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 of Anthropology and Director of the John B. Hurford '60 Center for the Arts and Humanities at Haverford College. Her research focuses on subjectivity, nostalgia, belonging, war, empire, and violence in Iraq and the Iraqi diaspora. She is the author of Return to Ruin: Iraqi Narratives of Exile and Nostalgia(Stanford University Press, 2021), winner of the Evelyn Shakir Non-Fiction Award at the Arab American Book Awards, and Political Undesirables: Citizenship, Denaturalization, and Reclamation in Iraq (Stanford University Press, 2025). Her current work includes a forthcoming book on how US media legitimized the invasion of Iraq.
Alka Pradhan is an expert on the application of human rights and humanitarian law to counterterrorism situations, and all aspects of the prohibition on torture, from prevention to litigation and accountability. She is currently Human Rights Counsel at the Guantanamo Bay Military Commissions, representing one of the defendants in the capital case of United States v. Khalid Sheikh Mohammad (the “9/11 case”); and Associate Counsel for Al-Hassan Ag Abdoul Aziz Ag Mohamed Ag Mahmoud at the International Criminal Court. She is also an Adjunct Professor of Law at Penn Carey Law School.
Ameena Ghaffar-Kucher, EdD is an Adv. Senior Lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education where she is also Director of the International Educational Development Program. Her scholarship focuses on structural Islamophobia and the schooling experiences of migrant youth, particularly how race, religion, and mobility shape their civic engagement and academic opportunity. She is the Project Director of Teaching Beyond September 11th, an open-access curriculum that provides educators with materials for examining structural, institutional, and interpersonal responses to 9/11 and their effects on AMEMSA communities, through critical inquiry and within a larger historical narrative.
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