Edinburgh Napier University

  Over the past two decades, counterterrorism in the UK and beyond has been characterised by contentious legal and social developments. One such development has been a marked preventative turn in criminal law, exemplified in the UK by the bringing into permanence and expansion of controversial pre-inchoate offences. These offences reflect a wider trend in anti-terrorism law in Europe and internationally, of rapidly expanding powers and discretion to enable earlier intervention. Meanwhile, social policies such as PREVENT in the UK have raised concerns over the stigmatisation of individuals and communities labelled as inherently risky and deserving of scrutiny. These measures share a common justification of preventing harm and increasing security – but as critical scholars have pointed to, the working understandings of what security, risk, and harm means have been too narrow and failed to consider intervention itself as a threat to communities, an undermining of their security, and a source of harm in itself.1
Despite a notable body of critical research on the ever-expanding criminalisation of terrorism, this critique must be taken further. Guided by recent critiques of crimmigration,2 we suggest that framing counterterrorism as an aberration of criminal law exceptionalises what is instead a mundane form of hybrid governance3, reinforcing rather than challenging its crisis-driven justification. We note the considerable overlap between counterterrorism and migration management, where coercive administrative measures which join high discretionary powers with low scrutiny and accountability are common. Indeed, international terrorism is routinely fought with migration measures, including visa restrictions, removals, and citizenship deprivation. These measures create and maintain racialised underclasses who are afforded diminished citizenship and diminished rights. Countering a criminocentric views of counterterrorism is paramount to exposing the socially and politically constructed nature of terrorist threats and the enduring colonial logics they perpetuate, making it necessary to move away from the crime lens altogether. Building on the emerging discipline of zemiology, we suggest that the social harm framework is best placed to conceptualise the true social impact of counterterrorism policies and to examine the role of law not only as source of security, but also as tool of repression and state violence. Moving away from state-defined problematizations of insecurity, a zemiological approach allows us to engage more effectively with what it means to prevent harm and to act in the public interest in doing so.