Alyssa Marie Miller

This book project examines the role of kinship in political strategies to defend Tunisians’ right of return after participation in transnational jihad. At the heart of these strategies lies kin-work: a form of affective labor that humanizes jihad volunteers by folding them back into the family’s relational bonds. In a hostile public sphere where the jihadi denotes a monstrous form of life, any political advocacy for jihad volunteers requires first recovering their humanity. Unlike strategies of “immediation” where the body expresses a universal humanity for the suffering subject, kin-work operates by showing how the rupture of naturalized kin-bonds exposes families to intolerable pain. The performances of women—particularly mothers—are seen as especially efficacious, since they conform to normative gender scripts that cast the patriarchal state as a masculine savior. Attending to street-level protests, televised talk shows, and other cultural forms, I show how the turn to kinship grounds an affective politics of citizenship, in an era when global citizenship regimes have been progressively eroded under the Global War on Terror.