Visiting Speaker Event with Dr Alice Finden

Counterterrorism and Colonialism provides a feminist and postcolonial take on the violent and expansive nature of counterterrorism globally and in Britain and Egypt specifically. It seeks to conceptualise colonial and postcolonial patterns of security and counterterrorism by exploring the relationship between lawmaking and intimate governance. By drawing together Legal Studies, Gender Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, Postcolonial Studies and Criminology I contest a key framing within Critical Security Studies and International Politics scholarship that views counterterrorism and countering violent extremism as exceptional post-9/11 phenomena. Instead, I conceptualise counterterror and security tools as part of the everyday, administrative and normal operation of law, productive of legal categories of difference that draw through colonial patterns and are created in intimate spaces. Methodologically, this study critically engages with the production of colonial and postcolonial truth-making about ‘extremist’, ‘immoral’, and ‘vulnerable’ subjects by juxtaposing archival moments from the early twentieth century British colonial occupation of Egypt with interviews with Egyptian migrants to Britain today. I demonstrate how the legal production of ‘dangerous’ subjectivities accompanies systemic sovereign anxieties that defy the boundaries of a wartime emergency. This method helps me both to identify normalising moments that are framed as ‘emergency’ and to read ‘against’ colonial versions of truth. Ultimately, I find that while counterterrorism replicates colonial patterns of violence, a refusal of these structures also entails the creation of alternative and hopeful pasts, presents and futures.