Weapons of mass participation: Social media, violence entrepreneurs, and the politics of crowdfunding for war

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.