This chapter begins with the history of the international recognition of terrorism as a crime, including through the adoption of global and regional counter-terrorism treaties, and United Nations (UN) Security Council resolutions. The chapter then turns to a discussion of the challenges associated with defining terrorism, including its material and mental elements, and with national prosecutions. The chapter also explores terrorism as a war crime, a crime against humanity, and a crime under customary international law. The chapter’s consideration of torture begins with the definition found in the UN Convention Against Torture, and considers the obligation to prosecute or extradite (aut dedere aut judicare) under that treaty. It also discusses torture as an international crime under the ICC Statute and other statutes of international criminal tribunals. The chapter ends with an examination of ecocide as an emerging crime.

This chapter reflects on the institutional strength of the Security Council. It emphasises the fact that the Security Council forms part of the greater organisation of the United Nations, composed of 193 states. While it is obvious that the Security Council is a forum of power politics, the Council is not only composed of the powerful and the permanent. This chapter submits that the less powerful states do not necessarily need always to play a secondary role – especially if they team up. The chapter is also guided by the idea that less powerful states, in particular, have an interest in the rule of law guiding international relations as a means of constraining raw power politics. The chapter thus presents an institutionalist perspective. At its core, this perspective is about checks and balances, as well as the ability to take the interests of ‘the others’ into account (i.e., those that do not have a permanent seat at the Security Council). The chapter applies this perspective to examine the exercise of distinct Security Council powers pertaining to the use of force, UN sanctions, and counter-terrorism legislation, as well as to possible new work terrains for the Security Council.

This chapter points to a dilemma at the heart of the judicial role. How can courts robustly review legislation for compliance with rights without exceeding the limits of the judicial role? And how can they pay respect to the democratically elected branches of government without ceding their obligations to uphold rights? Presenting courts as a form of constitutional ‘quality control’, this chapter argues they solve this dilemma by engaging in calibrated constitutional review. This requires judges to carefully calibrate the grounds and intensity of review depending on a complex analysis of legal and institutional concerns.

This chapter introduces the UN’s principal approach to dealing with ‘threats without boundaries’, a category that includes terrorism, pandemic disease, WMD proliferation, and organized crime. The UN harnesses managerial governance as a way of countering these threats without resorting to unilateral, militarized responses like the War on Terror. The UN conceptualizes the threats as interdependence problems which call for a joined-up response. The chapter reveals the symmetry of threat and response, showing how each is articulated in three dimensions. First, the transboundary flow of threats calls for multilateral cooperation in response; second, the interconnection of the threats, which aggravate and incubate one another, calls for a comprehensive response; and third, the attribution of a life-span to threats without boundaries, which are serried into emergent, manifest, and residual stages, calls for a continuous response. Managerial governance, the chapter concludes, is produced through the imperative to organize attendant on the complexity that accumulates in a project that is cooperative, comprehensive and continuous.

Taking the UN’s Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy as its focus, Chapter 3 discusses strategic planning, a managerial technology of composition and arrangement. It shows how the UN organizes and manages a swarm of counter-terrorism efforts by nation-states, UN specialized agencies, and other security actors. Strategic frameworks, the chapter explains, generate a shared aesthetic that lends integrity to a profuse swarm of ever-increasing ‘thematic’ aspects of terrorism (financing, radicalization, violent extremism, critical infrastructure, and so on) and cascades of fine-grained technical guidance about how best to ‘operationalize’ counter-terrorism. One way frameworks lend a sense of order to this swarm of initiatives is by organizing different themes into discrete, tessellating modular work-packages, and the chapter shows how these are related to ‘quasi-legislative’ Security Council resolutions. The chapter describes a second way that frameworks lend a sense of order to the cascades of technical guidance by using matrices of best practices. These open out UN resolutions into Mandelbrot-like sets of micro-prescriptions generated by specialized agencies like the International Civil Aviation Organization, whose work on biometric travel documents this chapter explores.

The embrace of counter-terrorism techniques in the COVID-19 pandemic suggests that they has become part of the transnational muscle memory – a go-to solution when a new or immense challenge arises. Leveraging transnational counter-terrorism to respond to new crises in this way legitimates it as ‘useful’, ‘effective’, and a ‘normal’ part of governance, expanding and extending the reach of counter-terrorism actors and apparatus within the international and domestic systems. Eschewing optimism in the repairability of the transnational counter-terrorism order, this conclusion warns that mitigations such as institutional reforms, better and more precise references to human rights law, or the increased participation of civil society may allow for lawyers to mediate the fundamental problems of the practices of transnational counter-terrorism, but they cannot resolve them. The problems run too deep for that.

This introductory chapter lays out the context and enquiries for the study. It outlines how the post-9/11 characterisation of terrorism as a matter of international peace and security globalised counter-terrorism, laying the groundwork for the development of a vast institutional, legal, and political order of transnational counter-terrorism. It critiques the continuing failure to develop a binding, international legal definition of terrorism in this light, and foregrounds the practice and problems of transnational counter-terrorism further developed in the chapters that follow.

This chapter unpacks the critical relationship between African peacekeeping and the continent’s international relations, tracing peacekeeping’s evolution from the periphery to the heart of many bilateral and multilateral relationships. In the aftermath of the failed 1993 UN/US-led intervention in Somalia and 1994 Rwandan genocide, the authors argue, Western powers sought to disengage from direct military involvement on the continent, increasingly relying on African states and militaries to provide ‘African solutions to African problems’. This dynamic has evolved into Western (and, increasingly, Chinese and Russian) underwriting of African peacekeeping missions, from Somalia to the DRC, and the growing subsidising of African security states by international partners. The chapter examines this development and how it has enabled a range of African governments, from Chad to Ethiopia, to carve out greater room for manoeuvre in their (often aid-dependent) relations with international actors. This has, the authors argue, had profound implications for domestic politics in a number of instances.

This chapter sets out the field of terrorism studies and reviews the main issues and research directions that characterise the field today. The history of the discipline is summarised and terrorism and its ‘near neighbour’ hate crime are defined and compared before turning to the developments that have dominated the research agenda over the last ten years.

Chapter 4 examines how obscenity is used as a regulatory mechanism by focusing on dead enemy bodies, using the cases of Muammar Qaddafi and Osama bin Laden. Images of violently dead bodies have been circulated and mobilized in the service of the war-on-terror. This framing shapes the understanding of what war is, via which images of war are deemed legitimate grounds for visual consumption. In considering the technologies of erasure in the war-on-terror, images of Qaddafi reinforced the notion of the inevitable failure of dictatorship. The dead body image of Osama bin Laden, on the other hand, was not publicly released despite widespread demand to see it, but its visibility was characterized as a security risk. The chapter elucidates the visual grammar of images that are overtly related to foreign policy actions such as counter-terrorism or democracy promotion. These larger policy discourses are supported and reinforced by the production and circulation of images of dead enemies in particular ways. By the rupture of the dead body taboo, viewers are instructed to engage with images in specific ways, and thus to engage the policy subjects of those images in particular ways, sustaining a larger narrative of security.

Terrorism involves acts with the intent of coercing or intimidating governments or societies in pursuit of goals that are generally political or ideological. It is this political/ideological component that makes it different from other forms of crime. Radicalisation is a term used to describe the psychological processes that lead to terrorism, with the term 'violent extremism' referring to actions that support ideologically driven violence. This chapter discusses approaches to preventing terrorism and violent extremism, with a focus on the definition of terrorism, the role of police in preventing terrorism, situational approaches to terrorism prevention, and social terrorism prevention. While the prevention of terrorism is the central focus of this chapter, terrorism prevention is also a vehicle to engage with topics that have broader relevance to crime prevention practice. Efforts to prevent terrorism involve all levels of government and rely heavily on policing and intelligence agencies, and also seeks to engage business and the communities to help identity and mitigate terrorism threats.

The interwar period in India was a time of great political upheaval, with the development of unprecedented mass support for the politics of anti-colonial nationalism. This period also marked the climax of the revolutionary movement in Bengal, as radicals disenchanted by the failure of the non-cooperation campaign soon returned to the tactics of assassination and political violence that they adopted before and during the war. In 1925, the return of revolutionary organizations prompted the Government of India to introduce the Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act, despite vigorous opposition from within the newly expanded Indian legislatures. With political violence reaching unprecedented levels in the early 1930s, colonial officials became increasingly reliant on repressive emergency laws that for the first time began to target ‘terrorism’ as a distinct category of crime.