Suchergebnisse

The concept of the 'pre-criminal space' has seen increasing uncritical use in countering terrorism policy since 9/11. It is understood by critical scholars primarily as a new legal temporality that brings forward the 'threshold of criminal responsibility', thus allowing for pre-emptive, suspicion-based criminalisation. This has allowed for the validation of measures such as arbitrary arrest and detention, bogus trial and restrictions on liberty, and is evidenced as being applied in an Islamophobic and racialised manner to entire communities. Furthermore, in our contemporary moment of Covid-19 where the emergency tools used to regulate hygiene and infection intersect with those used in countering terrorism work, critics are increasingly concerned about the expansion and normalisation of the pre-criminal space and its use in pathologising and medicalised ways. Using archival research, this article adapts the contemporary concept of the 'pre-criminal' to a historical and medico-legal context. In doing so it traces how the history of infectious diseases – in particular VD – has shaped the space through slippages between hegemonic understandings of morality, hygiene, vagrancy and extremism. I show how the 'vagrant' nature of disease marked racialised, gendered and classed subjects as potentially infectious and immoral. Looking particularly at the regulation of sex workers in British-occupied Egypt, I conceptualise the power struggles between actors including the British administration, British abolitionist feminists and the Egyptian government as a securitisation network which infiltrated the lives of Egyptians and marked them as suspicious. I further show how the encroachment upon everyday lives was made even more possible through the implementation of martial law. In this way, I suggest that contemporary British forms of pre-criminality and risk can be understood as a latent form of coloniality present in law-making practices.

Since the Moroccan invasion in 1975, official reports on visits to Sahrawi refugee camps by international aid agencies and faith-based groups consistently reflect an overwhelming impression of gender equality in Sahrawi society. As a result, the space of the Sahrawi refugee camps in Algeria and, by external association, Sahrawi society and Western Sahara as a nation-in-exile is constructed as 'ideal' (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2010, p. 67). I suggest that the 'feminist nationalism' of the Sahrawi nation-in-exile is one that is employed strategically by internal representatives of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Saguia el-Hamra and Río de Oro (POLISARIO), the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) and the National Union of Sahrawi Women (NUSW), and by external actors from international aid agencies and also the colonial Moroccan state. The international attention paid to the active role of certain women in Sahrawi refugee camps makes 'Other' Sahrawi invisible, such as children, young women, mothers, men, people of lower socio-economic statuses, ('liberated') slave classes and refugees who are not of Sahrawi background. According to Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh ( ibid.), it also creates a discourse of 'good', 'ideal' refugees who are reluctant to complain, in contrast to 'Other refugees'. This feminisation allows the international community not to take the Sahrawi call for independence seriously and reproduces the myth of Sahrawi refugees as naturally non-violent (read feminine) and therefore 'ideal'. The myth of non-violence accompanied by claims of Sahrawi secularity is also used to distance Western Sahara from 'African', 'Arab' and 'Islamic', to reaffirm racialised and gendered discourses that associate Islam with terrorism and situate both in the Arab/Muslim East. These binaries make invisible the violence that Sahrawis experience as a result of the gendered constructions of both internal and external actors, and silence voices of dissent and frustration with the more than forty years of waiting to return home.

"This interdisciplinary book presents an intervention into methodological practices in the subfield of Critical Terrorism Studies, and features established and early career scholars. The volume interrogates the role that research methods play in shaping the sub-discipline of Critical Terrorism Studies (CTS). It responds to two major methodological gaps within CTS: (1) the dearth of Global South cases and voices, and decolonial and feminist approaches; and (2) the lack of engagement with 'traditional' disciplines and quantitative methods. Together, authors demonstrate that interdisciplinary methodological dialogues can open up new possibilities for researchers seeking pathways towards and definitions of emancipation, social justice and freedom from violence. Simultaneously, the book shows that by focusing on the possibilities that methodologies open up to us and by maintaining a commitment to reflexive practice, we expand our understandings of what are 'legitimate' and 'acceptable' forms of research, thus challenging the Critical/Terrorism Studies divide. The chapters draw upon a wide range of empirical cases, including Nigeria, Kenya, France, Brazil and the UK, focusing on three key issues within Critical Terrorism Studies: its own relationship with and perpetuation of epistemic violence; decolonial, postcolonial, Global South, feminist and queer approaches; and more 'traditional' approaches and methods as a means to interrogate the methodological binary between Critical Terrorism Studies and Terrorism Studies. This book will be of much interest to students of critical terrorism studies, counter-terrorism, security studies and International Relations in general"--