Less than two weeks after the 9/11 attacks in 2001, former President Bush announced the launch of the “war on terror” — a war that would operate beyond borders and without any conceivable end. Twenty-five years later, the catastrophic violence and Islamophobia that war launched within the U.S. and across the globe has continued unabated.

As much as we resist ongoing state violence, we cannot achieve true justice for the harms of the past or look forward toward a future where our communities thrive if we don’t understand the true scale of the brutality that has been waged in the name of the war on terror. This means documenting the violence of the past — in order to both offer an accurate reflection of the forces that shape our current conditions, and to transform them towards a liberatory future.

In “The War That Was Never Meant to End: 25 Years of the War on Terror,” Muslim Counterpublics Lab and Truthout will look at the 25 years of state machinery borne out of the war on terror, documenting the violence of some of its key policies while imagining what true accountability could look like. As we mark the various milestones in the war on terror, series authors will examine the war’s trajectory, the normalization of state violence, and the role of justice and reckoning in forging a future free of the harms of the national security apparatus.