelian juntas are also highly authoritarian and repressive. They have imprisoned, disappeared, forcibly conscripted, and intimidated swaths of politicians, journalists, and activists. The juntas also have meager military accomplishments even after years in power. Tellingly, Traoré in particular has built an image as a Marxist, sovereigntist, anti-imperialist leader in the mold of Thomas Sankara (a widely admired military ruler of Burkina Faso between 1983–1987) by relying not just on his own performance, but also on a wide campaign of disinformation, including substantial AI content. In their support of Traoré, the same Leftists and pan-Africanists whom one might expect to criticize the War on Terror have become some of its most vociferous heirs.

There are different paths available to the Left, however, or for anyone who laments the trajectory of the world and its many conflict zones. One starting point involves asking why the rehabilitation of jihadists is considered anathema at some times and normal at others. Why were senior French officials, including President Emmanuel Macron, so hostile to the idea of dialogue with ag Ghali when Malian civil society voices first seriously floated the proposal in 2017? Why does Trump meet al-Sharaa but gloat about the assassination of a little-known provincial “terrorist” in a remote corner of Nigeria? It is noteworthy which interests lead to a compartmentalization of the War on Terror—interests such as migration control, for Europe, or investment, for the United States—and which political imperatives elevate it. The Left can stay consistent, in my view, by denouncing any leader who claims sweeping and abnormal powers in the name of counterterrorism, and by interrogating what interests allow for sudden accommodation with the “terrorists” of yesterday.

Another question is which forms of revolution the current world order will tolerate, and which it will not. In the current order, al-Sharaa can rule Syria, but only if he accommodates Israeli interests and deepens Syria’s longstanding neoliberal turn. Protesters can overthrow heads of state in Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria, or Sudan, but they are brutally repressed when they seek to overthrow systems. Moments of extraordinary political opening and effervescence end up confirming the severe limitations on solidarity, freedom, and imagination in our time.

One of the grimmest tragedies of the Sahel is that the 2014 popular revolution in Burkina Faso, which overthrew Sankara’s comrade-turned-murderer Blaise Compaoré, was so quickly stifled, first through a superficial democratic episode that empowered one of Compaoré’s former civilian proteges, and then in the faux-revolutionary dictatorship of Traoré. The juxtaposition of Syria and the Sahel merits reflection: for the world’s conflict and post-conflict societies, surely there are options beyond normalcy at the price of geopolitical conformity, or interminable conflict between brittle states and rebellions whose existence becomes a pretext for coopting—and ultimately silencing—revolutionary aspirations.

While on the one hand the United States recognizes the continuance of the ultimate sovereignty of the Republic of Cuba over the above described areas of land and water, on the other hand the Republic of Cuba consents that during the period of the occupation by the United States of said areas under the terms of this agreement the United States shall exercise complete jurisdiction and control over and within said areas with the right to acquire (under conditions to be hereafter agreed upon by the two Governments) for the public purposes of the United States any land or other property therein by purchase or by exercise of eminent domain with full compensation to the owners thereof.

-Agreement Between the United States and Cuba for the Lease of Lands for Coaling and Naval stations, February 23, 1903

Several years ago, my colleague Robert Orsi and I organized a campus reading of Guantánamo Diary, Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s autobiographical account of his fourteen-year imprisonment by the U.S. military at Guantánamo Bay. Community members signed up for fifteen-minute time slots. The Defense Department had heavily redacted the only version of the book that was available at the time, and censored lines appeared with a thick black line through them. When readers encountered redacted lines, they would ring a tabletop service bell, once for each line censored. The bell rang at regular intervals, and at times, continued repeatedly, denoting redacted paragraphs or pages. We started at 8:00 a.m. and it took nine hours to get through the book. A handful of people came in and out, listening quietly, scattered around the room in small groups. Some were visibly upset; a few were crying. People comforted one another. My turn to read aloud came over lunch, and at one point, I found myself alone, ringing the service bell and reading Slahi’s words to an empty room with high ceilings and an ornate balcony.

Slahi was released on October 17, 2016, and returned to his native Mauritania. The United States never filed charges. Was he inside or outside the United States during his detention from 2002 to 2016? Is there a U.S. border surrounding Naval Station Guantánamo Bay, or is the naval station part of Cuba? Where is Naval Station Guantánamo Bay? Where does the United States of America begin? Where does it end?

As the Cuban people’s suffering intensifies under an American-sponsored blockade, and storm clouds gather at the prospect of U.S. military operations in Cuba, the long shadow of more than a century of U.S. occupation of southeastern Cuba hovers quietly in the background, shaping political imaginations in both countries and making some options more thinkable than others.

Naval Station Guantánamo Bay (or GTMO, as the military refers to it) is a forty-five-square-mile American base located on the coast of Guantánamo Bay on the island of Cuba. GTMO is the oldest overseas American Navy base in the world and the only one in a country with which the United States does not maintain diplomatic relations. In 2022, the navy unveiled a $3 million modern postal facility to serve a community that has sent and received mail out of a converted horse stable since 1952, noting that “mail service is vital to this unique island community, where military transport a few times a week is the only means of travel to the United States.” So according to the navy the base is outside the United States. But is it?

With its rugged terrain and “dry, sun-blasted hills, where cactus and scrub clung to outcroppings of barren rock,” historian Paul Kramer explains, Spanish conquistadores left this corner of the Caribbean largely alone for centuries. Guantánamo sat suspended in the colonial margins, a “no state’s domain, a haven for pirates and slaves escaping both Cuba and Haiti, only a hundred miles across the Windward Passage at its nearest point. For them, Guantánamo had meant something like freedom.”

In the summer of 1898, U.S. warships sailed into Guantánamo Bay under the command of Bowman H. McCalla to fight alongside Cuban rebels against the Spanish fleet in a nine-day battle of the Spanish-American War, which ended with the signing of the Treaty of Paris in December 1898. Although Spain lost what remained of its overseas empire and the United States inherited most of Spain’s possessions, Congress had no intention of relinquishing control of Cuban affairs. When the Cuban Constitutional Convention began deliberations in July 1900, Congress notified the Cubans that the United States intended to attach an amendment to the Cuban Constitution. In 1901, U.S. secretary of war Elihu Root drafted a set of articles as guidelines for future United States–Cuba relations that became known as the Platt Amendment, after its sponsor, Senator Orville Platt of Connecticut. The Cubans, reluctantly and in the face of strong protest, included the Platt Amendment in the constitution. Cuba became a virtual U.S. protectorate. In 1903, the Platt Amendment was incorporated into a permanent treaty between the two countries that, according to the National Archives, “permitted extensive U.S. involvement in Cuban international and domestic affairs for the enforcement of Cuban independence.” Two articles from the treaty stand out:

III. That the government of Cuba consents that the United States may exercise the right to intervene for the preservation of Cuban independence, the maintenance of a government adequate for the protection of life, property, and individual liberty, and for discharging the obligations with respect to Cuba imposed by the treaty of Paris on the United States, now to be assumed and undertaken by the government of Cuba.

VII. That to enable the United States to maintain the independence of Cuba, and to protect the people thereof, as well as for its own defense, the government of Cuba will sell or lease to the United States lands necessary for coaling or naval stations at certain specified points to be agreed upon with the President of the United States.

The United States conditioned Cuban independence on constitutional provisions that would allow the U.S. Navy to occupy the area “for the time required.” The Cubans themselves “opposed the Platt Amendment in speech, pamphlet, and mass protest; Juan Gualberto Gómez, a delegate and a former general, charged that it would transform Cubans into a ‘vassal people.’” Nevertheless, under pressure, a divided convention adopted it.

Article VII of the Platt Amendment authorized the United States to lease or buy lands for naval bases and coaling stations in Cuba. Rent on the U.S. lease of Guantánamo as a coaling station and naval base was set at $2,000 per year beginning in 1903, paid in gold. In 1934, Cuba extended the lease and doubled the rent, with payment set at $4,085 to match the value in gold in dollars, an amount that remains unchanged to this day. The Platt Amendment was used repeatedly to legitimize U.S. interventions in Cuban affairs in 1906, 1912, 1917, and 1920. By 1934, however, widespread public criticism led to its repeal as part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy. But the United States retained its lease on Guantánamo Bay and continues to pay rent to Cuba via the Swiss embassy. After 1959, Fidel Castro refused to cash the checks.

And yet, under the terms of the lease, the United States retained complete jurisdiction and control over the southern portion of the bay, even as Cuba retained ultimate sovereignty. The only way to end this arrangement would be through U.S. withdrawal or bilateral agreement; the Cubans are not permitted to withdraw unilaterally.

The base has proven useful to the U.S. military. The United States launched invasions and occupations of Haiti in 1915 and the Dominican Republic in 1916 from Guantánamo. In World War II, the base became a major U.S. strategic asset, and by the mid-1940s Guantánamo was the second-busiest port in the Western Hemisphere, after New York, and was used by the navy to repel Nazi U-boats. According to the navy’s official history, “the base’s activities have at times included fleet training, ship repair, refueling and resupply, migrant operations, regional humanitarian relief and disaster assistance, search and rescue support, and detention operations. Today it remains the forward, ready, and irreplaceable US sea power platform in the Caribbean, giving decision makers unique options across the range of military and interagency operations.”

Although the United States does not claim sovereignty over Guantánamo, it does maintain “complete jurisdiction and total control” over the base. What does that mean? Where is the U.S.-Cuban border?

It is difficult to say. Kramer, the historian, describes the boundaries of the base as “indefinite.” Since 1950 the Cubans have been adamantly opposed to the U.S. presence at Guantánamo. Wary of infiltrators, in 1958 the navy put up a perimeter fence enclosing the base that still stands today. By late 1960, as relations deteriorated, a minefield containing over fifty thousand mines and spread over seven hundred acres divided the two parts of the island; at the time, it was the largest in the world. Following the 1961 Bay of Pigs debacle—a failed military attack organized by Cuban exiles working with the CIA to oust Fidel Castro—the Cubans added another barrier of uncrossable Maya cacti known as the “Cactus Curtain.” In 1964, Cuban foreign minister Raúl Roa shut off water and electricity to the base after the U.S. Coast Guard intercepted four Cuban fishing boats in American waters in the Florida Keys and imprisoned the thirty-six crewmen in a Florida jail. The water supply was never restored, and GTMO has had its own supply ever since. Land mines, concertina wire, and thickets of cacti divide the base and the rest of the island. There is no access to the base from within Cuba.

And yet, as of 2021, nineteen elderly Cubans were living on the base. Known as special category residents (SCRs), they are considered U.S. citizens. In 2021, CNN profiled retired clerk Noel West, then eighty-nine. West began working on the base in 1955 ordering fuel for planes and vehicles, commuting daily to his home in the Cuban town of Guaro. An avid baseball fan and umpire, in February 1964 he chose to stay late for a game and spent the night at the Cuban barracks on the base. The next day, his next-door neighbor from Guaro called to warn him that Cuban soldiers had been searching for him. He had mentioned to a friend that he was not a fan of the Castro regime. After fifty-five years of service, West stayed on the base after retiring in 2011 and never returned to Cuba.

Beginning in 1991, and for the next decade, GTMO served as a detention camp and processing center for Haitian refugees fleeing the aftermath of the 1991 coup against Jean-Bertrand Aristide. By July 1991, nearly 37,000 people were confined in tent cities surrounded by barbed wire. The U.S. authorities determined that 26,000 of these refugees had failed to qualify for political asylum (they were not “screened in”). Another 267 received asylum but were denied entry under a 1987 law excluding immigrants who were HIV positive that was in effect until 2010. At GTMO, the Haitians testing HIV positive who had been “screened in” were held in a separate detention area, Camp Bulkeley, where, as Kramer describes, detainees burned tents, hurled rocks at their captors, and engaged in a hunger strike to protest their mistreatment.

In 1993, a team of students and professors from Yale Law School’s Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic filed suit on behalf of the detainees on the grounds that they should enjoy constitutional protections because the base is legally under the “complete jurisdiction and control of the United States.” The government countered that the base was “a military base in a foreign country” and “not United States territory.” Detainees being held at the base, the government argued, were “outside the United States and therefore they have no judicially cognizable rights in United States courts.” Judge Sterling Johnson Jr. responded: “You’re saying, if I hear you correctly, that assuming that they [government officials] are arbitrary and capricious and even cruel, that the courts would have no jurisdiction because the conduct did not occur on U.S. soil? That’s what you’re saying?” The government concurred.

The government lost the case, shut down the camp, and transferred the remaining detainees to the United States. Judge Johnson ruled that due process guarantees under the Constitution did extend to the base, including the right to a lawyer, to proper medical care, and to not be held indefinitely without charge. Aside from those protections, however, and according to Kramer, Johnson also told an INS attorney that the state possessed unchecked authority “to take, kidnap, or abscond, whatever you want to call it, take a group and put them into a compound, whether you call it a humanitarian camp or a prison, keep them there indefinitely while there has been no charge leveled against them and there is no light at the end of the tunnel.”

Johnson’s ruling granting even limited rights to the detainees made the Clinton administration uneasy. According to Kramer, “The Clinton Justice Department…pursued a deal with the Haitians’ legal team: the Administration would comply with Johnson’s orders and drop an appeal; in return, Johnson’s decision would be vacated from the record. The advocates agreed, fearing that an appeal would prolong their clients’ detention and might, ultimately, succeed. According to one official, the Clinton Administration wanted to preserve ‘maximum flexibility.’”

The camps were back up a year later, and by 1994, they were sheltering 16,800 Haitians and 22,000 Cubans in tent cities on the runway. When the Cuban American Bar Association, Cuban refugee associations, and the Haitian Refugee Center sued on behalf of the refugees, they were initially granted injunctive relief by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida. On appeal, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals overturned that decision and, using another nickname for the base, “firmly situated Gitmo outside the United States and constitutional limits on state power.” The appeals court rejected the argument that leased military bases abroad “which continue under the sovereignty of foreign nations” were functionally equivalent to land borders or ports of entry, noting that laws mandating asylum hearings “bind the government only when the refugees are at or within the borders of the United States.” As Kramer concluded, “apparently, Gitmo was not at or within these borders.” The Cubans were released into the United States the next year, and the Haitians involuntarily returned to Haiti.

In 2002, GTMO opened its doors to its latest ignominious chapter as a U.S. prison camp for unlawful combatants who, according to then secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, “do not have any rights under the Geneva Conventions.” In December 2001, Justice Department deputy assistant attorney general John Yoo prepared the legal ground for indefinite detentions at GTMO with a memo to Pentagon general counsel William Haynes by making the case that Guantánamo is “foreign territory, not subject to U.S. sovereignty,” as part of an effort to make it less likely that U.S. courts would grant GTMO detainees habeas corpus rights. Yoo contrasted Guantánamo with the Philippines cases arising out of World War II, describing the latter as an “insular possession” until 1946 “and not a mere U.S. leasehold interest.”

On January 11, 2002, the first twenty captives arrived, and since then a total of 779 men have been detained at the base. The youngest was thirteen years old and the oldest was eighty-nine. Twenty-one were children. 86 percent of detainees were reportedly turned over to Coalition Forces in response to a bounty offer. As of January 2026, fifteen detainees remained imprisoned at the base.

Darryl Li describes GTMO as “one node in a global network of carceral circulation,” explaining that although new transfers had slowed by 2003 (and stopped entirely by 2008), “it was the older pattern of arms-length detention through local clients that has endured and continued to sustain GWOT [global war on terror].” When it comes to U.S. carceral practices in sovereign gray zones, Li suggests that GTMO stands in for a vast array of long-standing U.S. practices involving the use of client states and partners to carry out the U.S. government’s dirty work. Sites run in and by the United Arab Emirates and by Kurds in eastern Syria “enabled the US to warehouse, interrogate, and dispose of thousands of more people with far greater flexibility and far less scrutiny than at GTMO.”

Borders around black sites are purposefully ambiguous. Where America begins and ends is intentionally fuzzy. Detainees are held in limbo. The OED defines limbo as referring not only to prison or confinement but to “any unfavourable place or condition, likened to Limbo; esp. a condition of neglect or oblivion to which persons or things are consigned when regarded as outworn, useless, or absurd.”

Some have pushed back. One legal strategy is to actively draw the U.S. border around detainees to try to encompass them within U.S. constitutional protections. An example is the case of Lakdhar Boumediene, an Algerian-born citizen of Bosnia and Herzegovina who was the subject of a 2008 Supreme Court decision, Boumediene v. Bush, ruling that detainees were not barred from seeking habeas corpus or invoking the suspension clause merely because they had been designated as enemy combatants or held at Guantánamo. Boumediene’s detention began in 2002, when he and five other Algerians were seized by Bosnian police because U.S. intelligence officers suspected their involvement in a plot to attack the U.S. embassy in Bosnia. The United States classified the men as enemy combatants in the war on terror and imprisoned them at GTMO. Boumediene filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus (lit: “that you have a body,” a form of legal recourse against unlawful detention), alleging violations of the Constitution’s due process clause, various statutes and treaties, the common law, and international law. The district court granted the government’s motion to have his claims dismissed on the ground that Boumediene, as an alien detained at an overseas military base, had no right to a habeas petition. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit affirmed the dismissal. But the Supreme Court reversed in Rasul v. Bush, holding that the habeas statute extends to noncitizen detainees at Guantánamo. Foreign nationals held at GTMO could petition federal courts for writs of habeas corpus to review the legality of their detention.

Two years later, Congress passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (MCA), which eliminated federal courts’ jurisdiction to hear habeas applications from detainees who had been designated as enemy combatants according to procedures established in the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005. When Boumediene’s case was appealed to the DC Circuit for the second time, he and the other detainees argued that the MCA did not apply to their petitions and that even if it did, it was unconstitutional under the suspension clause. (The latter reads: “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”) The DC Circuit ruled in favor of the government on both points, citing language in the MCA applying the law to “all cases, without exception” that pertain to aspects of detention. One of the purposes of the MCA, according to this court’s interpretation, was to overrule the Supreme Court’s opinion in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, which had allowed petitions like Boumediene’s to go forward. The circuit court thus held that the suspension clause only protects the writ of habeas corpus as it existed in 1789 and that the writ would not have been understood in 1789 to apply to an overseas military base leased from a foreign government. The court held further that constitutional rights do not apply to aliens outside of the United States and that the leased military base in Cuba does not qualify as inside the geographic borders of the United States.

The Supreme Court then ruled that if the 2006 MCA were considered valid, its legislative history would require that the detainees’ cases be dismissed. However, they also found that because the procedures laid out in the Detainee Treatment Act are not adequate substitutes for the habeas writ, the MCA operates as an unconstitutional suspension of that writ. The detainees therefore were not barred from seeking habeas or from invoking the suspension clause merely because they had been designated as enemy combatants or were being held at Guantánamo.

With the court’s reversal of the DC Circuit’s ruling, the border began to come into focus, a faint dotted line provisionally encircling the detainees at Guantánamo and, perhaps, other black sites.

The “abject,” notes J. Kameron Carter, “is neither friend (subject) nor enemy (object). The abject exists in the zone between life (full citizenship) and death (the enemy as one who must be killed).” The category of abject, or homo sacer (sacred man, in Roman law), includes detainees at Guantánamo and others in border limbo. It includes Jews in mid-twentieth-century Europe and the figure of the slave, “modernity’s abject par excellence,” all of whom have been forced outside the bounds of humanity. It includes Palestinians in Gaza. Today it includes the Cuban people.

Borders are brokers of abjection. They can be hard to see because the abject exists in a border zone between life and death. Neither in nor out. Neither domestic nor foreign. Neither wholly part of the body nor wholly apart from it. She sits with other liminal subjects in the margins of global order.

In Downes v. Bidwell, one of the Insular Cases, the majority found that “Porto Rico belongs to the United States, but nevertheless, and notwithstanding the act of Congress, is not a part of the United States subject to the provisions of the Constitution in respect of the levy of taxes, duties, imposts, and excises.” Dissenting Justice Melville Weston Fuller interpreted this to mean that, “if an organized and settled province of another sovereignty is acquired by the United States,” Congress would retain the power “to keep it, like a disembodied shade.”

Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, American Samoa, the Federated States of Micronesia, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, and the Republic of Palau are liminal jurisdictions that are kept by the United States “like a disembodied shade, in an intermediate state of ambiguous existence for an indefinite period.” They live in the shadows of sovereignty, belonging to the United States but not part of it.

Speaking at the Future Investment Initiative summit in Miami in March of this year, Trump boasted, “We have been very, very successful. You know, when I went into Venezuela … I built this great military, I said, you’ll never have to use it, but sometimes you have to use it,” adding, “and Cuba’s next, by the way.” In threatening to “stop by Cuba after we’re finished” with Iran, Trump reaffirms Cuba’s inferior position as a subject of the long-standing American prerogative to “exercise complete jurisdiction and control over and within said areas.” Neither in nor out, neither domestic nor foreign. Neither wholly part of the body nor wholly apart from it. In the logic of American empire, Cuba subsists indefinitely in the shadows, and America never ends.

This essay is adapted and reprinted with permission from Heaven Has a Wall: Religion, Borders, and the Global United States by Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, published by the University of Chicago Press. © 2025 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.