Edinburgh Napier University

  Over the past two decades, counterterrorism in the UK has been characterised by contentious legal and social developments. One such development has been a marked preventative turn in criminal law, exemplified by the bringing into permanence and expansion of controversial “pre-inchoate” offences. Meanwhile, social policies such as PREVENT have raised concerns over the stigmatisation of communities labelled as inherently risky and deserving of scrutiny. These trends have attracted increasing attention from UK criminologists, who have been largely critical of this ever-widening criminalisation. In this paper we suggest that this critique needs to be taken further; guided by recent critiques of crimmigration, we suggest that the framing of terrorism and counterterrorism through a crime lens exceptionalises what is in fact a more mundane form of hybrid legal power, it distracts from the considerable overlap between counterterrorism and migration management, and reinforces the colonial logics used to justify oppressive counterterrorist measures. We consider the ways in which a zemiological framework may be useful in re-framing analysis of counterterrorism away from crime-based approaches.