ABSTRACT
This article brings to the fore aspects of the class relevance of post-9/11 domestic counterterrorism in the United States (aka “homeland security”). Without implying that a class perspective is the most meaningful or, by itself, a sufficient way of understanding counterterrorism, it highlights its largely overlooked class dimensions. By doing so, it strives to introduce (some) social considerations to the critical study of counterterrorismrelated phenomena, thus addressing a surprising lacuna in this field. Critical counterterrorism studies are dominated by biopolitical and constitutional-democratic accounts, which certainly are fruitful approaches, bearing important insights and critique. Yet, biopolitical accounts conceptualise social phenomena as manifestations of the logic and/ or structure of power, and constitutional-democratic accounts treat democracy as the constitutional outline of state institutions, rather than as a process of popular political creation and practice. In both cases, the study of society is not supplemented, but substituted by something else – the study of structures and logics of power, or the study of institutional forms.1
