Weapons of mass participation: Social media, violence entrepreneurs, and the politics of crowdfunding for war
| Date | 01 March 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1354066117744867 |
| Published date | 01 March 2019 |
| Author | Nicole Sunday Grove |
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https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066117744867
European Journal of
International Relations
2019, Vol. 25(1) 86 –107
© The Author(s) 2017
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sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/1354066117744867
journals.sagepub.com/home/ejt
Weapons of mass
participation: Social media,
violence entrepreneurs,
and the politics of
crowdfunding for war
Nicole Sunday Grove
University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, USA
Abstract
Since 2012, North American and European civilians have regularly engaged in combat
operations against the Islamic State in the globalized and decentralized battlefields of
Iraq and Syria. This article focuses on two aspects of this phenomenon. First, I argue
that these combatants represent a different kind of fighter from both private military
contractors and battlefield laborers profiled in the private security literature insofar as
capital is a means rather than an end in the innovation of violence. I refer to these fighters
as violence entrepreneurs. The relevance and limits of Schmitt’s writings on enmity and
his theory of the partisan are examined in the context of these contemporary networks
of security, mobility, and killing. My second argument centers on how online platforms
for the distribution of small-scale donations to these fighters and their self-crafted
missions facilitate hyper-mediated forms of patronage, where individual donors are both
producers and consumers of security in ways that further distort distinctions between
civilians and combatants. The imagined communities that support these combatants,
both morally and financially, through the banal networks of Facebook and peer-to-
peer funding platforms like GoFundMe suggest a radical deviation from conventional
organizational structures and capacities for waging combat. Crowdfunding congeals
these new geopolitical networks in the authorizing of individuals to determine their own
singular forms of enmity, mutating the conditions of possibility for the sovereign decision.
Keywords
Carl Schmitt, crowdfunding, ISIS, non-state combatants, partisans, violence
entrepreneurs
Corresponding author:
Nicole Sunday Grove, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, 2424 Maile Way, Saunders Hall, 608,
Honolulu, 96822, USA.
Email: nsgrove@hawaii.edu
744867EJT0010.1177/1354066117744867European Journal of International RelationsGrove
research-article2017
Article
Grove 87
Introduction
In February 2016, Patrick Maxwell, a former US Marine, was arrested for beating,
threatening to rape, then running over a 70-year-old taxi driver with her own car in
Aruba. Grace Angela picked Maxwell up outside of a nightclub in Palm Beach, where he
had asked to be taken to his hotel. When they arrived, he reportedly refused to leave the
vehicle and demanded to be taken to a pharmacy instead, where he also refused to get out
of the car. Angela described Maxwell as suddenly becoming violent, repeatedly hitting
her in the face while threatening to sexually assault her, until a witness tried to intervene.
Maxwell then stole Angela’s car, running over her leg and torso in the process. She sur-
vived the attack with a broken nose and seven broken ribs (Geerman, 2016).
One year previous to the incident, Maxwell was profiled by the New York Times as an
American “fighting ISIS” in Iraqi Kurdistan. The four-minute video documentary fea-
tures Maxwell describing his use of Google and Facebook to decode how to travel to
Sulaymaniyah, Iraq in order to engage in combat operations alongside the Kurdish
Peshmerga (Bofetta and Philipps, 2015). In response to a question posed by the filmmak-
ers (the question was not included in the audio), Maxwell ruminates: “I did hope … that
there would be a chance to split some heads … yeah [sound of gunfire].… As a private
citizen, I’m going to have an adventure, essentially, and that’s my own business.” What
would inspire someone to believe they were Foucault’s arcane sovereign, the decider of
who lives and who dies, capable of declaring their own war? In stepping back from a
horrific act of violence directed at an elderly woman working nights as a taxi driver, to
the experience of possessing an extreme form of freedom to “split heads” without seem-
ing limit or consequence in the nebulous warscapes of Iraq and Syria, there is a continu-
ity in Maxwell’s actions as his own army of one that links the causal violence of an
assault in Aruba, and more explicit forms of combat in Iraq within the same sovereign
subject.
My focus in this article is on North American and European civilians traveling over-
seas to engage in combat operations against the Islamic State in the globalized and
decentralized battlefields of Iraq and Syria. In what follows, I outline two arguments.
First, these combatants represent a different kind of fighter from private military contrac-
tors (PMCs) and other battlefield laborers profiled in the private security literature. For
this new combatant, violence is not simply instrumental in the pursuit of capital, terri-
tory, or some other gain, but rather is an end unto itself in the innovation, enjoyment, and
the metanoia of violence. Adapting Grove’s (2016a) concept of the violence entrepre-
neur, I situate the emergence of these fighters within contemporary forms of globalized
and mediatized warfare. My second argument is that the imagined communities who
support these fighters — morally, affectively, and financially — through the banal net-
works of Facebook, online donations pages offered via web-content management sys-
tems, and ‘peer-to-peer’ funding platforms like GoFundMe suggest a radical deviation
from conventional national and corporate organizational structures for waging combat.
Major debates in the literature on private security take place within a particular econ-
omy of violence, where violence is instrumentalized toward a goal, a form of compensa-
tion, survival, or some other end (see Abrahamsen and Williams, 2010; Avant, 2005,
2006; De Nevers, 2009; Leander and Van Munster, 2007; Spearin, 2008). In other words,
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