Global Counter-Terrorism

Twenty years since the 9/11 terror attacks and the start of the global war on terror, counterterrorism policies in multiple iterations continue to permeate everyday life across the world. Critical scholarship on counterterrorism has taken note of the pervasive presence of counterterrorism policies in public life. Yet there is little scholarship that draws out the conceptual links between the practice of counterterrorism in the global North and the global South. Inspired by decolonial approaches to the study of politics and international relations, this collection aims to unsettle the Western, Eurocentric hegemony in scholarship on counterterrorism. This collection uses a range of case studies from India, Egypt, Pakistan as well as from locations in the global North to show how counterterrorism policy and practice are closely tethered to particular negotiations with imperial legacies and colonial modes of knowledge about the law, politics, and terror. We also challenge colonial epistemologies of studying counterterrorism by delineating transnational connections as well as the various scales, spaces, and levels at which counterterrorism policies work. The book inaugurates three new areas of enquiry: 1) colonialism, coloniality, and the role that colonial epistemes play in shaping counterterrorism policies 2) the role of the global, transnational, and national in everyday discourses of (in)security in shaping counterterrorism policies 3) practices of everyday securitisation and counterterrorism and their interaction with other ideologies such as right-wing extremism and right-wing radicalisation. In exploring these myriad aspects of the life of counterterrorism policies, we unsettle a Eurocentric and 9/11 centric narrative of counterterrorism.