The world has a problem with counter-terrorism.

Since 2001, a transnational counter-terrorism order has emerged of such scale, scope, reach, and significance that the Secretary-General of the United Nations could describe it as ‘a comprehensive, multilateral counter-terrorism architecture at the global, regional and national levels’.Footnote ³ This architecture is now firmly established as a seemingly immovable part of the global governance landscape, characterised by an institutional and normative sprawl that embeds it across a remarkable range of transnational activities.

The attacks of 11 September 2001 acted as an accelerant for the development, institutionalisation, and hardening of transnational counter-terrorism in formal and informal international institutions. With a focus on norm setting, norm settlement,Footnote ⁴ capacity building, and sanctions regimes, this transnational activity has had concrete domestic effects. In the seventeen years after 2001, 140 states adopted new counter-terrorism legislation,Footnote ⁵ marking this as a period of legislative hyperactivity that is manifestly connected to the development of transnational counter-terrorismFootnote ⁶ and, particularly, to the central role of the United Nations (UN) within it.

Over the last twenty years, counter-terrorism has increasingly become part of the core business of the UN.Footnote ⁷ This was not always clearly reflected in the institutional structure of the organisation. Jane Boulden has written that ‘terrorism appeared to be both simultaneously everywhere and nowhere at the UN’Footnote ⁸ until the inauguration in 2017 of a new institutional arrangement specifically to co-ordinate UN counter-terrorism.Footnote ⁹ The everywhereness of which Boulden writes reflects the fact that, in pursuit of the ‘voracious ideal’Footnote ¹⁰ of security, questions of terrorism increasingly dominate the UN and all of its agencies. Transnational counter-terrorism is developed at and beyond the UN through laws, programmes, institutions, capacity-building activities, inter-institutional engagements, and normative sprawl. The law and practice of transnational counter-terrorism that emanate from this shape domestic law and policy,Footnote ¹¹ and at both national and international levels marginalise rights protection,Footnote ¹² close out spaces for disagreement and dissensus,Footnote ¹³ undermine other bodies of law that more effectively restrain state action,Footnote ¹⁴ and either ignore or co-opt civil society as a ‘partner’ but not a critical friend of the counter-terrorism juggernaut.Footnote ¹⁵ At the same time, transnational counter-terrorism gives the UN a new relevance. As Isobel Roele has remarked, ‘[i]n advocating for cooperation and inclusivity [in counter-terrorism], the UN simultaneously made the case for its own indispensability as a convening power’.Footnote ¹⁶

If anyone worried about whether the international counter-terrorism co-operation that emerged in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 could be sustained,Footnote ¹⁷ those worries have surely been quenched in the twenty years that have followed.

In this book I seek to both document and problematise the development of transnational counter-terrorism, showing the institutional and normative sprawl of counter-terrorism in transnational spaces, its domestic effects, and its marginalisation of human rights and participation. In doing so, I want to illustrate the determined construction of a vast institutional architecture of transnational counter-terrorism, through which the law and practice of transnational counter-terrorism develop, diffuse, and embed, often without formality, transparency, or accountability. I will show that, in this transnational counter-terrorism order, human rights are frequently invoked to justify countering terrorism and identified as key to effective counter-terrorism, but are rarely regarded as limits on its reach or ambition. That reach is extensive, driven by practices of institutional interlinkage, normative sprawl, and the voracious enterprise of preventing and/or countering violent extremism (P/CVE), which allows for counter-terrorism to seep into a vast array of activity. These activities have real and material effects at individual and national levels, fomenting a counter-terrorism atmosphere in which states can and do pursue repressive agendas, legitimated by recourse to transnational counter-terrorism, which in turn they seek to influence through entrepreneurial norm-shaping activities. And all of this with limited, if any, accountability.

If there are solutions to this, time is rapidly running out for us to identify and implement them.

The Post-9/11 Transnational Counter-Terrorism Order

Although the international community had addressed terrorism prior to the autumn of 2001,Footnote ¹⁸ its efforts had primarily been focused on event-specific Security Council resolutions,Footnote ¹⁹ futile attempts to define terrorism as an international phenomenon and/or crime, and the creation of specific treaty and sanctions regimes to address (directly or indirectly) particular elements of terrorist activity.Footnote ²⁰ The success of pre-2001 counter-terrorism efforts at the United Nations had been limited: only two states (the United Kingdom and Botswana) had ratified all of the UN conventions in place at the time of the September 11 attacks;Footnote ²¹ the Terrorism Prevention Branch was only very slightly resourced;Footnote ²² and countering terrorism hardly featured in the Office of Legal Affairs’ ‘Strategy for an Era of Application of International Law’.Footnote ²³ Certainly, terrorism and counter-terrorism formed part of many states’ foreign policy, there were some well-established patterns of transnational policeFootnote ²⁴ and securityFootnote ²⁵ co-operation, and some regional organisations had also engaged in at least some degree of counter-terrorism co-ordination.Footnote ²⁶ However, as a general matter, sovereign control over terrorism and counter-terrorism was a jealously guarded principle; counter-terrorism was, broadly speaking, a matter of domestic concern, law, policy, and governance.Footnote ²⁷ All of this changed with the 11 September 2001 attacks.

That change is reflected in the immediate attention paid to these attacks by the international community, not only through expressions of solidarity and empathy with the United States,Footnote ²⁸ but also in the form of law, policy, and operational arrangements that firmly established counter-terrorism as a matter of transnational, as well as national, governance. Indeed, what can be seen in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks is the rapid reclassification of counter-terrorism as a matter of international peace and security, enabling its elevation ‘to an unhealthy hegemonic category [that] comes to mean the unreflexive, parochial and anxious cleaving to a security-driven conception of a risk-free society’.Footnote ²⁹ As will become clear throughout this book, that elevation has been strongly supported by different states, in different guises, and at different times across the last two decades.

States are, of course, critical to the larger story of transnational counter-terrorism, as they in large part initiate programmes or the act of drawing certain issues into the broader sphere of counter-terrorism. It was also states – and especially the five permanent members of the Security Council – that so forcefully shaped the expanding counter-terrorism agenda at the UN in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. By framing these attacks as threats to international peace and security, the UN Security Council did not merely reflect, but rather constituted, reality; it turned terrorism into a matter of international security. Wæver explains that ‘[b]y uttering “security,” a state-representative moves a particular development into a specific area, and thereby claims a special right to use whatever means are necessary to block it’.Footnote ³⁰ Along similar lines, by deeming terrorism a matter of international peace and security, the Security Council engaged in a globalising securitising speech act, shifting the scale from national to transnational in a manner that would have profound consequences. By framing terrorism in this way, the Security Council opened the door, not only to military action by states acting individually or alone,Footnote ³¹ but also to its own unprecedented ‘legislative’ activity as the institution with responsibility for international peace and security.Footnote ³² As will become clear throughout this book, the far-reaching, pervasive, and persistent transnational counter-terrorism order that has developed in the last twenty years can be traced directly back to that scale-shifting, globalising speech act, and to Security Council Resolution 1373 (2001) – the remarkably productive instrument that emerged from it.

Since then, counter-terrorism seems to have become the thing ‘that relates, organises, and possibly subsumes a host of other middle-level securitisations’Footnote ³³ on a transnational scale. As we will see, transnational counter-terrorism encapsulates, shapes, and in large part enables the securitisation of financial systems, borders, data, transnational organised crime, peacekeeping, humanitarian action, internet regulation, and states’ duties towards citizens abroad. A host of securitising actors, including states and counter-terrorism institutions that have emerged since 2001,Footnote ³⁴ are ‘bound together positively’ by their shared identification of ‘international terrorism’ as a threat to be countered transnationally, thus ensuring transnational counter-terrorism’s durability.Footnote ³⁵ That durability emerges also from the shared commitment to the transnational counter-terrorist order among the permanent members of the Security Council, which often (although not always) reach consensus in the Security Council on counter-terrorism resolutions even when they cannot do so on other matters. As a result of their effective control of the Security Council, these five states enjoy disproportionate influence on the development, content, and diffusion of transnational counter-terrorism. While some other states seek out their own influence in this field (through funding UN counter-terrorism work, founding security-oriented regional organisations, or developing close working connections with counter-terrorism institutions), most states are ‘recipients’ of this order which is transmitted through hard and soft law, capacity building, and ‘technical assistance’, largely shaped and directed by Global North security hegemons.

In spite of this imbalance, the transnational counter-terrorism order has a striking stability. This is at least partly connected to the fact that it speaks to elites across multiple locations – elites that share not only a sense that terrorism is a physical threat that must be resisted, but also a vision of security that constructs the state as the legitimate locus of coercive power and permitted violence and seeks to maintain the existing order. This consensus has manifested in the transformation of transnational counter-terrorism from something pursued ad hoc to an institutionalised set of activities and actorsFootnote ³⁶ resting on a set of hard and hardening norms developed by public, private, and hybrid actors on national, regional, and international scales.Footnote ³⁷

This stability and institutionalisation confound characterisations of transnational counter-terrorism as constituting an emergency response to 9/11. While it is certainly the case that, at least in the earlier days of the contemporary phase of transnational counter-terrorism, there was recourse to what might be understood as exceptional action from a legal perspective (states of emergency, derogation from human rights treaties, extensive empowerment of executive actions, and rapid reaction by the Security Council), transnational counter-terrorism has developed to destabilise notions of emergency, at least as a clear legal category. Some, but not all, of transnational counter-terrorism relies on military action, sometimes but arguably not always reaching the threshold of armed conflict (and consequently muddying the waters of whether, when, and with what results international humanitarian law appliesFootnote ³⁸). Some, but not all, of transnational counter-terrorism applies responsive sanctions and other repercussions to persons or entities deemed, through extraordinary processes, to be involved in or associated with terrorism, but it does so through a permanent and irregular quasi-judicial structure (raising questions of how, in what way, and to what extent those subject to it are entitled to due process).Footnote ³⁹ Much of transnational counter-terrorism relies on permanent legal, structural, and institutional change to how states pursue security, including through legislative change and the mandated creation of resource-intensive technologies of security, raising questions of whether, how, and to what extent transnational counter-terrorism undermines, overrides, or depoliticises domestic law-making and state sovereignty. The international institutional landscape has been transformed by the emergence and seeming permanence of formal and informal institutions dedicated to pursuing the objectives and ‘supporting’ implementation of norms developed within transnational counter-terrorism, raising questions about the distinction between law and soft law, the processes of law-making, and the legitimacy of contemporary modes of transnational regulation and governance. Transnational counter-terrorism is, in short, legible as part of what Didier Bigo terms the ‘governmentality of unease’;Footnote ⁴⁰ it spans the space ‘between exceptional measures and the immediacy of action on the one hand and the ordinary administrative, police or insurance measures on the other’.Footnote ⁴¹

The creation of an extensive normative and institutional infrastructure around transnational counter-terrorism has meant that the ‘security’ that is sought is not reliant on transient and opportunistic alliances, but rather pursued through a structure that has the potential for permanence and through which a whole host of other securitisations can be funnelled and, in turn, concretised as order. By inserting law into this equation, compulsion is introduced so that security is less dependent on the will of security actors and can rely instead on coercion through legal obligation and associated architectures of compliance and enforcement. By locating much of the norm-generating activity of transnational counter-terrorism in exclusionary forums such as the Security Council,Footnote ⁴² the immediate audience is reduced to a smaller number of willing states with the capacity (if it is needed) to enforce agreement from other states through norm generation. Through all of these machinations and more, transnational counter-terrorism has been removed from the realm of politicisation, and developed into an order of great scale, depth, influence, and opacity – a powerful framework that is remarkably resistant to being dislodged as a pillar of global governance.

The Persistent Problem of Definition

Importantly, this has occurred without the long-standing deadlock on defining terrorism having been resolved.Footnote ⁴³ The Sixth Committee of the General Assembly still has not finalised the Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism – a task on which it has been engaged for decades. In spite of introducing a substantial number of resolutions relating to counter-terrorism (which I consider in Chapter 2), the Security Council has not formulated a binding definition of terrorism in any of them.Footnote ⁴⁴ Neither have its institutions, such as the Counter-Terrorism Committee, developed clear definitions to bound their work. Instead, these institutions seem to have stepped back from the definitional task to focus on acting instead, creating the impression that ideological disagreements over the definition of terrorism have quietened.Footnote ⁴⁵ By doing so, they of course leave the critical task of defining terrorism – and thus the scope of counter-terrorism law and powers – largely to domestic governments and/or international institutions, many of which have taken the opportunity to pursue worryingly expansive approaches, including labelling campaigns pursuing self-determination as ‘terrorist’.Footnote ⁴⁶

The lack of an international definition is not an accident of transnational counter-terrorism; it is a facilitator of it. The failure to grapple with the definition of terrorism as soon as the Security Council began its concerted counter-terrorism work in September 2001 ‘enabled the development of a doctrine of deference to State counter-terrorism practices’Footnote ⁴⁷ that no doubt greased the wheels of state compliance and engagement. No wonder, then, that some consider its avoiding ‘the divisive issue of defining terrorism’ to be one of the reasons why the UN’s Counter-Terrorism Committee (CTC) quickly gained support from member states.Footnote ⁴⁸ If, as Messmer and Yordán argue, the counter-terrorism ‘system’ established by the Security Council is ‘not solely a state-centered effort, nor solely a Security Council-centered one’ but ‘a de-centralized combination of both approaches, establishing a division of labor between the Security Council’s development of strategic global counterterrorism interest, and the states’ role in the execution of these’,Footnote ⁴⁹ then the Council’s persistent failure to define terrorism and practice of imposing expansive and coercive obligations on states produced a situation where states are empowered by the transnational counter-terrorism order, but hardly restrained by it at all. In other words, it may well be that a legally binding definition of terrorism has proved elusive, not only because of differences in approach and motivation across states,Footnote ⁵⁰ but also because of the latitude states acquire from the combination of an increasingly ‘hard’ transnational counter-terrorism order and a persistently absent definitional limit on its application.

This lack of definition remains, notwithstanding over a decade of special rapporteurs calling critical attention to the need for terrorism to be narrowly defined in both national and transnational spaces,Footnote ⁵¹ as well as the decades of inconclusive action by the Sixth Committee of the UN General Assembly, already mentioned. It also remains the case, in spite of a clause in Security Council Resolution 1566 (2004) – a Chapter VII resolution – which might be read as offering something akin to a definition, but which is non-binding,Footnote ⁵² ‘imperfect’,Footnote ⁵³ and missing the limiting features of a definition.Footnote ⁵⁴ In Resolution 1566 (2004) the Security Council:

Although this Security Council resolution does not refer to General Assembly Resolution 49/60 (1994), it does have echoes of it. In that resolution, the General Assembly stated that ‘[c]riminal acts intended or calculated to provoke a state of terror in the general public, a group of persons or particular persons for political purposes are in any circumstance unjustifiable, whatever the considerations of a political, philosophical, ideological, racial, ethnic, religious or any other nature that may be invoked to justify them’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Neither of these provisions provide the kind of limiting force we might consider to be central to a definition should we be seeking legal certainty and precision. They do, however, communicate to state actors a permissive approach from which it might be inferred that the imprimatur of transnational counter-terrorism can be applied to state action provided it is pursued under the guise of counter-terrorism. Indeed, as we will see further in Chapter 4, states seem to have interpreted the lack of a limiting definition as licence, justifying expansive and repressive domestic laws and operations by express reference to Security Council resolutions or the Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy.Footnote ⁵⁷ In other words, while Sebastian von Einsiedel may argue that UN-led counter-terrorism ‘provides conducive background music that can be helpful to those member states who want to embark on comprehensive counter-terrorism efforts in line with human rights and international law’,Footnote ⁵⁸ the real life of transnational counter-terrorism tells us that it also provides little disturbance to those states who wish to use counter-terrorism to repress and dominate their polities. It is important that we acknowledge the effects of, on the one hand, developing a transnational counter-terrorism order with attendant institutions and compliance/enforcement mechanisms and state empowerment and, on the other hand, failing to develop a definition that disciplines and limits the power(s) unleashed by, in, and through that same order.

It is abundantly clear that, at least for norm entrepreneursFootnote ⁵⁹ (including states), counter-terrorism comprises a wide range of activities, laws, technologies, and institutions that have as their aim the identification, disruption, prosecution, punishment, and prevention of terrorism, so categorising certain actors or activities as (counter-)terrorist has real significance. This is important, not only because counter-terrorism is rhetorically counterposed to terrorism, so that whatever is addressed by counter-terrorism law, policy, and activities becomes characterised as ‘terrorism’ and thus treated as such in legal and other ways, but also because it brings me to a point that bubbles underneath much of what I will expound in this book – namely, that transnational counter-terrorism is a transformation project in international affairs.Footnote ⁶⁰ Even while purportedly pursued to address terroristic violence that is itself exploitative, damaging, and unjustified, counter-terrorism is a means of distinguishing between legitimate and illegitimate action, force, and even opinion. It gives prima facie legitimacy to actions undertaken under its auspices. It is a mode of domination and an instrument of violence. It may well have been preferable for national and international law to have eschewed the category of terrorism and instead treated it as crime, but we are a very long way from this. Instead, we operate within a politico-legal world in which terrorism and counter-terrorism are concepts rich with descriptive and normative power in international relations.Footnote ⁶¹

There is, of course, nothing new about arguing that states’ responses to security challenges are often detrimental to the enjoyment of human rights. Indeed, this so-called security/liberty or security/rights dichotomy is so embedded that both scholarly literature and the structure of international human rights law seem to concede to it, whether by promoting the notion of a liberty/security frontier whereby increases in one require decreases in the other until a point of optimisation is reached,Footnote ⁶² or by allowing states to derogate from some human rights obligationsFootnote ⁶³ or to interpret the demands of other, limitable rights ‘contextually’ (read: in a less demanding way) in times of emergency, war, or security-related crises.Footnote ⁶⁴ On the other hand is a compelling body of work that rejects the notion of any such frontier or balancing as placing these concepts in competition with one another, and insists instead on the utility, wisdom, and appropriateness of seeing rights and security as interrelated and interdependent, with rights protection being understood as a bedrock for security and security as a necessary condition for the protection and enjoyment of rights.Footnote ⁶⁵ Under this reading, a state has an obligation to protect those within its jurisdiction from terrorismFootnote ⁶⁶ (and resultant obligations to those who become victims of terrorismFootnote ⁶⁷), and an obligation to do so in a rights-compliant manner. This was well summarised by Martin Scheinin in his last report to the UN Human Rights Committee as UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms while Countering Terrorism (UNSRCT), where he wrote: ‘Compliance with all human rights while countering terrorism represents a best practice because not only is this a legal obligation of States, but it is also an indispensible [sic] part of a successful medium- and long-term strategy to combat terrorism.’Footnote ⁶⁸

Since then, a similar sentiment has been expressed by each of Scheinin’s successors as UNSRCT (Ben Emmerson and Fionnuala Ní Aoláin) as well as by numerous UN bodies. Indeed, the same sentiment is at the core of the Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy,Footnote ⁶⁹ pillar IV of which affirms that human rights and the rule of law are the fundamental bases for countering terrorism.

Transnational Counter-Terrorism: Just More Global ‘Governance’?

In the almost-twenty years since September 2001, the transnational counter-terrorism order has deepened and expanded, with considerable implications at national, regional, and international levels. However, in spite of this, the emergence, concretisation, institutional sprawl, and normative reach of transnational counter-terrorism per se has received limited attention, whether in international law, international relations, or security studies. While some elements have been written on in isolation,Footnote ⁷⁰ some instruments (especially UN Security Council Resolution 1373 (2001)) extensively discussed and debated,Footnote ⁷¹ some actors’ counter-terrorism activities considered in depth,Footnote ⁷² and some topics brought together in thematic handbooks and similar collections,Footnote ⁷³ the transnational counter-terrorism order taken as a whole is only now beginning to receive concerted scholarly attention.Footnote ⁷⁴

Almost twenty years ago Hilary Charlesworth warned against constructing 9/11 as ‘the crisis’ around which much scholarly attention was focused.Footnote ⁷⁵ In her estimation, ‘international lawyers … are preoccupied with great crises, rather than the politics of everyday life. In this way international law steers clear of analysis of longer-term trends and structural problems’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Her observations illuminate a key implication of the tendency in some scholarship to zone in on either 9/11 or specific elements of the post-9/11 order without attending to the steady and sometimes impenetrable expansion of counter-terrorism as a mode of transnational governance that emerged in its aftermath. This book aspires to add to the emerging literature attending to precisely those longer-term implications. Gavin Sullivan uses the sanctions regime empirically and critically to illustrate the development of counter-terrorism as a new global security law that ‘works as a global ordering device’.Footnote ⁷⁷ Similarly, in her insightful work, Isobel Roele looks to the infra-law of counter-terrorism as part of what she deems the legalisation of collective security, arguing that (along with transnational organised crime and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction) counter-terrorism has become a site of ‘law-and-not-law’ managerial governance.Footnote ⁷⁸ Meanwhile, Nathaniel Tilahun Ali brings to light international regulatory initiatives that form part of transnational counter-terrorism and which serve not only to expand regulatory reach but also to multiply those entities that exercise transnational counter-terrorism power.Footnote ⁷⁹

Sullivan, Roele, and Tilahun Ali all focus on particular elements or registers of the transnational counter-terrorism order and, in so doing, bring to light the details of bureaucracy, procedure, practice, and technology that underpin the pervasiveness of transnational counter-terrorism. Complementing this work, I seek to bring to the scholarship a panoramic perspective, influenced by techniques of panorama that at once disorientFootnote ⁸⁰ and ‘promise[] a synthesis and condensation of an entire landscape that [] allow the viewer to comprehend and consume it’.Footnote ⁸¹ Conscious of the limitations of such an enterprise and the necessary sacrifice of some detail in undertaking it, I try to encapsulate activities and developments across different transnational and national scales and different bodies or sub-disciplines of law without being limited by their conventional boundaries, many of which are in any case confounded by the sprawling nature of the transnational counter-terrorism order that I make out in this book. In this, I am motivated by what Karen Alter recently formulated as the attempt ‘to make sense for myself and for others of the crazy and contradictory world we live in’,Footnote ⁸² which I aspire to achieve by engaging in an almost cartographic exercise of mapping the practices and surfacing the problems of the transnational counter-terrorism order, so as to better insist on its breadth and scale and point towards its disruptive and deleterious effects.

In spite of my panoramic aspiration, I do not purport in this book to offer a comprehensive account of the content of transnational counter-terrorism law and policy. In truth, counter-terrorism turns up across so many fields that it could not comprehensively be mapped without an encyclopaedic approach encompassing, for example, measures on the acquisition of weapons,Footnote ⁸³ the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction,Footnote ⁸⁴ the protection of cultural heritage,Footnote ⁸⁵ trafficking in human beings,Footnote ⁸⁶ the protection of critical infrastructure,Footnote ⁸⁷ judicial co-operation,Footnote ⁸⁸ illegal oil exports,Footnote ⁸⁹ ransom payments,Footnote ⁹⁰ the protection of children,Footnote ⁹¹ the impact on refugee law,Footnote ⁹² the intersection with international humanitarian law,Footnote ⁹³ and international standards for the oversight of intelligence and security agencies.Footnote ⁹⁴ I thus organise the book, not around specific topics determined by the content of transnational counter-terrorism, but rather around five key themes: the institutions of transnational counter-terrorism (Chapter 1), the law of transnational counter-terrorism (Chapter 2), the expansiveness of transnational counter-terrorism (Chapter 3), the domestic effects of transnational counter-terrorism (Chapter 4), and the conundrums of accountability in transnational counter-terrorism (Chapter 5).

In this attempt, I do not claim to answer Charlesworth’s call to provide an account of the ‘international law of everyday life’,Footnote ⁹⁵ but I do seek to draw together the many threads, across multiple transnational spaces, that together shape the everyday life of transnational counter-terrorism. I seek to show that while international legal institutions may still on occasions speak the language of crisis and emergency when dealing with specific terrorist acts or actors, counter-terrorism per se has become normalised within everyday international law, transnational activity, and global governance just as it has at the domestic level.Footnote ⁹⁶ In spite of this, it continues to benefit from the allowances conventionally extended to actors in times of crisis: fast-tracked processes of law-making, a lack of transparency, minimal participation, the marginalisation of rights, appeals to necessity, the funnelling of resources, and an absence of accountability. Transnational counter-terrorism is, in other words, an international order under the guise of an emergency response. It has no end, not only because terrorism has been elevated to the status of a global challenge, but also because its laws, institutions, and practices are – and are intended to be – a permanent part of the transnational landscape. The transnational counter-terrorism order does not envisage an end, even while it may speak of defeating terrorism and eradicating the conditions conducive to it. Instead, it adapts, expands, and embeds; it operates as a mode of global governance.

For many people, what I will describe and analyse in this book will resonate with established work on polycentricity in governance,Footnote ⁹⁷ be legible as a simple evolution of the longer-standing tendency of certain fields to have ‘qualitatively shifted from domestic management to complex transnational or global activity’,Footnote ⁹⁸ or reflect established trends of informalisation in international institutions.Footnote ⁹⁹ These developments mark the institutional landscape of transnational counter-terrorism law as much as they do other fields of transnational governance. One might, then, be tempted to suggest that transnational counter-terrorism is just another example of the internationalisation of policy-making, diffusion of authority beyond the state, adjustment of procedural norms, and distribution of governance resources across a growing range of actors and entities – that it is just more of the same. The inclusion of private actors in shaping, developing, and enforcing standards and rules across borders is old hat to scholars of migration, for example. Institutional sprawl and the development of soft law and club-like structures to pursue hegemony will surprise no international trade lawyers. The sprawl of security rhetoric into fields like internet regulation and border management will be familiar to critical security scholars. The absence of effective accountability mechanisms for transnational activity will be recognisable to scholars of transnational regulatory governance, and so on. So, what is it that makes these developments worth dwelling on, and even worth worrying about, in the context of transnational counter-terrorism?

The answer lies in the nature of counter-terrorism as a subset of security. Like all security, counter-terrorism has a kind of gravitational pull. Upon being invoked, it is capable of containing within it a whole host of challenges and issues that, once counter-terrorised, become engulfed in a security frame. Given the stickiness of that frame and the stability of transnational counter-terrorism, it is hard to recover and reconstitute these as being matters not of security but of humanitarianism, ethics, or human rights protection. Some legal scholars already dispute the securitisation literature’s claims of de-securitisation,Footnote ¹⁰⁰ conscious that even if matters are moved out of the formal discourse of security, the logic of security remains imprinted on the legal landscape through which it has passed. Rights have been recalibrated downwards and never recover their previous, more expansive content. Institutions that were presented as meeting temporary exigencies are never dismantled. Emergency legislation is repackaged and made permanent. Procedural adjustments to protect security during trials are normalised and spread across fields, and sometimes across jurisdictions. Industries, technologies, expertise, and professions that have developed in response to the counter-terrorisation of an issue remain in place and continue to influence the purportedly de-securitised field. The gravitational pull of counter-terrorism is accompanied by the corrosive effects of securitisation, such that the state’s obligations to respect, protect, and fulfil human rights become distorted and repackaged as obligations to counter terrorism, with even the most egregiously repressive actions being presented as rights protection, either for the general populace or for those ‘vulnerable to radicalisation’, or both.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Counter-terrorism changes shape and may sometimes barely be visible, but it never goes away. That is why it matters.