This opening paragraph of CONTEST: The United Kingdom's Strategy for Countering Terrorism demonstrates that counter-terrorism is everywhere in the contemporary UK. It has become a quotidian part of the law, institutions, activities and preoccupations of the state. Counter-terrorism is no longer temporary or exceptional. It is permanent and everyday, even though its effects and intrusions continue to be justified by the rhetoric of necessity, exceptionalism and extraordinariness. Within this counter-terrorist state, questions arise about how to give effect to the fundamental constitutional and democratic commitment to accountability. The answer, we argue, lies at least to some degree in an assemblage of actors, institutions and activities that we call ‘counter-terrorism review’.

Conceptualising counter-terrorism review

Throughout this work, we use the term ‘counter-terrorism review’ to describe the assemblage of actors, processes and actions related to accountability for the counter-terrorist state. Our use of this term is intended to move us past a narrow construction of counter-terrorism review as comprising only juridical processes of review. While judicial consideration of counter-terrorism law is part of counter-terrorism review, it is not sufficient to capture the broad range of activities to which the term could be applied. As Dawn Oliver tells us, ‘access to the courts alone cannot protect us from bad government’. While courts play a critical role in assessing lawfulness, this is not and should not be the only standard by which we might hold the state to account in counter-terrorism. In other words, while judicial review tells us something about counter-terrorism, that is largely limited to questions of law. Nor is political review sufficient: review through parliamentary committees or parliamentary debate is part of counter-terrorism review, but it is not all of it. We use the term ‘counter-terrorism review’ to include and go beyond these two forums (courts and politics) and their various review functions, even though the workings and relative merits of both are dominant in the literature of counter-terrorism ‘oversight’.