Thanks to generous funding from the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, a team of us–me, Jessie Blackbourn, and Lydia Morgan–spent 18 months mapping, conceptualising, and investigating the operation of the counter-terrorism review assemblage in the United Kingdom. Throughout the project we maintained a website about the project and its animating ideas, and the project’s main output has now been published. This is a book entitled Accountability and Review in the Counter-Terrorist State published by Bristol University Press. The book goes on sale officially on 4 December 2019 but can be preordered here at the pre-publication price of £27.99.
Category: research
New Publication: The Transnational Counter-Terrorism Order
Last November I was delighted to present a Current Legal Problems lecture at UCL. The article that emerged from that lecture has now been published in advance access format by the CLP and will appear in this year’s hardcopy. It is available here, and the abstract is as follows:
We live our lives in an often-unseen transnational counter-terrorism order. For almost two decades now, counter-terrorist hegemons have been acting on multiple transnational levels, using a mixture of legal, institutional, technical and political manoeuvres to develop laws, policies and practices of counter-terrorism that undervalue rights, exclude civil society, limit dissent and disagreement, and expand greatly the reach of national and transnational security. The assemblage of laws, institutions, forums, processes, bureaucracies, and cooperative networks that have emerged from these machinations should be understood as a transnational counter-terrorism order that is intended to instantiate on a global level ‘an arrangement of social life…[that]…promotes certain goals or values’ (Bull), whether or not they conflict with rights, whether or not they emerge from legitimate and participatory processes. This paper brings together various seemingly-technical or esoteric strands of law, institutions, policy and politics to show their connections, interdependencies and interactions and, thereby, to illustrate the emergence of this transnational counter-terrorism order. It argues that unless we recognise the connections between and multi-scalar implications of the seemingly disparate, sometimes opaque, and often bureaucratic elements that make up the transnational counter-terrorism order, its scale and implications will remain hidden in plain sight and we may find ourselves unable effectively to insist on fidelity to the constitutionalist values of rights, accountability, and democratic legitimacy.
New article: Is there a Conservative Counter-Terrorism?
The latest issue of the King’s Law Journal is a special reflection on ‘civil liberties under Conservative-led governments since 2010′. The papers within the issue cover a wide range of topics including human rights protection across what Colin Harvey calls the “fractured union” of the UK, to the European Social Charter discussed by Colm O’Cinnéide.
My colleague Lydia Morgan and I have a paper on counter-terrorism law and policy (“Is there a Conservative counter-terrorism?”), wanting to question whether there is something distinctive about the Conservative approach to counter-terrorism in the post-2010 era when compared with what came before it. In the paper we find that actually there is a remarkable level of substantive continuity between New Labour governments from 1997-2010 and the 2010+ approach in Conservative-Led governments. The Blair/Brown approach in turn is deeply informed by what preceded it, especially in Northern Ireland, so that in fact there is a fairly wide and deep consensus about some core commitments within UK counter-terrorism law. Those core commitments are: a focus on prevention, an embrace of surveillance, and a manifestation of human rights scepticism in the counter-terrorism context. Continue reading “New article: Is there a Conservative Counter-Terrorism?”
New article: On public submissions to the Citizens’ Assembly
My latest paper, written with Mima Markicevic, has just been published in the Women’s Studies International Forum. The paper, entitled “Reforming abortion law in Ireland: Reflections on the public submissions to the Citizens’ Assembly“, builds on a hand coding of a sample of over 1,000 submissions to the Assembly on the 8th Amendment and considers the arguments made out therein, placing them against the backdrop of the Joint Oireachtas Committee and the eventual referendum campaign. Access is free through this link for the first 50 days of publication, and this extract from the introduction gives a good sense of the overall argument:
Following a detailed, hand-coded analysis of over 1000 of the submissions received we found that they attend primarily to ‘broad’ or ‘first principles’ arguments about abortion per se, and are only minimally concerned with technical (and technocratic) arguments about the future shape and nature of the legal regulation of abortion. Within the submissions themselves there is limited evidence that key arguments about harm, the impact of criminalization, and the requirements of international human rights law that were advanced by pro-repeal advocates achieved significant purchase, while the pro-retain submissions revealed a significant dependence on emerging arguments about disability and disability rights in anti-abortion activism. In contrast, arguments of constitutional design, of international human rights law, of legal certainty, of medical practice etc. dominated the official narrative that followed the Assembly, in particular the Joint Oireachtas Committee that was established especially to receive and consider the report of the Assembly and make recommendations to the parliament as a whole (Houses of the Oireachtas, 2017). In this paper we focus on the primary arguments made the submissions from the general public to the Citizens’ Assembly. We go on to consider the extent to which these arguments subsequently arose in the referendum campaign of 2018. Relying on a detailed exit poll from the referendum vote (RTE & Behaviour and Attitudes, 2018), we argue that the arguments made in these submissions continued to motivate voters on the day of the referendum itself, even where the elite and official discourses of the referendum campaign itself diverged somewhat from these. This analysis raises questions about the purpose of the Citizens’ Assembly per se and particularly about whether its primary impact was on official political narratives of abortion law reform in Ireland rather than on the everyday voter as she engaged with the issues.
Professor Fiona de Londras 