Conor Gearty’s Homeland Insecurity is a superbly written study unveiling the damage that the contemporary obsession with terrorism has on liberal democracies. As the book’s subtitle suggests, antiterrorism law is here to stay, as are pernicious effects on rights and liberties that go with it. Alarmingly, antiterrorism measures in the global north have become self-sustaining, detached from any real threat of violence.
The first part of Homeland Insecurity explains how terrorism came to be such a deep-seated concern for the global north. Proponents of antiterrorism laws might not have made up the bombings and assassinations, but they did much to construct the idea of “terrorism”. Gearty argues that the roots of “terrorism” as a concept lie in colonialism. Building on the work of decolonial historians and critical scholars, he shows how “terrorism” was adopted by colonial powers to denigrate and delegitimise the violent resistance of colonised peoples, shifting the spotlight away from their own blood-soaked project of empire. We are reminded that both Ireland and Palestine were important early testing grounds for the concept of terrorism and attendant antiterrorism laws.
“Terrorism” found new political uses during the cold war, as western experts in the 1980s argued (unconvincingly) that the Soviet Union was calling the shots behind the scenes of violent campaigns from Belfast to Berlin and Beirut. Spinning local grievances into a transnational crisis benefited defenders of the status quo. Among these experts was one Binyamin Netanyahu, then the permanent representative of Israel to the United Nations. Around this time, Israel began to rely repeatedly on the UN Charter’s provisions of self-defence to justify its “antiterrorism” measures. This was treated as far-fetched at the time, but dangerous precedents were being set. Soon self-defence was regularly being cited as the rationale for pre-emptive “counter-terrorism” by governments the world over.
Part two explains how antiterrorism became an integral part of international and domestic legal systems. While September 11th, 2001 was no new beginning for terrorism or antiterrorism law, it served to catalyse some incipient trends. Gearty deftly explains how policymakers continued to exploit domestic and international legal grey areas to use indefinite detention, pre-emptive strikes and extraordinary rendition. All of this had happened before 2001 of course, but the global “war on terror” turned these practices into “common sense parts of the defence of democracy, not subversions of it”.
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The picture painted here is of a United Nations lacking internal coherence. Efforts to establish a UN consensus on terrorism in the 20th century foundered among the differing perceptions held by former colonial powers and former colonies over the legitimacy of violent national liberation movements. UN work on terrorism was thus for decades confined largely to piecemeal condemnations. Post 9/11 it slowly took on a new character. Resolution 1373, sponsored by the United States, committed UN members to fight terrorism. It swung the balance between liberty and security decisively in favour of security.
Much UN antiterrorism architecture developed thereafter, and Resolution 1373, was used as the rationale for expeditionary and domestic counter-terrorism in ways that clashed with the UN’s purported commitment to human rights. Antiterrorism zeal did not go entirely unchecked. The UN special rapporteurs on protecting human rights while countering rerrorism (Irish legal scholar Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, among others) did much to highlight the caustic effect that the obsession with antiterrorism was having globally. Successive special rapporteurs have fought antiterrorism overreach valiantly, but much of what they have critiqued was facilitated (perhaps even mandated) by the United Nations itself.
Gearty turns his attention from the international to the domestic, and he pulls no punches here either. Domestic checks and balances have fared little better in holding governments to account. Judges have been passive, reluctant to curtail executive power when it comes to matters of national security. When courts have risen to the challenge, they might have managed to curb governments’ worst excesses, but at the cost of more deeply embedding illiberal antiterrorism measures within our legal systems.
Gearty argues powerfully and convincingly that liberal democracies have always maintained double standards. This is what accounts for different behaviour at “home”, “away”, and in those “uncertain homelands” such as Northern Ireland that do not fit neatly in these categories. It is what accounts for the poor treatment of the “other”; non-citizens, foreigners, and the “enemy within”. It is why states have castigated their opponents in the colonies for “terrorism” while relying on more brutal violence themselves. Despite the global north’s preoccupation, terrorism has never posed an existential threat there. Terrorism is a noxious concept. It increasingly feels reductive and ill-fitting in a world shaken by the violence in Gaza and Ukraine. And yet, Gearty posits, the society’s obsession with antiterrorism law might well outlive its commitment to human rights.
Dr Kieran McConaghy is a lecturer in terrorism and political violence at the University of St Andrews in Scotland
