Becoming Agents

Although she now seems ubiquitous, the agential girl-in-war arrived on the scene relatively recently. In 1996, Carolyn Nordstrom observed that in most accounts of war, girls barely existed. Girls in war, she argued, “were largely, dangerously, invisible … they had no agency to direct their lives, to talk and trade and set up healing programs, they never spoke on the radio, their words were not recorded in newsprint, political scientists did not quote them, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) did not interview them.” In accounts of war, she found, “girls … are acted upon; they are listed as casualties – they do not act. They are not listed as having identities, politics, morals, and agendas for war or peace.”Footnote ²² Iconic works like The Diary of Anne Frank and, in the 1990s, Zlata Filipović’s Zlata’s Diary, bear this out; in these girls’ diaries, as Sidonie Smith argues, “the child becomes the sentimental public figure of ethnic trauma” who cannot act on her own behalf.Footnote ²³ Both Frank and Filipović’s stories, Smith notices, are at once Americanized, depoliticized, and sentimentalized; in their circulation, the girl-author becomes a victim of politics rather than a political actor. Further, when the girl as victim–witness, in her unassailable innocence, stands in for the entirety of the violence she has experienced, her symbolic presence covers up the geopolitical dynamics that have led to her victimization, reducing the historical circumstances that enable wars and genocides to ethnic differences which, as Susan Woodward points out in the context of the Balkans, “do not set a society inexorably on a path toward  war.”Footnote ²⁴

Innocent ethnic victimhood also appeared in iconic Cold War photos of traumatized girls. The indelible images of South Vietnamese child Phan Thi Kim Phuc and “Afghan girl” Sharbat Gula captured those girls’ extreme vulnerability, inciting global sympathy and action.Footnote ²⁵ The photos served the aims of opposing sides in the Cold War and led to opposite outcomes. Nick Ut’s famous image of Phuc burned by napalm, screaming in pain, illustrated US brutality even toward its alleged allies, even toward children; it helped to catalyze US domestic opposition to the war and bring about its end. In contrast, Gula’s haunted gaze in Steve McCurry’s photo, as Shakira Hussein writes, became a “symbol of Afghan suffering under the Soviet occupation”; the accompanying article drums up support for the mujahadeen “freedom fighters” the United States is covertly arming.Footnote ²⁶ However, in other ways, the photographs were similar: Both were taken without the consent of their subjects, and neither subject was happy about the fame her photograph brought her or the uses to which her image was put.Footnote ²⁷ These memorable photographs thus produce a double denial of agency, as Phuc and Gula are depicted as helpless victims and then deprived of control over the circulation of their images.

Accounts of girls in war changed significantly over the course of the War on Terror. Far from being imagined as passive traumatized victim–witnesses, girls in conflict zones are now assumed to be political and military actors who participate actively in war and counterinsurgency; their power, far from being denied, is often wildly exaggerated. Liberal New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof pronounced in 2015, in a statement which he regularly repeated in his column, “to counter terrorists, sometimes a girl with a book is more powerful than a drone in the sky.”Footnote ²⁸ Writer and physician Pius Kamau likewise claimed in 2014 that “education of African girls is the only antidote” to terrorism on that continent.Footnote ²⁹ These naturalizing equations of “educated girls” with anti-terrorism agendas and weapons were codified at the United Nations (UN), which merged much of their gender equality and anti-terrorism programming, making “gender mainstreaming” central to their counterterrorism strategy.Footnote ³⁰ The US nonprofit GirlSecurity similarly argues that “girls, especially, have unique security insights that can expand our collective approach to national security.”Footnote ³¹ Now, the geopolitical conventional wisdom is that rather than being protected, girls must be brought to the table and given a voice in security conversations. In other words, girls should be used as resources in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency.

The educated counterinsurgent girl thus became a cultural figure who would help achieve and justify the changing imperatives of the US-led War on Terror, a decades-long campaign that would encompass at least seventy-eight countries and include torture, disappearance, mass killing, and the displacement of tens of millions.Footnote ³² As Jasbir Puar has chronicled, this most illogical of wars was explained in part through the reconfiguring of US gender, sexual, and familial norms in response to the threat of Arab–Muslim “terrorists.” The United States and its allies suppressed the knowledge that terrorists’ political grievances were political, characterizing them as stemming from sexual repression, in contrast with a tolerant West that was newly inclusive of gay couples.Footnote ³³ Over the course of the war, the figure of the terrorist in the US imagination did not change much: Liberals especially but also conservatives consistently characterized him as intensely patriarchal and homophobic, opposed to pluralism and tolerance that were for a time claimed as Western values, but also sexually deviant and otherwise pathological. Barack Obama’s Reference Obama2020 memoir, in a telling example, laments the “millions of young men” whose lives are “warped and stunted by desperation, ignorance, dreams of religious glory, the violence of their surroundings, or the schemes of older men.” Obama wistfully recalls that he “wanted to save” these young men, but “the world they were a part of, and the machinery I commanded, more often had me killing them instead.”Footnote ³⁴

In contrast with this fairly consistent portrayal of the many young men who commit the thought crime of hating US empire and must, however regrettably, be murdered for it, depictions of women and girls have both proliferated and transformed, shifting after the failure of the war’s initial “shock and awe” phase from portraits of their victimhood to assertions of their agency.Footnote ³⁵ One reason for the increased focus on women and girls in war is that we live in an age when, while soldiers are still mostly men, war casualties are mainly civilians. This is the result of a gradual shift that culminates, as Grégoire Chamayou points out, in drone warfare, where there is not and cannot be a battlefield, where soldier risk falls to zero while civilian casualties become inevitable. Chamayou cites by way of illustration the Reaper drone badge, which features a smiling Grim Reaper and the slogan “that others may die.”Footnote ³⁶ But the military’s closer attention to women and girls, and its discovery of their agency, occurred for other reasons too. The sentiment expressed famously by Laura Bush, Oprah Winfrey and many others at the outset of the US war in Afghanistan, that the United States was going to war to save the country’s passive women – “women of cover,” as George W. Bush called them – from the repressive Taliban, was roundly condemned by scholars, journalists, and feminist activists. Cynthia Enloe’s Reference Enloe1990 denunciation of “womenandchildren” as a category of victim; Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s questioning of feminist solidarity in ‘Under Western Eyes,’ Lila Abu-Lughod’s Reference Abu-Lughod2002 query “Do Muslim Women really need saving?”; Iris Marion Young’s Reference Young2003 deconstruction of “the logic of masculinist protection”; and Saba Mahmood’s Reference Mahmood2004 study of religious Egyptian women. The Politics of Piety were powerful and influential, together constituting the rare feminist scholarly intervention that shifted popular discourse.Footnote ³⁷ It was no longer possible for War-on-Terror advocates after the Bush years to talk straightforwardly about “saving” Muslim women without public criticism.Footnote ³⁸

Characterizations of Iraqi and Afghan women as passive victims were not just critiqued by feminist scholars; they were also tested and found wanting by US and NATO forces. The Female Engagement Teams of US women soldiers in Afghanistan, for example, were “regarded as a failure” because Afghan women defied the expectation that they would “be honest and transparent in their communication” with the female occupying forces.Footnote ³⁹ The NATO Teaching Gender handbook details related lessons learned from the military’s initial underestimation of women:

US and NATO military forces thus learned in the early years of the War on Terror that women in Muslim countries had agency. Imagining these women as passive victims of oppressive conditions was not only bad optics but also bad strategy, because it left the occupiers unprepared for women’s strategic agency and insurgent action. One example of the military’s absorption of these lessons is their enlistment of American literary scholar Carol Burke, who served as a cultural consultant embedded with US forces in Afghanistan. In her book about the experience, Burke includes a chapter entitled “Under Western Eyes,” invoking Mohanty to explain all the ways US soldiers misunderstand Afghan culture. Burke theorizes an “American gaze” that “cannot inhabit the Afghan imaginary,” focusing on the cultural misunderstandings she is helping to mitigate, rather than the very enterprise of imperialist war, in which she is, of course, assisting.Footnote ⁴¹

Abu-Lughod’s call for Westerners to both accept “the possibility of difference” (that Afghan women “might want different things than we might want for them”) and “be vigilant about the rhetoric of saving people” was thus answered during the War on Terror, though it did not bring about the economic justice or cessation of imperial drives for which she also called.Footnote ⁴² Insights about women having agency did not in any way deter the US military from its geographically unbounded, endless war against civilian populations, and it did not cause NATO to retreat from its military operations. However, it did necessitate a change in vocabulary. Military trainings stopped using the language of women’s rights and empowerment, and began instead to speak of “gender mainstreaming” and “incorporating a gender perspective.”Footnote ⁴³ “Gender mainstreaming” experts, often trained in gender and sexuality studies graduate programs, urged military and civilian counterinsurgent forces to take into account the idea that gender is both historically constructed (as in the NATO handbook’s claim that “gender roles change over time”) and culturally variable in order to better understand the situation of local populations and thereby achieve their objectives.Footnote ⁴⁴

The focus on gender in war and counterinsurgency, and the acknowledgement of the previously ignored agency of women and girls in those struggles, occurred concurrently with a moral panic in the United States about overly agential “mean girls.” According to self-proclaimed expert Rosalind Wiseman, in the 1990s and 2000s, girls in groups were, or were becoming, highly dangerous. Wiseman’s inspiration for writing her bestselling 2002 parenting manual Queen Bees and Wannabes was her own experience in high school in which, she explains, a girl clique lowered her self-esteem to the point where she stayed in an abusive heterosexual relationship.Footnote ⁴⁵ Despite this foundational trauma, the book contains not a hint of feminism; patriarchal and other structural forces appear in it only to be discounted.Footnote ⁴⁶ Rather, Wiseman constructs “girl world” as a habitat of its own, replete with various types (Queen Bee, Wannabe, Banker, Target, Champion) whose traits parents must catalog and master. The book encourages parents to see “girl world” as alien, scary, and potentially dangerous: insets throughout containing examples of the wrong way to talk to your child are titled “land mine!”Footnote ⁴⁷

Inspired by Queen Bees, the 2004 film Mean Girls, directed by Mark Waters, takes this fear of girl-groups even further, to comic but also didactic effect. The film follows new girl Cady, who has grown up “in Africa” with zoologist parents, as she encounters for the first time the unruly world of US girl cliques; the joke is that the real “jungle” is not Africa but girl world. Cady attempts to infiltrate the popular clique of mean girls on behalf of the outcast friends who are initially kind to her, but then gets wrapped up in girl world and ascends through its hierarchy. After the girls’ backbiting and sabotage escalates to brawling and mayhem, the mean girl fever finally breaks at a school dance; Cady, having realized the error of her ways, gives a heartfelt Prom Queen speech, apologizing and telling each girl she has wronged how beautiful she looks. The girls come back to their senses and, breathtakingly quickly, end up heterosexually paired off for the final dance. The boys with whom they now dance happily have appeared out of nowhere or heretofore been mere pawns or annoyances. The dance scene ends in an aerial shot of dancers gliding harmoniously, assuring viewers that with everyone coupled up, order is finally restored.

This pivotal scene in Mean Girls, when the chaotic, destructive girl-clique is wrenched apart into peaceful heterosexual couples, points to the anxieties behind the otherwise baffling worries about “mean girls,” whose longtime existence had in previous cultural works been played for laughs and drama but not so thoroughly pathologized.Footnote ⁴⁸ It suggests that the postfeminist sensibility that took hold in the global North in the 1990s (and globally, on different timelines) dovetailed with neoliberalism in ways that seemed for many to threaten patriarchal and familial stability. This postfeminist sensibility had at its center both a solidarity-lite “girl power” ethos and a principle Rosalind Gill terms “femininity as bodily property” – meaning that one’s body is one’s own and must be monitored and sexualized “for oneself,” but also that normative femininity inheres in having a sexy body rather than, as in the era before feminism, in being nurturing.Footnote ⁴⁹ If feminist scholars critiqued postfeminism’s emphasis on individual agency, exuberant femininity, and “girl power” as insufficiently disruptive of the status quo, conservative observers, as well as some parents of girls, saw it as overly disruptive. This perceived disruption is embodied in the roving cliques and wild riots of Mean Girls, as well as in the girls’ lack of interest in care, deference, and coupling up until they reform at the end. This seems to align the panic over “mean girls” with general anxieties about what Nancy Fraser calls the “crisis of care” that has intensified in neoliberalism.Footnote ⁵⁰ Parents and other authorities perhaps sensed in these selfish and powerful girl cliques a rejection of the work of social reproduction; such critics of “mean girls” connected their opting-out of care work, however unfairly, with the general social crisis and decline in quality of life brought on by hyper-exploitation and the contraction of the welfare state. Mean girls, with their postfeminist performances of collective “girl power,” took the blame for the general callousness and care-crunch in neoliberal societies.

The film’s jokey mobilization of “Africa” to establish Cady’s total ignorance of high-school cliques and girl-types is worth returning to, as an indication of what Kathryn Bond Stockton has usefully called “the United States … outsourcing its child.”Footnote ⁵¹ In its insistence that postfeminist girl empowerment has gone too far, Mean Girls uses Africa as a foil, imagining it as a place where girls are still innocent, oppressed, and deserving – in other words, good investments – in contrast with the mean girls who have eschewed proper nurturing femininity. This logic pervaded US culture in the Mean Girls years, as when Oprah Winfrey in 2007 commissioned a $40 billion school project for girls in South Africa after decrying the materialism of US “inner-city” kids: “If you ask the kids what they want or need, they will say an iPod or some sneakers. In South Africa, they don’t ask for money or toys. They ask for uniforms so they can go to school.”Footnote ⁵² This dynamic, in which the girls of the global North are imagined as overly empowered in contrast with the agential aspiring disciplined girls of the global South, persists in popular culture and global organizations alike. As Rosie Walters finds, girls in US and UK high schools repurpose the UN Foundation’s Girl Up! clubs, where they are meant mainly to raise donations for global-South girls, as a way to address sexism at their own schools; the girls report that the UN charity frame makes them “appear less … radical” and helps stem skepticism from peers, teachers, and parents about the need for a feminist group.Footnote ⁵³ Despite these efforts by actual girls to thwart the terms they are given, “girl” frameworks seem in their insistent comparisons between global North and global South girls to impede feminist solidarity as well as coherent political analysis.

Force Multipliers

The outsourcing of the girl and the rejection of feminism converged in the persona and stories of mountaineer-turned school-builder Greg Mortenson. In 2006, Mortenson and David Oliver Relin published Three Cups of Tea, promoted by Penguin Books as “the astonishing, uplifting story of a real-life Indiana Jones and his humanitarian campaign to use education to combat terrorism in the Taliban’s backyard.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Narrated by Relin, the book recounts Mortenson’s 1993 failed attempt to climb the treacherous peak K2, after which he has a physical breakdown; is nursed back to health by Pakistani villagers; and, in return for their hospitality, promises to build them a school. The rest of the book chronicles Mortenson’s rollicking adventures as he wins over rural communities through tea drinking and other respectful behavior, then constructs fifty-five schools in Pakistan ambiguously designated “especially for girls.” Despite unabashed caricatures of the local people – men “attack” their food in a “primal, barbaric” manner – and what one reviewer deemed the book’s “self-indulgent digressions, clunky prose and odd, hagiographic references,” Three Cups enjoyed tremendous success.Footnote ⁵⁵ The book spent four years on the New York Times bestseller list; provided copious material for liberal interventionist opinion columnists; and, perhaps most importantly, shaped the strategy of the US troop surge in Afghanistan in the late 2000s. It also inspired donations from schools and churches across America, as well as from Barack Obama, who donated $100,000 of his 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winnings to Mortenson’s Central Asia Institute (CAI).Footnote ⁵⁶

As Three Cups accumulated attention, it began to draw scrutiny. Journalist Jon Krakauer, initially a generous supporter of Mortenson and the CAI, uncovered a series of inaccuracies in the book, including its incorrect identification of the Baltistan region of Pakistan as violent and Taliban-ruled, its false claim that Mortenson had been kidnapped by Taliban forces, and the fact that many schools Mortenson boasted of did not exist or lay empty while he used the Institute’s funds to promote his book. In 2011, Krakauer enumerated these accusations in a blistering e-book entitled Three Cups of Deceit, and 60 Minutes ran a story exposing the false kidnapping and empty schools.Footnote ⁵⁷ The state of Montana sued Mortenson for defrauding the CAI – they settled for $1.2 million – and four readers drew on Krakauer’s discoveries to file a class action suit against Mortenson, Relin, Penguin, and the CAI.Footnote ⁵⁸ The latter suit was thrown out of court, but the consequences of the debacle, at least for Relin, were severe: He died by suicide in 2012, suffering from depression he linked to the lawsuit and Mortenson’s public statements blaming him for the book’s inaccuracies.Footnote ⁵⁹ The extreme disillusionment of the book’s readers and cowriter indexes the tremendous hope Mortenson inspired in a swath of the US public, for a time, by embodying the idea that the suppression of terrorism could occur through heroic civilian actions that were imagined to be basically apolitical.Footnote ⁶⁰

Although its press and paratextual materials emphasize girls’ education and empowerment, most of Three Cups is devoted to male leadership and bonding, harkening back to Cold War propaganda. The book boasts of Mortenson’s ability to pull in acolytes “almost against their will,” indicating his power to command respect and affective devotion. This depiction of Mortenson resonates with the persona of Vietnam War propagandist Tom Dooley, “the jungle doctor”; like Dooley, Mortenson goes by “Dr.” (Relin and others refer to him as “Dr. Greg”), though he has no such credential.Footnote ⁶¹ Mortenson’s personal life also follows patriarchal lines: After a relationship with Marina, a (real) doctor who coldly breaks up with him because she is impatient with his selfless devotion to service, he meets and marries Tara Bishop, the daughter of a fellow mountain climber, who dedicates her life to raising their children and encouraging his school-building ventures.

The book’s pivotal moment is also one of male bonding. Mortenson, attempting to rush one community along in its school-construction project, irritates his elderly mentor Haji Ali. Ali, embodying the position of what US military planners euphemistically call their “host nation,” takes Mortenson back to his hut and commands him to “sit down and shut [his] mouth” while Ali’s wife, Sakina, prepares tea. When she is finished, Haji Ali finally speaks, telling Mortenson: “If you want to thrive in Baltistan, you must respect our ways.” He further explains: “The first time you share tea with a Balti, you are a stranger. The second time you share tea, you are an honored guest. The third time you share a cup of tea, you become family, and for our family, we are prepared to do anything, even die.” Mortenson characterizes this as “the most important lesson [he has] ever learned,” explaining further that “We Americans think you have to accomplish everything quickly. We’re the country of thirty-minute power lunches and two-minute football drills. Our leaders thought their ‘shock and awe’ campaign could end the war in Iraq before it even started. Haji Ali taught me to share three cups of tea, to slow down, and make building relationships as important as building projects.”Footnote ⁶²

The passage’s leap in logic – a necessary one, if the book is to work as a guide to winning the War on Terror – is Mortenson’s inclusion of “shock and awe” in his otherwise commonplace chronicle of American busyness. The problem with shock and awe, in Mortenson’s analogical rendering, does not inhere in the attempt to liberate peoples through military invasion and occupation. Rather, the problem lies in American velocity, in the ideas of “shock” and “awe” themselves rather than the massive destruction these words occlude; Mortenson understands the shock and awe strategy as an extension of unhealthy work habits. The failures of counterinsurgency stem, according to this logic, from US soldiers’ unwillingness to “build relationships” with the people of the countries they invade and occupy. All it would take to inspire rural Pakistanis to lay down their lives for Americans, the book suggests, would be to spend hours in the homes of local men, drinking tea with them. The constitutive element on which Mortenson’s vision of slow counterinsurgency rests, of course, is women’s labor. Sakina’s preparation of the tea is both crucial and invisible in the scene; the “scalding” tea appears while Sakina herself vanishes. Mortensen’s prescription for peace, then, depends on a seemingly endless homosocial bonding ritual undergirded by women’s constant labor; though his vision of developing Pakistan and Afghanistan requires people to change their lifeways and values, this unequal division of labor must persist or even intensify.

If drinking tea in order to overcome cultural barriers through male bonding constitutes the first step in Three Cups’ anti-terrorism strategy, the second step is educating girls. This tactic depends on what Mortenson sees as rural Muslim girls’ comparative immobility. “Once you educate the boys,” he argues, “They tend to leave the villages and go search for work in the cities, but the girls stay home, become leaders in the community, and pass on what they’ve learned.”Footnote ⁶³ In other words, locked into the work of social reproduction, girls will be unable to exercise the freedom of movement that modernization theorists and development workers once promised their correctly transformed male subjects; instead, they can only become sedentary conduits for the education they gain. In his second memoir, Stones into Schools, Mortenson further clarifies how that education connects to counterinsurgency:

Mortenson here adds his own spin to the alleged proverb about girls’ education. For him, the girl is not only a high-return investment but also a dormant explosive device, a “force multiplier” waiting to be activated through value-neutral education: Once triggered, she can, through her sentimental labor, combat the anti-Western and disorderly elements in her society. This idea depends on certain assumptions about girls – that they are mothers-in-waiting, that their education will lead them to oppose terrorism – but also about terrorists, namely that “believing in extremist violence or terrorism” is a culturally produced pathological condition rather than a decision to commit political violence that might have explicable political causes. As Puar and Amit Rai have explained, it is through this characterization of terrorists as products of cultural malformation that liberal accounts demonstrate their difference from overtly racist conservative ones.Footnote ⁶⁵ The logic of educating girls so that they might grow up and remold the minds of their future sons made sense to Mortenson’s readers because of this dominant diagnosis of political “extremism” as bad cultural training, which conveniently only a mother is equipped to remedy.

In Mortenson’s vision of proxy psychological warfare, then, each girl will pass on a reliable message of support for the West to the offspring she will inevitably produce. That this grown-up girl will stay in her “impoverished Muslim society” and become a mother is never in doubt: As with Sakina in the tea-drinking ritual, her outsized labor as a reproductive and pacifying force is naturalized to the point of disappearing. Girls’ education, rather than facilitating gender equality, exists primarily for the purpose of increasing women’s ability to facilitate dialog between men. Whether preparing endless cups of tea or shifting their sons’ allegiances, they are not given more life choices by development, as Amartya Sen wishfully posits, but are instead consigned forever to the task of lubricating East–West relations.Footnote ⁶⁶ These relations, for all their tenderness, still have the violent goal of producing counterinsurgent “hosts” who, in Haji Ali’s words, are “prepared to do anything, even die” for their guest/occupiers.

From about 2009 to 2011, crucial years in the Iraq and Afghanistan troop surges, Three Cups of Tea became, as Nosheen Ali writes, “a strategic guide for the US military.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Mortenson visited dozens of military bases, briefed senior Pentagon officials, and exercised considerable influence over military commanders like Christopher Kolenda, Stanley McChrystal, David Petraeus, and Mike Mullen, who began ostentatiously drinking tea in photo ops with village elders.Footnote ⁶⁸ As its website boasted, and as military reading lists corroborate, Three Cups also became required reading for soldiers bound for Afghanistan.Footnote ⁶⁹ Even after Mortenson’s story was discredited, the focus on school building in war persisted, for example in a US–UK bilateral project in 2015 “to improve the quality of and access to education for girls in conflict areas.”Footnote ⁷⁰

This goal signals the lack of ambition that characterizes neoliberal, girl-focused development – rather than working to end conflict or protect girls in war zones, Western governments and their development agencies simply want to improve their education—but it also endangers children. Sonja Grover has drawn on statistics about the astronomical increase in school attendance in Afghanistan over the course of the US occupation, along with the equally sharp increase in attacks on schools, to critique this new orthodoxy.Footnote ⁷¹ She argues that development organizations’ insistence upon school-building as the key humanitarian and strategic intervention in war violates children’s human rights, “plac[ing] child civilians in harm’s way by encouraging school attendance despite inadequate security for education.”Footnote ⁷² Mortenson’s uplifting tales of school construction in war zones, then, led to emulation by development agencies even when these policies endangered children.

We Are Malala

In 2012, the year after Mortenson’s fall from grace, Malala Yousafzai became a household name. While Yousafzai herself has politics that are distinct from Mortenson’s (she vocally opposes US drone attacks as opposed to working with the US military and emphasizes financial barriers to education for all rather than counterinsurgent logic), the fact of her being shot on the school bus for speaking out against the Taliban seemingly redeemed Mortenson’s ideas, corroborating the core insights of his fabricated stories by starkly pitting “the girl” against “the Talib/terrorist.” Yousafzai’s memoir I Am Malala, cowritten with British journalist Christina Lamb and published in 2013, does similar work, despite Yousafzai’s attempts to complicate the story. The memoir interweaves Yousafzai’s biography with historically informed accounts of colonialism and an impressive range of literary references. Yousafzai is not afraid to make political pronouncements; she decries the Taliban but also details the history of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) during the 1980s war with the Soviets, when, as she puts it, “this idea of jihad was very much encouraged by the CIA.” The memoir’s beginning is characteristic of its style, jolting between the historical/geopolitical and intimate-emotional scales:

As the opening suggests, Yousafzai insists on multiple large-scale contexts for her story: colonialism, partition, development, and war. But while many readers in the West seem to have read and enjoyed I Am Malala, they are largely much more interested in her personal plight than her attempts to historicize her situation. On Goodreads, nearly all of the negative reviews from Americans (as opposed to those from Pakistani readers accusing her of betraying her country) complain that the book contains “too much history” and that they “didn’t go into the book to hear about the formation of Pakistan.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Another reader reports, “I was expecting an intense story of a girl who is fighting for her rights to go to school then getting shot and not giving up but what I found was basically her just talking about the history of Pakistan.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Even the book club guide for I Am Malala is light on context, asking readers questions such as “do you have a particular cause you care about deeply?” and “Think of someone in your life who has been a mentor. How did she or he inspire you?” The historical context has likewise been stripped from the young readers’ edition of Yousafzai’s memoir, which begins not with Partition but rather with a description of Malala’s private world, beginning with the line “when I close my eyes, I can see my bedroom.”Footnote ⁷⁶ The fact that Yousafzai was shot, upsetting though it may be to children, is of course still included, but her references to colonialism, the ISI, and the CIA have been cut from the text. Likewise, of the many lesson plans shared online for teaching I Am Malala in English and Social Studies classes, none seem to consider colonialism, US–Pakistan relations, or the War on Terror. Instead, the goals of these lessons tend toward the personal and inspirational, with themes including “Using Malala’s Story to Develop Student Agency,” “Finding Your Voice,” and “Mindfulness and Community Service.”Footnote ⁷⁷

Scholars have remained unconcerned about this disjuncture between the political and even didactic tone of Yousafzai’s memoir and the anodyne lessons of individual empowerment US students and other readers are asked to draw from it, worrying instead that readers and consumers of “Malala” are erasing her agency.Footnote ⁷⁸ Yet the I am Malala lesson plans, it is worth noting, focus not at all on pity, “saving,” or even oppression: None ask “how can we save Malala?,” or “how did the British government save Malala?” or “how can the US government help girls like Malala?,” or any variant of those questions. Rather than depriving Malala of agency, students are asked to note Malala’s agency and learn from it for the purpose of their own self-improvement. Such lessons depoliticize Yousafzai’s memoir not by deploying suffering victimhood and savior tropes, but rather by encouraging students, like the girls in Booksmart, to use Malala’s courage and trauma to help them both appreciate their own school experiences (perhaps in a way meant to curb “mean girl” activity) and act courageously in their own lives.

Although they have not so far attained the canonical status of I Am Malala, Afghan girls’ education memoirs have proliferated in its wake. Replacing the “blue burqa” books decried by Sonali Kolhatkar and James Ingalls for “capitalizing on the oppression of Afghan women” in the early years of the US war there, these memoirs feature talented, resourceful, resilient, and above all agential Afghan and (less often) Pakistani girls.Footnote ⁷⁹ The girls all have exceptional talents: Maria Toorpaki is a world-class squash player, Khalida Popal is an exceptional footballer, Zarifa Adiba is a skilled violist.Footnote ⁸⁰ They are also exceptionally driven and stubborn: Sola Mahfouz administers herself a full curriculum remotely, then sneaks into Pakistan to take the SAT, while Pashtana Durrani distributes educational iPads to Afghan girls and becomes, for a short time, a tribal leader. These memoirs, which, like I Am Malala, are narrated in the first person in collaboration with Western women journalists, tell the stories of these exceptional and talented girls, how they discover and develop their talents, and how they ultimately must flee the Taliban, sometimes with the help of military and civilian benefactors. Promotional blurbs from Bill Gates, Hillary Clinton, and Yousafzai herself, among many others, call these memoirs “uplifting” and “inspirational,” and indeed the memoirs all narrate striving and success. Durrani makes a point of proclaiming at the start of her story, “no one is coming to save you if you’re an Afghan woman,” and it is true that these girls’ almost superhuman efforts to survive and succeed far outweigh the efforts of any benefactor; never in these memoirs is a girl “saved.”Footnote ⁸¹ These girls’ agency is inspiring and exhausting, undeniably theirs and yet still somehow appropriated by the very Westerners who have made their country into a war zone. While the learning depicted in these memoirs will be discussed in Section 2, for now it is sufficient to say that the girls primarily teach and coach themselves, and that unlike Yousafzai, they mainly study STEM subjects rather than humanities or social sciences.

Alongside these post-I Am Malala first-person memoirs of Afghan and Pakistani girlhood, there also appeared a crop of Three Cups-inspired travel memoirs by Westerners about Afghanistan. These Westerners, almost always Americans and often athletes, arrive in Afghanistan during the US occupation, but also after or during some sort of trauma or failure in their own lives: Runner Martin Parnell recovers from a blood clot in his brain; cyclist Shannon Galpin’s younger sister is raped, which triggers her memory of her own rape; Christian school administrator Gail Goolsby experiences a crisis of faith.Footnote ⁸² Galpin most explicitly invokes Mortenson, explaining that Three Cups inspired her to go to Afghanistan, and further that “Citizen diplomats are needed across the globe, connecting communities and cultures, looking at individuals as agents of change.”Footnote ⁸³ In their attempts to survive, teach, or coach in Afghanistan, these Westerners gain wisdom and overcome their traumas. Their books are littered with inspirational epigraphs and discussion prompts – they are meant to work as self-help books. They indicate that travel to Afghanistan has a clear purpose for Westerners; namely, they go there to discover the secrets of resilience. Galpin’s memoir is perhaps the culmination of this impulse. Her rape, she writes, “created a domino effect that rippled through the rest of my life and led me to a dusty, war-torn corner of the world.” By coaching girls’ cycling in Afghanistan, “a country where women’s rights aren’t just trampled – they’re crushed into a fine dust,” she finally “chose to risk everything and fully commit to be an active participant in the world that surrounds me.”Footnote ⁸⁴ On the final pages of the book, she attempts again to explain this connection – that is, that she has drawn courage from Afghan girls and women in order to face and resolve her own trauma:

Here Galpin proclaims that the “revolutionary” courage of Afghan girls and women, their voices, agency, and willingness to risk their lives, has inspired her not to learn about geopolitics or challenge sexual violence in the West, but rather to attain inner peace. As with Mortenson and the other Western memoirists, the “saving” relations are inverted; Galpin draws on the courage of Afghan girls to save herself.

Thus the acknowledgement of the agency of women and girls in the global South, which so many postcolonial feminist scholars fought for, has now happened: The US military, NATO, security firms, Greg Mortenson, students, and ordinary US and European readers now know that girls and women are not to be saved, that they should not be reduced to their oppression, that they can change the world, that they can and should risk their lives to go to school. The important thing to note, however, is that this articulation of girls’ agency has happened without weakening the structures of empire. In fact, it has often bolstered those structures by enlisting the agential girl in the defense of empire and military occupation.

“Mothers of Development”

Development ideology has always carried within it an instrumentalist human-capital logic: The exploited and dispossessed are often asked to sacrifice “for development” rather than being served by it. Development ideology has also always been gendered. Postwar modernization theory, in the heyday of US-led state development interventions, assumed men as its principal subjects. As Maria Josefina Saldaña-Portillo explains, modernization theory relied on what its proponent Walt Rostow called “reactive nationalism” – masculine aggression in response to humiliation by a “greater power” (generally the United States); for Rostow, exploiting masculine drives to control and protect women, children, land, and nation was key in spurring leaders to hurry their nations through the unpleasant capitalist modernization process.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ This process, as Rostow already hints, often happens in the context of military struggle.

While Rostow clearly delineated men as the protagonists of development, some administrators began to center women. Sarah Bellows-Blakely has recently uncovered a counterinsurgent context for the beginnings of girl-focused development in Kenya, finding that at the height of the Mau Mau uprising in the 1950s, “the colonial administration increasingly embraced woman-focused programming as essential to the linked movements for social and economic development and as key to the suppression of the rebellion.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Whether men or (in rare cases in this earlier period) women were imagined as key protagonists of development, it was clear that development required sacrifice: In exchange for the better material standard of living promised to them but rarely given to them directly, people around the world were expected to abandon their traditions and beliefs, submit to labor discipline, spend their free time contributing to infrastructure projects, and sometimes (as attempted in the Kenya case) give up their desires for independence.

Development thinking became even more instrumentalist – even less concerned with subjects-in-development and their attainment of full personhood or meaningful lives – as it came to center women. Beginning in the early 1970s, development organizations adopted a Women in Development (WID) framework, targeting women for development interventions by citing their overlooked economic activity. WID advocates often pointed to women’s reliability as consumers and debtors; women, say microlenders and their fans, always pay back their loans, even if they must go hungry to do so.Footnote ¹⁰² These human-capital logics dominated early WID programming, which many feminist intellectuals and development planners understood as an attempt to give freedom to Third World women by bringing them more thoroughly into the wage and credit economy.Footnote ¹⁰³ The development regime’s shift to center women gained momentum from but also bolstered the rise of neoliberalism, as the burdens of sustaining societies with decimated public sectors were shifted onto the infinitely self-sacrificing woman.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Summers’ 1992 speech marked another shift in the ideal subject of development, this time from the woman to the girl. The emergence of the investable girl, couched in the language of agency, futurity, and finance, deepened development planners’ attachments to the self-sacrificing feminine subject. The focus on girls’ education as a high-return investment also erased feminist commitments in development programming. A few early girls’ education programs retained a weakly feminist orientation, pledging to eradicate gender stereotypes from textbooks, but by the 2000s, those programs had abandoned dreams of gender equality for a vision that emphasized “gender awareness” and “comparative advantage” along with the now-ubiquitous yet always vague “gender mainstreaming.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ These policies, in a deepening of the inverted logic of WID (women, properly exploited, will help development rather than development helping women), were meant to capitalize on the gendered division of labor in a particular society in a way that might best serve the national and global economy.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Focusing on the girl and emphasizing her incredible agency absolved development agencies of accusations of imperialist feminism (no victims here!) while also letting them off the hook for maternal health interventions or even basic liberal asks like pay parity for women. It was much easier to invest in a girl, get her into school, and let her do the rest.

While US counterinsurgency strategy has long relied on gendered assumptions about civilian and insurgent populations, the relationship of girls’ education development programs to US-sponsored counterinsurgency campaigns began to take shape during the 1980s and 1990s. For the US Agency for International Development (USAID), Central America was a key early site of this girl-focused development strategy, at a time when, as Greg Grandin has argued, the United States was using its incursions and proxy wars there as “workshops” for its subsequent, more ambitious interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Guatemala was home to USAID’s first development program exclusively devoted to girls’ education, inaugurated at a 1991 conference called Educating Girls: Achieving the Development of Guatemala.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The organizers proclaimed the “historic” nature of the conference, claiming that “For the first time in any country in the world, key public and private-sector policy-makers met to formulate policy recommendations concerning a previously little-known development issue: the role that four-to-six years of formal primary education plays in a country’s social and economic development.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Arguing that “when resources are invested in educating girls, they achieve multiple benefits in social and economic development and in real savings for the country,” and agreeing to focus on rural, indigenous girls, conference participants created a National Emergency Plan for Girls’ Education.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Guatemala’s first lady, Magda Serrano, spoke at the closing ceremony, where she “expressed her satisfaction and pleasure in taking part in an event of importance to the children and development of Guatemala.”Footnote ¹¹¹ The final goal resolved by participants was “to create a national consciousness-raising campaign to inform the public of the importance that the education of girls holds for Guatemala’s development.”Footnote ¹¹² The slogan of the Guatemala program, “An educated girl is the mother of development,” indicates that, like Summers the following year, Guatemalan and USAID planners saw no problem with characterizing girls only as mothers-in-waiting.Footnote ¹¹³ The conference report does not mention feminism or gender equality, instead justifying its focus on girls by citing studies that concluded that “the rate of return” from investments in girls’ education “is higher than for boys.”Footnote ¹¹⁴

The Guatemala conference report is notable for another context it omits, namely the brutal war the Guatemalan government had been waging for decades against the country’s leftist and indigenous populations. The report’s conclusion that “no single factor (e.g., attitudes of parents; cultural values; the quality of teaching) is responsible for Guatemala’s low primary school completion rates among girls and high illiteracy rates among women” seems absurd in its omission of not only the stark inequality consolidated by decades of right-wing military governments, but also the massacres of indigenous communities and the destruction of their economies and social lives in a campaign where, as Grandin writes, “genocide and counterinsurgency became indistinguishable social projects.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ Rather than implicate the Guatemalan government, USAID partnered with it, as evidenced by the participation of Magda Serrano, whose husband, Jorge, had worked in the government of Efraín Ríos Montt during the years when Ríos Montt carried out scorched earth campaigns that killed many thousands of indigenous Guatemalans. While Jorge Serrano attempted to initiate peace talks with leftist insurgents during his presidency, a ceasefire was not reached until 1996; thus, the conference’s “emergency plan” for girls’ education was formulated while the government was still waging war on leftists. USAID had also played an active role in this counterinsurgency, helping to build what M. Gabriela Torres has called Guatemala’s “counterinsurgent state”: USAID trained the country’s police from 1954 to 1974, oversaw the 1980s resettlement camps into which the military forced indigenous people whose villages they had destroyed, and doctored reports in order to cover up the army’s massacres.Footnote ¹¹⁶ While the conference report does not mention any of this, hints of the regional context can be found in charts that show Nicaragua’s comparatively high women’s literacy and girls’ schooling rates throughout the 1980s due to programs implemented by the Sandinista government, statistics the report’s descriptive text ignores.Footnote ¹¹⁷

The choice of Guatemala as a prime location for girls’ education is connected to USAID’s ongoing counterinsurgency efforts there, but also must be understood in the context of the most internationally well-known Guatemalan book ever published. Indigenous leftist Rigoberta Menchú’s testimonio Me Llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia, first published in 1983 when Menchú was 24, is, among other things, a girls’ education memoir. As the title suggests, it is the story of the birth of a girl’s revolutionary consciousness. Menchú’s testimony tells the story of how her K’iche’ community gave her a sense of self and educated her in a Marxism heavily inflected by both the K’iche’ belief system and liberation theology, as when she explains that collective study of the bible led her group to conclude “that every one of our Indian race has a right to eat.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ It was at the height of Menchú’s fame, right before she won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992, that the US-sponsored, pioneering girls’ education program was launched, targeting indigenous girls in rural areas as particularly deprived. This characterization of indigenous communities as bereft of education seems deliberately to compete with Menchú’s story in an attempt to erase it.

The logic that USAID workshopped at the Guatemala conference soon extended across Latin America. El Salvador, a location of much feminist ferment in the 1980s within and alongside its Marxist FMLN guerrillas, as well as a more overt US counterinsurgent presence, was another early adopter of girls’ education as a national development strategy. In 1999 USAID chose El Salvador as one of five countries (and the only one in Latin America) for its Strategies for Advancing Girls’ Education program; USAID boasted of its “involvement of nontraditional sectors (business, media, and religious) in addressing issues related to girls’ education” and “the commitment of funds primarily to mobilizing sectoral partners rather than implementing specific project activities.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ This privatizing approach, which USAID touted as novel at the time but which would soon become its standard practice, involved partnering with businesses such as the fried chicken chain Pollo Campero, which produced 50,000 placemats introducing fictional “educated girl” Flotania who promised girls that “You can also be a Camperonix girl: If you go to school, perform well in school, if you are interested in your own and your country’s development.”Footnote ¹²⁰

Such capitalist and nationalist exhortations were a far cry from the popular education movement that had swept El Salvador during the 1980–1992 civil war, which John Hammond describes as “less a cause than an effect of politicization.” In his study of Salvadoran popular education, Hammond finds that it “called for an integration both between learners’ cognitive development and political consciousness and between education and its community setting.”Footnote ¹²¹ In El Salvador, as Hammond notes, popular education campaigns inflected every part of the guerrilla fighting experience. He observes that “when people who participated talk about education (in the base community of the 1970s, and in the guerrilla army and the civilian communities of the 1980s), they often refer to the whole range of organizing rather than just literacy or training in skills.”Footnote ¹²² All combatants participated in regular political education discussions “meant to encourage independent thought, not just the parroting of a line,” as well as reading, writing, and arithmetic lessons that were “promoted for their ideological effects: to keep combatants from developing an excessively militarist mentality.”Footnote ¹²³ The popular education movement extended well beyond communities of fighters, extending into the FMLN’s liberated zones, contested zones, and even sometimes areas less affected by fighting. Learning sessions could happen anywhere, not necessarily requiring school buildings, pencils, or books. The important thing, Hammond argues, was active, politicized learning: Students would recite syllabic families together, then conclude with a discussion of why it was important to learn to read. Though Hammond finds that most Salvadoran teachers had not read Brazilian progressive educator Paulo Freire, they followed Freire’s practice of centering political content in lessons on any subject.

This entire history of popular education in El Salvador – how it grew from local community and popular struggle into a liberatory project fiercely opposed by the US-backed government and their death squads – was ignored and even negated by USAID’s push, in concert with both the Salvadoran government and corporations like Pollo Campero, for girls to “perform well in school” and “care about their country’s development.” This was the beginning and the blueprint for the broader story of “girls’ education” during the War on Terror: Emphasizing the eager girl allowed for a sleight-of-hand where entire histories of militant popular education, as well as intellectual debates and struggles over what and how to teach, disappeared into thin air.

Education Wars

In a scene immortalized by Michael Moore in his 2004 documentary Fahrenheit 9/11, George W. Bush learned of Al-Qaeda’s 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon as he was visiting an elementary school classroom in Florida. Bush was there to promote his No Child Left Behind educational reforms, which most famously mandated yearly high-stakes testing in elementary and middle schools and tied federal school funding to student performance on those tests. That day, Bush was participating in a reading exercise with second-grade students and their teacher entitled “The Pet Goat.” In his film, Moore mocks Bush for continuing the lesson during a national emergency; his awkward, dazed presence in the classroom demonstrates his flat-footedness and general idiocy in the face of national disaster. In hindsight, however, Bush’s decision to linger in the classroom seems a bit more apt and perhaps even ominous. In the decades-long War on Terror that Bush would soon initiate, education would play a key role, with the United States intensifying and exporting the militarism already present in its education system.

The intertwining of education and militarism in the United States did not begin with the War on Terror. Since World War II, US universities have been systematically linked with weapons and other war technologies in a way that has shaped research agendas and fields of inquiry in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities.Footnote ¹²⁴ This militarization was extended to school curricula during the Cold War, as when the National Science Foundation reacted to the Soviet launch of Sputnik by developing new math and science curricula (“the new math”), while Congress passed the US National Defense Act to fund lab equipment, teacher training, science fairs, and other activities to boost science in elementary and high schools.Footnote ¹²⁵ In the 1990s, despite the Cold War having ended, the military presence in US schools grew significantly. Junior Reserve Officer’s Training Corps programs expanded, and the US Department of Defense founded several programs: Starbase, whose mission is “to expose our nation’s youth to the technological environments and positive civilian and military role models found on Active, Guard, and Reserve military bases” and Troops to Teachers, a training program which helps former soldiers transition into teaching in “high- needs” school environments.Footnote ¹²⁶ School administrators viewed such programs, Nicole Nguyen finds, as necessary “to instill discipline in students marked as unruly and to promote military enlistment as a way to gain financial security.”Footnote ¹²⁷

No Child Left Behind built on this foundation, incentivizing the further militarization of American schools and students. NCLB emphasized nationalist fears – that US schools were falling behind the rest of the world – as well as the militarized rhetoric of instilling discipline in students, rhetoric associated with schools like the KIPP charter schools.Footnote ¹²⁸ But NCLB also militarized students in more concrete ways, including mandating that high schools give military recruiters access to personal information about each student or lose federal funding; setting up “military academy” charter schools; and giving (generally under-resourced) public schools the option to adopt an entire homeland security curriculum. In her ethnography of one homeland security high school, Nguyen charts how high-level national security officials visited the school regularly, getting low-income students excited about earning high salaries in managerial security careers that were generally not open to them while also instilling fears in students about terrorists who could strike anywhere, anytime.Footnote ¹²⁹

While the military and homeland security presence in US schools has been concentrated in under-resourced districts, this presence has also registered more subtly in the culture at large. The wave of militarism that swept through US schools in the 1990s was reinforced by Hollywood feature films such as Kindergarten Cop (dir. Reitman, 1990), Dangerous Minds (dir. Smith, 1992), The Substitute (dir. Mandel, 1996), and The Substitute II: School’s Out (dir. Pearl, 1998), all of which feature teachers with military (or police, in the first case) backgrounds entering the classroom for the first time, connecting with children, and, at least in the latter three, turning their lives around. The rise and fall of such films also seems connected to the fate of Teach for America, founded in 1989 with a similar, and similarly nationalistic, vision of energetic trainee teachers changing the lives of “at-risk” students. By the end of the 1990s, however, many of these young, energetic teachers had revised their goals. Having found it more difficult than they’d imagined to transform students’ lives, they entered the school reform world in order to transform the education system, generally working, as one study puts it, “in privatized settings that emphasize management, entrepreneurship, and accountability.”Footnote ¹³⁰ The decline of films after the 1990s that imagined spirited young teachers, often with military training, arriving to inspire and change the lives of inner-city youths seems to reflect this shift in analysis: Poor kids of color were not the problem anymore, but rather intransigent, lazy teachers.

This shift in school reform orthodoxy was chronicled and reinforced by documentary filmmaker Davis Guggenheim, whose first film, the 2001 observational documentary The First Year, tracked five teachers through their first year of teaching in under-resourced classrooms, emphasizing their heroic efforts to connect with and help their students. His 2010 documentary Waiting for Superman returns to the subject of schools, but its title indicates a shift in focus; both the title and the film itself suggest that the idea of transformative pedagogy is naïve, and that systemic reforms are instead needed. Like the fictional inner-city-teacher films of the 1990s, Superman brings a militaristic and nationalist sensibility to education, but with different settings and different aims in mind. Superman shifts viewers away from classroom scenes and toward an indictment of the education system, using military metaphors to convey nostalgia for America’s Cold War dominance of the world while blaming teachers’ unions (also an artifact of that era) for America’s decline.

In between The First Year and Superman, Guggenheim became an A-list filmmaker by collaborating with Al Gore on the Oscar-winning 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth. That film established him as working in the social problem documentary genre, politically akin to the twentieth-century Hollywood films which attempted to depict and reform unjust institutions through tales of individual injury and action. Guggenheim’s films generally promote liberal individualism despite evidence that it may not work: Inconvenient Truth presents compelling evidence that relentless capitalist fossil fuel burning will lead to melting icecaps and the death of much life on the planet, but ends by retreating into individualism and gradualism. The final screens before the credits give viewers a list of consumer opportunities, such as “If you can, buy a hybrid car,” mixed with nationalist exhortations like “reduce our dependence on foreign oil,” and messages directed at children to “tell your parents not to ruin the world that you will live in.” Taken together, these pieces of advice convey the politics of all of Guggenheim’s films: deeply capitalist and nationalistic, interested in vaguely humanitarian action at the level of the individual, and particularly interested in the family, especially the child. Education is also central to Guggenheim’s films – his films are educational, featuring authoritative if laid-back voiceovers and didactic animated interludes, but they are also preoccupied with a broadly sketched idea of education.

Waiting for Superman takes a polemical approach to what it argues is the failure of the US public education system. While it contains some soul-searching at the beginning, as Guggenheim worries about his own decision to send his children to private school, Superman soon lands on the real culprits for subpar schools in the United States: strong teachers’ unions. Journalist Jonathan Alter snidely calls the Democratic Party “a wholly owned subsidiary of the teachers’ unions,” and the film hammers home the argument that merit pay and the inability to fire bad teachers, reforms obstructionist unions will not allow, are the surefire and only fixes to a broken education system. The film does not define what a good teacher or a good education is, but rather assumes teaching quality to be the speed at which teachers can “cover” content. Its talking heads are neither pedagogy experts nor teachers, but rather economists and journalists, along with anti-union school reformer Michelle Rhee, charter school entrepreneur Geoffrey Canada, and tech billionaire Bill Gates. A cartoon interlude (see Figure 3) depicts an ideal educational model in which a teacher pours content directly into the heads of students, while the voiceover explains that “it should be simple: teachers filling students with knowledge and sending them on their way.” The film thus takes for granted what Freire calls the “banking model,” arguing that teachers who deposit knowledge into passive students are those enviably few “good teachers” who deserve the merit pay that cannot be awarded to them due to intransigent and powerful unions.

Figure 3

The banking model, Waiting for Superman.

Superman’s uninquisitive approach to education is accompanied by the insistent militarism of its iconography and the various allegories it mobilizes. Though most of the children the film follows are not white or blond, the movie poster features a smiling blonde girl in a uniform, sitting at a desk and raising her hand. A shaft of light illuminates her, shining down from a sky filled with ominous clouds. Even more ominous, however, is the horrific wreckage surrounding her desk, as far as the eye can see; at the bottom of the image, under the film’s title, a yawning crater opens up. American education, the image conveys, is not only a war zone, but the site of total apocalypse. This apocalypse, we soon find out, has to do with America “falling behind” other nations. “Up until 1970, American public schools were the best in the world,” Guggenheim asserts, ignoring how many US schools were racially segregated in those years. After 1970, in Guggenheim’s narrative, other countries, and particularly China, began catching up, thereby casting the US system into jeopardy. This idea of education as competition rather than cooperation saturates the film, which cuts repeatedly to slow-motion shots of kids running a race as an allegory for educational success or failure.

The other central allegory in the film is even more explicitly martial. Cutting between shots of run-down Harlem streets and lines on a graph showing reading scores of kids above and below the poverty line, Guggenheim laments that “Over time, despite everything we’ve tried, even progressive educators began to believe that the gap could never be closed, and for those of us who drive by these schools, maybe we make the same dark assumption: that those kids, the ones in the poorest neighborhoods, just can’t learn.” The film then cuts abruptly to black and white footage of a US Air Force plane. “In 1947,” Guggenheim continues, “Many felt the sound barrier could never be broken, even men of science … until Chuck Yeager.” We hear Yeager explaining that he “didn’t look at it that way.” We cut back to the Harlem streets, cementing the sound barrier as a metaphor for the alleged impossibility of educating poor kids (it is worth pointing out here that many things have never been tried in educational policy, the most obvious being equalizing education funding across school districts, which Guggenheim never considers).

Apart from raising the “dark assumption” of scientific racism in order to question it, this metaphor of the sound barrier signals a certain nostalgia for the postwar confluence of US military domination of the world and the welfare state made possible by the spoils of that domination. The metaphor also signals the degree to which school reform is a military and militarized project; Guggenheim reaches for Yeager’s success in an attempt to project his supreme patriotic confidence into the future. These are not the only aspects of the film that liken school to war: Rhee continually characterizes herself as “fighting for children” and the extended, suspenseful charter school lottery in which the film culminates echoes nothing so much as Vietnam War draft lotteries.

Guggenheim’s framing of education as war in Superman, along with the myriad ways education was entangled with the War on Terror in those years, made the counterinsurgent girl a natural next subject for him. His contribution to counterinsurgent girl culture took the form of his 2015 documentary He Named Me Malala. Following Yousafzai and her family in Birmingham, England, as she recovers from the Taliban’s attempt on her life, He Named Me Malala is a less pedantic and more intimate film than Superman; it contains extended scenes of Malala joking and relaxing with her family, arm-wrestling her brothers, and managing her speaking engagements. Guggenheim, however, is not interested in the content of Yousafzai’s speeches, nor in the political histories and circumstances that led to the attempt on her life. Instead, he spends a lot of time asking her if she has a crush on celebrity men and on boys in her class, as well as goading her into recounting the pain and fear she felt when she was shot. Malala declines to do either one, refusing the normality offered to her by Guggenheim and his camera. Although the film is meant to be a loose adaptation of Yousafzai’s memoir, which discusses both British colonialism and how the US and Pakistani governments enabled the rise of the Taliban, the film represents the Taliban as a singularly strange evil without history.

Instead of recounting the historical circumstances that led to Malala’s near-assassination, as Malala herself does, the film takes a nominative determinist approach to understanding her life. The question of whether Malala’s father determined her fate by naming her after the martyred teenage warrior Malalai is the central preoccupation of the film. In this way, He Named Me Malala figures the relationship between Malala and her father as one of a drone and its operator, imagining that Malala is denouncing Taliban officials and endangering herself at the behest of her father. While both Malala and her father reject this framing, Guggenheim pushes it on them at every turn, sometimes asking Malala’s father if he feels guilty that he named her and sent her out to be harmed, sometimes admiringly asking him how he instilled confidence in her, as if looking for the formula, sometimes asking Malala similar questions. “My father did not force me, he just gave me the name,” she patiently explains, but this seems not to satisfy Guggenheim, as indicated by his choice to begin the film with the story of brave Malalai sacrificing herself, juxtaposed with a shot of Malala in the hospital, unconscious.

The film’s poster also hints at the idea of Malala as a drone, depicting her with seemingly blank books oddly levitating and soaring behind her, the flapping pages looking like nothing more than wings. Malala’s winged presence, and the resonance between girls and drones it signifies, which the next section discusses more fully, realizes the potential for the droneification of school children that was already lurking in Superman. In the aforementioned “banking model” cartoon, after the students’ metallic heads are filled with what looks like metallic alphabet soup, they grow wings and fly out the classroom window, resembling drones as they hover in formation. Although their style and focus differ, Waiting for Superman and He Named Me Malala both index humanization strategies that wealthy white Americans seem to use on poor children of color, in one case, and Muslim girls on the other. It seems, in both cases, that they can only be humanized through their conscription into a global struggle for national supremacy and against terrorists, which sometimes culminates in their droneification.

Girls without Books

But what of the “girl with a book” of Kristof’s pronouncement? What is she meant to learn? What is she learning? It is difficult, reading recent memoirs by Afghan girls that showcase their agency and resilience, to know what they imagine as learning or what they would like to learn; scenes of learning in the memoirs are few and far between. There are, however, a couple of exceptions: Two of the memoirs do focus on non-athletic education, though they do not feature many books. Instead, they depict Afghan girls teaching themselves and others to learn on computers and iPads, using programmatic and corporate lessons. These edtech programs and ventures seem to be the next step in the counterinsurgent educational project, in their attempts to remove reading, discussion, and even thinking entirely from education.

Sola Mahfouz’s Reference Lauzon, Graae and Maurer2023 memoir Defiant Dreams is one of the few post-2006 girls’ education memoirs that features a girl with a blue burqa (albeit holding a book, whose title is undiscernible) on the cover. The cover also features a blurb from Bill Gates, who gushes that “seeing the way people like Sola Mahfouz think about the world reinforces my optimism about the future.” Kristof also blurbs the book, writing that Mahfouz “reminds us that the greatest untapped resource around the globe isn’t gold or oil, but the female half of the population.” Mahfouz’s story is indeed remarkable: Stuck at home after her family pulls her out of English lessons in Kandahar in response to Taliban threats, she teaches herself English from a Pashto-to-English dictionary, laboriously copying words as well as recording herself saying them. With her newfound English, she reads a Time article by Gates about the online education company Khan Academy; the article characterizes it as “a revolutionary website featuring over three thousand bite-size videos on all academic subjects.” Mahfouz then begins working through the Khan Academy videos one by one, “conquer[ing] basic arithmetic” and moving through the rest of the videos “at an electrifying speed,” taking a break one day out of every three to do household chores.Footnote ¹³¹ After she has taught herself all the Khan Academy lessons, she sneaks into Pakistan for three months to take both the SAT – for which she secures a spot, just barely, thanks to her plucky English-language practice partner Emily – and the English Language exams. She passes the exams and, again with Emily’s help, secures a US visa and a place at Arizona State University, excelling there and eventually becoming a postgraduate researcher in the cutting-edge area of quantum computing.

While Mahfouz does read books along her journey, favoring fiction and popular science, her main focus, as with most of the Afghan girls who are able to propel themselves through sheer brilliance and force of will into college and grad school, is STEM. Throughout her voracious quest for education, in which she consumes video after Khan Academy video, Mahfouz does not seem to engage evaluatively or critically with what she learns – like the cartoon children in Waiting for Superman, she opens up her mind and lets the knowledge pour in. This is also a remarkably lonely way of learning: The Khan Academy videos, while they allow her to learn safely, remove the possibility of interaction from her education.

Another Afghan girl’s education memoir, this one by Pashtana Durrani, extends and solidifies the vision Mahfouz sketches of a bookless, school-less education. Her memoir narrates her childhood in a refugee camp in Pakistan, from whence she hatches an idea to help the girls of her home country. “A single visit there showed me that the brick-and-mortar thing wasn’t going to work,” she writes. “Girls there needed an education that could survive twists of fate.”Footnote ¹³² Learning from a Canadian NGO, Durrani figures out that she can load content onto a solar-powered tablet, then works tirelessly at networking and internships to figure out how to launch her NGO. Eventually, she gains the trust of both tribal leaders and the NGO world and succeeds in distributing tablets to suburban and rural girls in Afghanistan. The content Durrani includes on the tablets is similar to Mahfouz’s learning program, or Superman’s ideal education; eclectic “coverage” and technical instruction as opposed to depth. “I tried to cover as much ground as possible, for as diverse an audience as possible,” Durrani writes, “There were lessons on everything, from the basics of writing to how to sell your embroidery on Facebook. And The Lion King, obviously” (Durrani is partial to The Lion King because she, like Simba, is constantly feuding with her uncle). Durrani includes a projector feature on her iPads so that girls might learn in groups, but she acknowledges that the lessons are largely and necessarily solo.

It remains to be seen how this new, brick-and-mortarless landscape of girls’ education will revise the old development vision, in which a girl must be encased in a school building so as to delay pregnancy and increase her nation’s GDP. If the girl-in-school vision propagated by economists like Summers is driven by a sense of the infinite elasticity of the girl’s capacity, this new vision – as evidenced by the Gates, Khan Academy, and Disney tie-ins – is more concerned with the capacity of nonhumans. Gates and Khan Academy are currently collaborating on Khanmigo, an “AI-powered tutor and teacher support tool”; Gates, on his blog, recounts his Reference Gates2024 “trip to the frontier of AI education,” where “students are using Khanmigo as a personalized tutor” while teachers ask it for “lesson hooks for assignments.”Footnote ¹³³ This use of robotic technology in the classroom, while building on the ways militarization, surveillance, and capitalist drudgery have long inflected classroom socialization, is at the same time frighteningly new in its total outsourcing of the thinking process.

We can perhaps trace the lead-up to this human abandonment of critical and creative thinking within the very education system that is supposed to be devoted to these practices in the odd aphorism that began this section, in which the “girl with a book” is compared to and conflated with the drone. But somehow the girl is still needed, often to morally validate the drone’s presence. Another Gates blog entry, from April 2025, celebrates the “Drone Didis (sisters)” of India, who use drones to fertilize their crops. The drones help make the spraying of fertilizer more efficient, freeing up the women’s time and money for other entrepreneurial activities. At the end of the entry, Gates and his interlocutor conflate the didis with the drones they pilot:

Gates’ bizarre exhortation to “think of the Didis” when faced with the noise pollution of a drone “at a wedding or a park” indicates the role of women and girls in morally licensing the drone: Their empowerment mitigates both the inherent nuisance and the fear caused by drones buzzing overhead. The wedding reference in particular is ominous, given the history of US drone strikes on weddings and other festivals in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen, events that to pilots often look like the “pattern of life” disruptions they associate with terrorist activity.Footnote ¹³⁵ The end of the blog post, when Kajol tells Gates that people tell her she is “flying too high,” is strange since she is not flying at all; it is simply her proximity to drone technology, when she has perhaps been conflated in the minds of others with underdevelopment or stagnation, that creates the “soaring” effect for Kajol and Gates. The next section further investigates these conflations, particularly of empowered girls and drones, in order to better understand the complicated intertwining of militarism, surveillance, tech-monopoly-capitalism, and feminized labor that has characterized the first quarter of the twenty-first century.

Fabricating Precision

As Chamayou’s Monroe story demonstrates, remote-controlled flying vehicles (the basic definition of a drone) have been around a long time. However, the launching of Hellfire missiles from such vehicles in order to kill people only dates from the beginning of the War on Terror. Before the War on Terror, the United States, for both legal and technological reasons, had publicly opposed using targeted assassinations to combat terrorism. In July 2001, as Jane Mayer reports, the US government expressed its opposition to Israel’s assassinations of Palestinian suspected terrorists, with the US ambassador to Israel proclaiming that “The United States government is very clearly on record as against targeted assassinations … they are extrajudicial killings, and we do not support that.”Footnote ¹⁴⁶ But after the September 11 attacks that year, when George W. Bush and Congress authorized themselves to fight and preempt terrorism anywhere in the world, they also lost their compunctions about targeted killings.

Although targeted killings via drone strikes were initiated by Bush’s government, they only became the dominant US counterterrorism strategy during the Obama era, after the shock and awe tactics of the early Iraq and Afghanistan invasions had failed. Americans were weary of wars that seemed endless; they elected Obama partly based on the false hope that he would end the War on Terror. Despite predator drones’ frequent mistakes and routine civilian casualties, Obama liked the approach, and in the first few months of his administration, he sharply escalated the number of drone assassinations while keeping his tactics and kill list under wraps. The CIA and executive branch framed these drone strikes as a new form of counterinsurgency, in which many of their targets were (suspected) mid-level leaders of the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, and other insurgent groups. This new strategy pushed the boundaries of warfare with tactics like “signature strikes,” which do not require even the name of a suspected terrorist, but instead use pattern-of-life analysis to identify and kill suspects who forever remain nameless; “kill boxes,” which solve the legal problem of the lack of a battlefield or anyone fighting back by positing an encased battlefield around wherever the suspects are; and “double taps,” in which drone pilots attack for a second time when rescuers rush to the site of an attack to tend to their wounded and bury their dead.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ These practices yielded 3,797 dead by drone during Obama’s presidency, many of whom were not known by name to their killers but were still posthumously classified as combatants.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Obama, when he did discuss these killings, consistently made them seem measured and controlled, as in 2012 when he claimed that most drone attacks had been “very precise, precision strikes against al Qaeda and affiliates.”Footnote ¹⁴⁹

The shift to targeted assassinations in the Obama era, in what Andrew Bacevich has called the “Israelification” of US foreign policy, was accompanied by a shift in cultural representations of terrorism and the War on Terror.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ If the Shock and Awe phase of the war was best represented by the Fox show 24, which used its real-time ticking-bomb scenarios to valorize the torture US soldiers and agencies were carrying out, and the counterinsurgency phase was spurred by Three Cups of Tea, the War on Terror’s targeted assassinations phase was most iconically embodied by the Showtime prestige production Homeland (2011–2020). Adapted from the Israeli show Prisoners of War, Homeland represents an Israelification of the War on Terror’s culture: Targeted assassinations have become routine, and the US, following Israel’s lead, is represented as scrappy and beleaguered rather than muscular and overpowering. Instead of embodying belligerent strength as 24 protagonist Jack Bauer had, Homeland’s CIA operative protagonist Carrie Mathison projects both vulnerability and genius: Her mental health pathology (she is bipolar), as Alex Bevan argues, both “undercuts her legitimacy” with the agency and “inspires her professional breakthroughs” when her intuition is again and again proven correct.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Homeland embodies almost to the point of parody what Inderpal Grewal has termed security feminism, in the sense that its implicit feminist commitment to “believe women” requires that CIA functionaries take out terrorists without evidence.Footnote ¹⁵² Made by the producers of 24 in collaboration with the CIA, Homeland helped shape a new era in the War on Terror dominated by surveillance, assassination, and women rather than muscularity, torture, and men. Obama noticed these resonances between Homeland and his administration’s projections of both vulnerability and “precision” violence; in 2013, he named Homeland as his favorite show, telling star Claire Danes that she was “a finer actress than I am president.”Footnote ¹⁵³

Homeland features young women and girls in pivotal anti-terrorism and surveillance roles. In the final episode of Season 1, would-be suicide bomber Brody’s teenage daughter Dana is the only one who can get through to him, convincing him not to detonate the bomb that would kill the vice president. By season four, the season set in Pakistan in which Carrie is nicknamed “the drone queen,” women occupy nearly all positions of power. Carrie is the Pakistan station chief; the US ambassador to Pakistan is a woman whose hapless professor husband has been turned into a mole by a charismatic young Taliban-supporting woman, Tasneem, who initially pretends to be his student; and the standout young CIA agent in Pakistan is Fara, who makes the pivotal discovery that Taliban villain Haissam Haqqani is still alive. Apart from terrorist mastermind Haqqani, the men and boys on the show are moles, dupes, captives, and makers of fatal mistakes, while the women on both sides run the show. Ultimately, in the season, an attempt to save a young woman leads to the Taliban takeover of the US embassy: When Haqqani holds a knife to Fara’s throat, the CIA director hands over their list of informants, after which Haqqani kills Fara anyway. The CIA’s sentimental capitulation to the demands of the Taliban when faced with the prospect of Fara’s death is revealed to be the incorrect move in the moment as well as later; the US government’s impulse to save the girl is the incorrect one on which the season turns.

Although tough calls such as this one abound in Homeland, the show is unquestioning in its support for the War on Terror and the worldview that gave rise to it. The show hinges on the idea that terrorists (a category that lumps together Al Qaeda, Taliban, ISIS, Iran, and any other predominantly Muslim insurgent group or nation) are the epitome of evil. The United States thus has not only the absolute right to kill members and even supporters of terrorist groups, but also the moral high ground in killing them and the foreknowledge that they will commit violence even when they have not previously done so. Carrie’s instincts and hunches about terrorists are rarely based on much evidence but nonetheless are never wrong; on the rare occasions when she makes a mistake, as when she launches a drone strike on a wedding, that mistake can be traced back to the wily terrorists. While various characters on the show pose ethical dilemmas to do with sacrificing innocents for the greater good, it never occurs to them or to the show itself that the United States does not have the right to hunt and assassinate civilians anytime, anywhere, just because they might wish Americans harm. Homeland’s contrivance of troubling scenarios and ethical grey areas, along with Carrie’s brilliant soulfulness, closes off any perspective that would imagine the United States to be in the wrong.

As Diane Negra and Jorie Lagerway write, Homeland “inspired successors across the (narrowing?) network and cable divide.”Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Television shows from the sentimental Madam Secretary to the soapy Covert Affairs to the more Trumpian Jack Ryan, and films from the torture-porn hit Zero Dark Thirty (dir. Bigelow, 2012) to the ostensibly critical drone drama Good Kill (dir. Niccol, 2014) to the British thriller Eye in the Sky (dir. Hood, 2015) share elements and plots with Homeland, posing ethical dilemmas for their protagonists that revolve around launching drone attacks. At a time when footage of actual US drone strikes was kept secret, Homeland and these other works of drone television and cinema established conventions for filming that supported the “precision” story about drone warfare. Scenes of drone strikes almost uniformly unfold in the same way, cutting between conscientiously attentive drone operators and close-up, full color, ground-level shots that testify to the accuracy of both the camera’s view and the drone operators’ ideas about what they are seeing. Through these editing conventions, even cultural works that purport to question the ethics of drone warfare testify unrealistically to its absolute accuracy of perception.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ The girl in these works of propaganda stands in for the idea of innocent civilians and the possibility of saving or sparing them. However, these texts, like Homeland, generally argue against saving girls, both because it symbolizes a kind of sentimentality trap and because the girls themselves exercise their agency by rejecting attempts to save and protect them.

When given a chance to speak, girls in these shows and films unfailingly take the side of drones and drone strikes. This occurs spectacularly in the CBS drama Madam Secretary, the most earnest of the terrorism-related television offerings of the 2010s. Inspired by Hillary Clinton and counting among its writers former defense analysts and diplomats, Madam Secretary features idealistic Secretary of State Elizabeth McCord, who generally reaches for diplomacy before resorting to war. Elizabeth’s husband Henry, an ex-fighter pilot, renowned religion professor, and CIA operative who embodies the “soldier-scholar” persona Laleh Khalili identifies as key to the War on Terror’s post-shock-and-awe image, spends much of Season 2 tracking down a terrorist’s young wife, Hijriyyah.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ After they finally extract Hijriyyah from a cave in Libya, CIA agents interrogate her, but she initially will not tell them where her husband is. It is only when they bring in her former teacher to mediate that they get the truth: Hijriyyah is not talking because she is afraid, not of her husband but of her father. In fact, Hijriyyah will only allow the CIA to kill her husband once they have first killed her father. The CIA agrees, and Henry and Elizabeth happily watch news of the drone strike from their weekend home. When we cut back to Hijriyyah, she is sitting in the interrogation room, crying as she looks through photos proving her father’s death. “I thought he was stronger than a bomb,” she says, and viewers discover that she is crying tears of happiness. “I thought he was stronger than Allah. And now I’m free.”

Other War on Terror works offer versions of this plot, in which girls and young women welcome drone assassinations. Both Good Kill and Jack Ryan feature drone strikes that interrupt rapes while sparing the would-be victims. In Jack Ryan, the young woman has already kicked the grunting, slobbering would-be-rapist away when he is killed by a drone; in Good Kill, a film which is otherwise critical of drone warfare, the strike is revenge for the rapes the drone pilots have observed on their screens. In both cases, the drone operators launch strikes in violation of their superiors’ orders, lending a heroism to their remote killing that is otherwise hard to fathom. In both cases, the victims are grateful for the drones that have killed their would-be rapists; both the film and the show assume without any debate or questioning that death is the correct punishment for rape or attempted rape, at least for an Arab or Afghan man. Hijriyyah’s tears in Madam Secretary at the death of her father also echo those of CIA agent protagonist Maya at the close of Zero Dark Thirty, when her decade-long dream of assassinating Osama bin Laden is finally fulfilled. Maya is not well-characterized: Her single-minded motivation to kill Bin Laden is the only thing the audience knows about her. Her final tears signal a heretofore unseen vulnerability and, in the film’s moral universe, validate the copious, gruesome torture and gratuitous killing that the CIA has thus far perpetrated. All these texts thus seem to use sentimental portrayals of vengeful young women to rationalize pushing the boundaries of what is allowed in war ever further.

The British drone drama Eye in the Sky wields an imperiled girl in order to push yet another boundary of warfighting. The film opens on a scene of an adorable girl of about eight, Alia (see Figure 4), as she hula-hoops in a courtyard in Nairobi. We see her loving parents, her studiousness, and how her freedom to play is threatened by Al-Shabaab militants. It is only after introducing Alia that the film cuts to its primary setting, a British conference room where military and civilian officials debate whether to launch a drone strike on the terrorists nearby, even if it will kill Alia, who keeps venturing out to sell bread near the compound. This debate takes up the entire film: The general, played by Helen Mirren, is convinced that the “Al-Shabaab facilitator” in the compound will kill eighty people if he is not immediately assassinated, but fearful American drone pilots and British civilian officials have questions. British officials in particular object to the killing of the girl on strategic grounds: There is no question, for them, that preemptively taking out the terrorists will save more lives than not doing so, but they worry about the optics of killing Alia. In the debate that takes up most of the film, these officials’ hesitancy is revealed to be supported by the law, which requires “near certainty” that civilians will not be killed, but also to be cowardly and misguided. In the world of the film, technology (including a “hummingbird drone” with facial recognition capacity) provides absolute certainty that more innocent people will die without the strike than with it; thus, saving the girl the officials and pilots see in front of them only to let future girls die is both cowardly and mathematically unsound.Footnote ¹⁵⁷

Figure 4

Drone view of Alia, Eye in the Sky.

By disregarding state sovereignty, the rights of suspected terrorists, and the difference between predictions of future violence and the present infliction of violence, Eye in the Sky turns launching the drone strike and killing the girl into the morally correct, if agonizingly difficult, action. The general ultimately gets around legal obstacles by fudging the numbers about the probability of Alia’s death in order to launch the strike, which kills both the terrorists and Alia. This action is presented as at once sad (the film closes on her inconsolable parents) and a noble sacrifice. The film thus takes up and repudiates the motive and motif of sparing the girl, ultimately rejecting that logic as sentimental and flawed in favor of a more actuarial one that emphasizes the evil of terrorists and their inevitable future violence.

Eye in the Sky and the lesson it articulates (uncontroversially, given the film’s overwhelmingly positive reviews) is one measure of how thoroughly drone culture, like other contemporary cultures of development, war, and counterinsurgency, has rejected “saving” girls. Girls are instead imagined as active participants in security conversations and actions. Organizations such as GirlSecurity, BlackGirlsHack, CybHER, Girls Who Drone, and Drones4Girls are attempting to shape diverse groups of global-North girls into active forces in the military and intelligence worlds who will possess the controls for remote warfare. Such hopeful visions of global-North girls’ career successes and raised voices by turns obscure and celebrate the militarization of education. In contrast to these organizations that imagine girls at the controls, there is a whole set of mainly Western representations – including writings by Bill Gates, the UN, and Greg Mortenson, as well as many of the cultural works discussed here and in the previous section – that imagine girls in the global South as drones themselves. Metaphorically rising into the sky, these girls hover above their own societies, surveying them and assisting in attacks, seemingly happy and empowered. But the very discrepancy between these flying weaponized girls’ sense of their own agency and their resemblance to drones raises questions as to how much freedom security states and empires really grant the girls they enlist.

Eye in the Sky also signals the hidden expansion of War on Terror operations in Africa. As Nick Turse writes, “since 9/11, the US military has engaged in a largely covert effort to extend its footprint across the continent with a network of small and mostly low-profile camps.”Footnote ¹⁵⁸ In 2007, they established Africa Command (AFRICOM) to consolidate these efforts, which now proclaims on its website without much detail that it operates in fifty-three African countries to “counter malign actors” in order to “advance US national interests and promote regional security, stability, and prosperity.”Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Since April 2020, AFRICOM has released civilian casualty assessment reports in the form of barebones refutations of media reports that US airstrikes, most frequently in Somalia, have resulted in civilian casualties. Most entries take up reports of US airstrikes and conclude with “after the review, the report was assessed as unsubstantiated,” either denying that the strike happened at all or denying that there were civilian casualties. The reports purport to be “part of the command’s commitment to transparency and accountability,” but their sketchiness and pat conclusions do not provide much in the way of either.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ AFRICOM’s activities continue to be difficult to determine, coming into visibility only occasionally, as when four US soldiers were killed in Niger in 2018.Footnote ¹⁶¹

The rare public spectacle of the War on Terror in Africa featured girls, namely the girls of Chibok in Northern Nigeria (soon to be known as the “Chibok girls”), who were kidnapped by Boko Haram in 2014. The #BringBackOurGirls campaign is perhaps a limit case for this Element’s argument that imperatives to save girls and women are exhausted, and that everyone, now, accords girls agency. However, a closer look at the story of the Chibok girls complicates any straightforward claim about lingering Western commitments to “saving” girls. While demands to save the Chibok girls abounded, the West was also confused about who should save the girls, what saving them should look like, and whether (as the international community ultimately decided) the killing of terrorists was the more important goal. To be mobilized in a way that would justify the War on Terror strategy of killing terrorists even at the expense of civilian life, the girls needed agency imputed to them, albeit in imaginative and sometimes gruesome ways.

“Our Girls”

In April 2014, the militia group Boko Haram (meaning Western or non-Quranic education is forbidden), which had been a significant force in Nigeria since 2009, kidnapped 276 teenage girls – most between sixteen and eighteen – from a boarding school in the majority Christian community of Chibok in Northern Nigeria. The girls’ parents attempted to follow them on motorbikes but largely failed, though fifty-seven of the girls were able to escape during the initial journey by jumping out of the flatbed trucks carrying them. Nigerian activists, including the former minister of education, began to organize protests demanding the return of the girls, spearheading a #BringBackOurGirls social media campaign, which began to receive international attention. In early May, first lady Michelle Obama saw a TV news story about the girls and, after checking with her press secretary, tweeted a photo of herself with a #BringBackOurGirls sign, touching off an international campaign in which celebrities demanded the girls’ return. As Joe Parkinson and Drew Hinshaw detail, “the tweeting took off from there: Hollywood celebrities, prime ministers, rap stars, the pope.” Hillary Clinton tweeted, “We must stand up to terrorism,” while Nancy Pelosi tweeted, “What has happened in Nigeria is outside the circle of civilized human behavior.” “Our girls” had gone viral.Footnote ¹⁶²

This outpouring of attention, however, did not lead to the release of the Chibok girls. In May, at the height of the media frenzy, a blogger ventured into Boko Haram territory on behalf of an Abuja Imam and convinced Boko Haram to free all the girls in exchange for the release of one hundred of their prisoners. The Nigerian government initially agreed to the exchange, but President Goodluck Jonathan cancelled the deal after being called to a “crisis summit” in Paris, in which foreign ministers from the United States, France, Britain, and Israel pressured him not to negotiate with terrorists.Footnote ¹⁶³ Thus, in the weeks after Michelle Obama made “bringing back our girls” a cause célèbre, her husband successfully pressured their government to leave them in captivity. The United States decided instead to send 120 military personnel to the area to launch drones over Lake Chad; France, the UK, Canada, Israel, and China also sent specialized surveillance and military equipment and personnel. All these surveillance and military efforts failed, most spectacularly in a 2016 mission when American warplanes, flown by Nigerian pilots and assisted by CIA intelligence, killed at least ten of the Chibok girls and wounded many more.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Finally in late 2016, two years after the kidnapping, a joint Swiss–Nigerian mediation effort succeeded in getting twenty-one girls released for ransom, and a prisoner exchange a year later, in May 2017, freed eighty-two more of the girls. The rest were never freed.

Thus, as Parkinson and Hinshaw conclude, even as the Chibok girls “transformed into a central prize in the Global War on Terror, their story became distorted in ways not conducive to freeing them.”Footnote ¹⁶⁵ The West’s characterization of terrorists as monolithic meant that they failed to understand Boko Haram, which emerged from impoverished Northern Nigeria as a relatively peaceful religious group, and then, after brutal police and military crackdowns, began targeting first the police and the military and then also civilian Christians and children.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ Westerners also projected onto Boko Haram what they knew about the Taliban, meaning that, as Parkinson and Hinshaw explain, “an insurgency that opposed Western education was understood by Americans as opposing girls’ education.”Footnote ¹⁶⁷ This reliance on War-on-Terror frames in conjunction with the girls’ celebrity status ended up prolonging their captivity, making Boko Haram realize that they were valuable objects to be traded, while Western countries opposed any negotiation “with terrorists” that would look to the world like another loss in their ever-expanding war. The entire hashtag campaign and the Western interventions it sparked depended on the two fantasies that also underlie War-on-Terror cultural works: The fantasy of the “precision” strike that can eliminate all the “terrorists” (no matter how marginal) while keeping their victims alive, and the related fantasy that this obliteration is something girls want – that they would rather have Western bombing campaigns than be free or safe.

Western representations of the Chibok girls mainly affirm these fantasies rather than reckoning with them. The best known of these is celebrated Irish novelist Edna O’Brien’s novel Girl, published in 2019. Girl tells the story of fictional Chibok girl Maryam, who goes unnamed for much of the story, as she is kidnapped by Boko Haram and forced into marriage, gives birth to a baby, escapes, and then undergoes a difficult readjustment period that ends with her finding peace in a convent. O’Brien attempted to research the novel by traveling to Nigeria twice, but she found that the Chibok girls were “reluctant to talk.”Footnote ¹⁶⁸ Patricia Lockwood writes in her review of Girl that it is perhaps for this reason that “some texture is absent from the Girl’s inner monologue,” and that “there is a thinness, as if every third word is missing.” Maryam does not have much in the way of thoughts or memories or what Lockwood poetically calls “the self-mythology that chants in the background of experience,” but rather is utterly focused on action in the moment.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ The thinness of Maryam’s characterization, however, does not mean O’Brien deprives her of agency: Maryam acts, is brave, and feels things strongly. However, like many other agential girls imagined in the War on Terror culture discussed throughout this Element, she has neither a distinctive cultural location nor seemingly any distinctive character traits.

While O’Brien is hesitant to characterize Maryam, she does not share this reticence in her depictions of the Boko Haram kidnappers. As she is being kidnapped, Maryam narrates, “We enter dense jungle, trees of all kinds, meshed together, taking us into their vile embrace. Nature had gone amok here.”Footnote ¹⁷⁰ This explanation of the terrain is as close as the book gets to an explanation of Boko Haram: They are simply “nature gone amok” – brutish and barbaric and hateful. This racist, Islamophobic characterization is most evident in the novel’s staging of multiple brutal gang rapes: Girl imagines the kidnappers “baying and cheering” as they rape the girls in a public spectacle, with a bucket out for “clots of blood” to fall into.Footnote ¹⁷¹ In a second gang rape, the men are depicted as “guffawing, feeding and foraging and emptying themselves” into Maryam, while also slapping her “with savage swipes,” as other girls are being raped on either side of her. “I both died and did not die,” narrates Maryam.Footnote ¹⁷² A third rape is perpetrated by one man, “eel-thin and cocky with a jazzy shirt,” while his friends take photos of her with their phones.Footnote ¹⁷³ Maryam escapes soon after this, and upon her return dreams of “boiling [her] captors, in big black pots … we smash their skulls and their brains ooze out in a kind of murky mush.”Footnote ¹⁷⁴ These revenge fantasies persist until Maryam finds peace at the convent, away from these unimaginably brutal Muslim men.

Although, with the exception of Lockwood, reviewers touted the novel as realistic, the brutal gang rapes in Girl were entirely O’Brien’s invention.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ Parkinson and Hinshaw write that “Insurgents were banned on punishment of death from partaking of sex outside of marriage, whether rape or simple adultery”; while some of the girls were pressured into marriage, none alleged gang rape, much less the public, frequent gang rapes Girl invents.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ The twenty girls Parkinson and Hinshaw talked to describe their captivity as containing a very different kind of suffering: They foraged for food and sometimes went hungry, were forced to take classes where they had to memorize Quran passages, were beaten on the knuckles when they made mistakes, were forced to cover up their bodies, and were pressured to marry and convert to Islam and harassed and beaten if they did not.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ Girl’s staging of multiple brutally graphic, public gang rapes, while at the same time being unable, as Lockwood writes, to characterize its protagonist with even “something as small as a favourite colour,” aligns the novel with the aims and strategies of the War on Terror.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ Namely, it accords girls agency only in order to project onto them Western desires to torture and annihilate “terrorist” (Black, Muslim) men.

In substituting the girl for a kind of drone-like weapon, and in insisting that drones and airstrikes rather than negotiations should free her, the same Westerners who prevailed upon Nigeria to “bring back our girls” attempted to limit the girls’ function to one of surveillance and vengefulness. But girls, of course, are more complicated. The Chibok girls Parkinson and Hinshaw interviewed did not spend time wishing torture and death on their captors. They questioned and negotiated with their kidnappers; married and did not; renounced or adopted Islam; and ran away, sometimes with their new husbands. Naomi Adamu, one of the oldest captives. worked in Boko Haram’s medical clinic assisting a doctor; she negotiated with her captors on behalf of the faction of girls who refused their demands that they marry or convert to Islam, later reflecting that in captivity she had “become a leader.”Footnote ¹⁷⁹ However, upon her return, she struggled to adjust to her placement at the American university to which the freed girls were given scholarships, and ended up leaving to train as a nurse. Unlike Jahan, with whom this section began, Adamu wants to be “a simple health worker”; she refuses the role of traumatized vengeful victim, but also that of symbol and agent of Western triumph and surveillance.

Adamu’s resilience, though not her desire for a simple life, is captured in another representation of a Chibok girl: Nnedi Okorafor’s comic “Blessing in Disguise,” which Okorafor drew for Marvel in 2017. In the wake of her paralysis in a bus accident, Okorafor’s character Ngozi feels depressed, until a spider venom capsule falls into the spokes of her wheelchair and breaks open, transforming her into a superpowered creature. Newly possessed of the ability to fly, walk, and fight, she slays the rhino-monster that has just murdered the Black Panther, then becomes the new Black Panther herself.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ Okorafor explains that Ngozi’s story was inspired by the Chibok girls, “normal girls who suddenly had to deal with a huge change in their lives,” though the main thing that marks Ngozi as a Chibok girl seems to be her desire to annihilate the terrorist/monster enemy.Footnote ¹⁸¹

This anti-terror sensibility is in keeping with Okorafor’s other work as well as other recent science-fictional representations of African girls. Like “Blessing in Disguise,” these works feature gifted and exceptional Black, mostly African girls, who fly and do other spectacular things with technology; these girls transmit and symbolize the richness of African life and cosmologies. But despite often making use of tribal and anticolonial tropes and traditions, these works tend to use girls for their surveillance powers, sometimes also weaponizing them, and often depicting fruitful collaboration with the US security state. These works thus show the limits of techno-feminist, Afrofuturist, and Africanfuturist visions of Pan-African pride that depend on the poisonous blessing of securitized robotic technology.

STEM Supergirls

Okorafor begins her Reference Okorafor2017 TED talk, “What if an African girl from a traditional family, in a part of future Africa, is accepted into the finest university in the galaxy, planets away? What if she decides to go?” She goes on to explain that this is the plot of her Binti trilogy: “Binti leaves the earth, on her own terms” and becomes “not other but more” by fusing with alien biomatter.Footnote ¹⁸² These particular themes – the agency and excellence of girls, the centering of Africa, and perhaps most importantly, a general optimism about both technology and aliens – are for Okorafor the principles of Afrofuturism. She recalls not connecting with science fiction as a child because she “couldn’t relate to these stories preoccupied with xenophobia, colonization and seeing aliens as others.” Her more optimistic science fiction was instead inspired by frequent trips to Nigeria, where she was impressed by the ways people used technology to survive and overcome infrastructural breakdown. Okorafor would maintain this techno-optimistic orientation but draw a distinction the following year between Afrofuturism and what she defined as “Africanfuturism,” claiming for herself the latter term to express the importance of Africa (rather than the centering of US Black culture) in her work. To explain this distinction, she gives an example:

• Afrofuturism: Wakanda builds its first outpost in Oakland, CA, USA.

• Africanfuturism: Wakanda builds its first outpost in a neighboring African country.

These are, of course, references to the end of the 2018 Black Panther movie (dir. Ryan Coogler), which finds engineer-princess Shuri in charge of a community outreach center in California, symbolizing the Wakandan community’s decision to open itself up to the world. The Black Panther franchise, like Okorafor’s fiction, showcases brilliant girls: Its 2022 sequel, Wakanda Forever, also directed by Coogler, stars Shuri (now an “AI engineer” and newly crowned Black Panther) alongside MIT student and inventor Riri. They are joined by Nakia, a princess with superior linguistic and spying skills, as they first go to war against and then forge a tentative truce with the Talokanil, Mayan warriors who became underwater mutants at the time of the conquest. Shuri herself is a drone-like STEM girl: She flies around with “Nanotech wings” saving the day, including saving white US state department official and perpetual Black Panther ally Everett Ross. If Okorafor worries that the Black Panther films do not center Africa enough, they otherwise share a sensibility with her work: They celebrate a version of girls’ education with a strong emphasis on STEM and robotics, and they imagine that such an education can be mobilized in service of something that often looks much like anti-colonial liberation, at least for Black exceptional girls and those they lead.

Both the Black Panther films and Okorafor’s writings imagine US military tech and personnel, as well as tech lords and their inventions, as allies in these struggles for Black self-determination, reflecting how the War on Terror figuration of agential weaponized girls has infused even Afrofuturist and Africanfuturist visions. This tendency becomes more pronounced in Okorafor’s post-Binti fiction, as it takes ever more techno-optimist stances. In her Reference Okorafor2018 short story “Mother of Invention,” a smart home and the numerous drones it controls assist protagonist Anwuli as she gives birth, anticipating her every need.Footnote ¹⁸³ In her 2021 novella Remote Control, Ghanaian girl protagonist Sankofa takes on the qualities of an armed drone, controlled by death; upon sensing a threat, she blows up everyone around her. Benign drones help Sankofa along the way, and in general, the novel allegorizes the investments of powerful and destructive forces in the girl and how she, like the drone, is weaponized to cause mass destruction. But Remote Control holds out hope for the girl/drone’s ability to gain autonomy, as evidenced by the final line, when Sankofa returns to her empty, gutted home and finally gains control over her powers: “This time, she did it on purpose.”Footnote ¹⁸⁴ Sankofa’s arc dovetails well with the televisual depictions of drone warfare discussed earlier: Deployed as and equated with a drone, she ultimately embraces her counterinsurgent fate, a twist the novel imagines as an empowering exercise of agency.

Okorafor’s 2024 metafictional novel Death of the Author is clearest in imagining that alliances with tech lords and their militarized technologies can be liberatory for African women. In the novel, paraplegic Nigerian–American celebrity writer Zelu, despite the strenuous objections of her family, collaborates with a tech billionaire to first acquire robotic legs and then go to space.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ As Sandra Newman writes in an ambivalent review, “More than one plot point involves someone simply offering Zelu a technological solution to her problems, and her agency is expressed only by deciding to accept it.”Footnote ¹⁸⁶ More than this, Zelu’s agency is revealed to be entirely fictional at the close of the book, when it is revealed that she is actually the protagonist of a story written by a creative robot. The novel’s arc is thus the inverse of Remote Control’s: Zelu has been making choices all along, but the end reveals that she is in fact being controlled remotely by her robot creator, charming and wise humanoid robot-author Ankara. Zelu’s choices to embrace and meld with robotic technology have been scripted by the technology itself.

Death of the Author reveals its twist not with dystopian unease but with techno-optimist exuberance, imagining well-meaning African robots that conserve the culture of their human creators and can thus create sympathetic human characters. The novel, therefore, does not contend with the securitized militarized desires for annihilation that have shaped the technological advancements of the War on Terror, nor does it consider how so much robotic and military tech has been conditioned by the brains not of wise, peaceful Nigerian elders but of virulently racist and misogynist Silicon Valley tech lords. Instead, it fantasizes about benign or, at worst, neutral technologies that do not replicate the racism of their inventors.

By contrast, worries about the racism and colonialism embedded in technological infrastructure are directly articulated by Tade Thompson, another author of the Nigerian diaspora, in his Wormwood Trilogy. At the end of the series, ghostly rebel protagonist Bicycle Girl/Oyin Da fights alien colonizers and their fungal xenosphere (a cloud of information that characters psychically tap into) on behalf of humans, even though she is not exactly human herself but rather constructed from the xenosphere. In other words, although she explains at one point that she is trying to figure out how to “save the world from aliens, yet keep their infrastructure,” just as the Nigerians “kept the trains … after the British left,” Bicycle Girl ultimately concludes that this is impossible: The fight to save humanity will necessarily destroy this infrastructure, and her along with it.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ The Wormwood trilogy thus does not share the optimism of Okorafor’s work. Here, the anti-terror security empire, intertwined with networks shaped by the greed and racism of tech lords, cannot be selectively adopted or fused with for liberatory purposes. Rather, it must be destroyed, right down to the heroic girls who are perhaps its most impressive creations, if Africans (for Thompson, allegorized out to humanity in general) are to have any hope of freedom.