Security, Identity, and British Counterterrorism Policy

Kathryn Marie Fisher

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781349572083, 9781137524218
• eBook ISBN: 9781137524225
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Gobierno estadounidense

Counterterrorism laws and policies have become a normalized fixture of security agendas across the globe. How do 'us/them' identity constructions contribute to the legitimizing strategies surrounding this development? The British case provides a historically-situated illustration which is of ongoing significance for security and insecurity today.

Part I

Setting the Scene

1

Counterterrorism, Identity, (In)security

On 30 January 2014, British Home Secretary Theresa May of the Conservative Party,¹ then with the support of Nick Clegg (Liberal Democrats) and Hazel Blears (Labour Party, former cabinet member), proposed a security amendment to the Immigration Bill, “deprivation of citizenship”:²

(60) Deprivation if conduct seriously prejudicial to vital interests of the UK.

(1)In section 40 of the British Nationality Act 1981 (deprivation of citizenship), after subsection (4) insert–.

“(4A)But that does not prevent the Secretary of State from making an order under subsection (2) to deprive a person of a citizenship status if—.

(a)the citizenship status results from the person’s naturalisation, and

(b)the Secretary of State is satisfied that the deprivation is conducive to the public good because the person, while having that citizenship status, has conducted him or herself in a manner which is seriously prejudicial to the vital interests of the United Kingdom, any of the Islands, or any British overseas territory.” [emphasis added]

(2)In deciding whether to make an order under subsection (2) of section 40 of the British Nationality Act 1981 in a case which falls within subsection (4A) of that Act, the Secretary of State may take account of the manner in which a person conducted him or herself before this section came into force.³

This amendment passed the House of Commons Third Reading 295 to 16 and remained in the final bill, receiving Royal Assent 14 May 2014. While the Immigration Act is not exclusively focused on counterterrorism, it speaks to counterterrorism lawmaking and identity construction in how some measures were constituted through a discourse of deprivation with respect to “British nationality”, reinforcing an externalization of individuals from the self due to a possible affiliation with terrorism. The power to separate within from without is in this book argued to be of significant consequence over time when one considers repeated associations of terrorist danger with (non)belonging, even if there were no convictions for a specific offense:

Mark Pritchard (Con): For clarification, is it the Government’s position that someone considered under the new criterion would not need to have committed any criminal or terrorism-related offence, but could be walking around the streets of London right now?

Theresa May (Con, Home Secretary): Yes. People need not have been convicted of a particular offence to be deprived of their citizenship.⁴

May went on to argue that the measure is “a targeted policy that will be used sparingly against very dangerous individuals who have brought such action upon themselves through terrorist-related acts” [emphasis added] and that the clause is “proportionate and necessary”.⁵ Legitimizing discourse was linked to the deportation of “foreign criminals” [emphasis added], continuing a pattern of constructing terrorists as physically and ideationally external to the self.⁶

It is this propensity to link a particular outsider status with terrorism and terrorists that largely drives this book’s analysis of British counterterrorism law and policy over approximately 40 years. While security risks associated with terror continue, for example as evidenced by the January 2015 attacks in Paris, the ways that we understand and represent such risks in discourse and practice is not predetermined, entails particular consequences, and thus remains open to critical analysis. On the UK government website “Policy: Protecting the UK from terrorism”, last updated in September 2014, it states the “threat to the UK and our interests from international terrorism is severe”, that the “terrorist threats we face now are more diverse than before, dispersed across a wider geographical area, and often in countries without effective governance” [emphasis added].⁷ Articulations of “international” merge a seemingly undeniable expansiveness of danger with a problematic ambiguity of identification. In this sense representations of international terrorism are based in vague yet politically inarguable constructions of the terrorist as external to the referent.

The path of British counterterrorism has not been about exclusively increasing and expanding state power, but that is observed as being the dominant trajectory. Measures have been taken to curtail security in the name of liberty, and from one perspective, we can consider an increase in legal powers as connected to an increase in attention to human rights given a rise in official reviews and reports during lawmaking.⁸ Control orders were eventually removed and pre-charge detention was decreased to 14 days with the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012. Nick Clegg has agreed with those claiming a need for updated laws but has also voiced opposition to “blanket” surveillance in a language of national identity – for example, insisting “he did not regard it as British to presume the whole nation was guilty by requiring the internet companies to retain such a vast amount of data”.⁹ In addition, there has been growing attention to consequences of alienation, not only in official reports, reviews from groups such as Liberty, and critical academic literature, but also during parliamentary debate, as will be discussed in later chapters.

However, despite moves as above that could be seen as a recalibration of the liberty-security nexus, the current state of counterterrorism is largely one of normalized exception. Policies such as CONTEST (“The United Kingdom’s Strategy for Countering Terrorism”, which was until June 2011 referred to as “The United Kingdom’s Strategy for Countering International Terrorism” [emphasis added]) have become institutionally embedded, and new laws such as the UK Counterterrorism and Security Act (CTSA) 2015 continue to be passed. Receiving Royal Assent in the weeks leading up to this book’s final submission, the CTSA 2015 reinforces Temporary Prevention and Investigation Measures (TPIMs) introduced in 2011 and includes new provisions for powers, such as temporary exclusion orders restricting individuals from returning to the UK for up to two years. Focusing on the British case is not to single out the UK as the only case demanding analysis, but to enable an empirical engagement that is attuned to contextual specificity. It is important to approach this single case with a lens attentive to ongoing expansions in counterterrorism beyond the UK. On 9 December 2014 New Zealand passed the Countering Terrorist Fighters Legislation Bill, explained as responding to “the rapidly evolving threat posed by the issue of foreign terrorist fighters and growing international terrorism”.¹⁰ On 18 December 2014 Kenya passed a “sweeping counterterrorism bill”, including the power to hold suspects for up to a year without charge.¹¹ In France, following the January 2015 attacks, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls declared France was at “war with terrorism, jihadism, and radicalism”, opening the door to new legal proposals.¹² In Belgium, there are promises of new laws “Expanding the cases where Belgian citizenship can be revoked (for dual nationals) for those thought to pose a terror risk”.¹³ And in April 2015 the controversial Prevention of Terrorism Act 2015 was passed in Malaysia. In the United States, counterterrorism strategy includes ongoing discussion to revise the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) given challenges from the Islamic State and the Levant (ISIL), revisions that would expand security measures “against ISIL or associated persons or forces” [emphasis added].¹⁴

Such security moves and related processes of legitimation that could be interpreted as foreignizing the terrorist are not new to 2014 discourse around “foreign fighters” supporting the Islamic State (IS).¹⁵ Rather, they link to articulations of terrorism as an external other before 21st-century events, with arguments for and against exceptional measures employing a “logic of exclusion” similar to mid-late 20th-century discourse and practice.¹⁶ These externalizing measures have become an embedded part to how we (try to) make sense of insecurity from terrorism. David Miranda’s detention at Heathrow on 18 August 2013 reinvigorated debates over a security state.¹⁷ But even critical voices situated their dissent through assumptions of terrorism as from outside: “The terrorism law, enacted in 2000, is aimed at killers. It is designed to allow police to stop possible jihadists or Irish Republican Army (IRA) members planning bombings, as they enter Britain” [emphasis added].¹⁸ By tracing British official discourse and practice across four decades, this book provides one narrative of how counterterrorism has come to be formed and legitimized in the way that it has by paying particular attention to how the language of identity construction is not an objective description of some preexisting reality, but is constitutive of how we understand reality in an ontological sense. In this way we can consider how language is of a particular causal consequence for outcomes of meaning-making and action.

Rationale and backdrop

From the mid-late 20th century through the first decade of the 21st century, labels such as “domestic” and “international” with regard to terrorism became unquestioned terms with which to categorize the terrorist other. Defining international terrorism as involving “the citizens or jurisdiction of more than one country” and domestic terrorism as “confined within the borders of a single state and [involves] no foreign citizens or property”¹⁹ would seem to be a relatively clear delineation. But as acknowledged by Paul Wilkinson, such inside/outside boundary making is problematic given unavoidable categorical overlap.²⁰ Labels of terrorism may come across as self-evident, but such identifications are instead tied to social and political practices of meaning making. In considering these practices and their consequences, legal moves are an important source with which explore how social and political processes reinforce and/or reconstruct modes of legality, borders of control, and dominant (or dominating) security norms. New legal measures can be activated during moments of crisis, but as explained by Claudia Aradau and Rens Van Munster, they are also “constitutive of sovereignty, modern law and political communities” [emphasis added].²¹ New powers are thus not reflective of a pre-existing reality, but instead, they contribute to the content of that reality. As new laws are formed, the benchmark for subsequent lawmaking is recalibrated and parameters of state power are reconfigured through rule of law legitimation struggles, enabling a kind of mundane routinization of exceptionality.²²

Acts of law establish a particular type of stat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Part I  Setting the Scene
• Part II  A Story of British Counterterrorism and Identity
• Part III  Reflecting and Looking Ahead
• Appendices
• Notes
• References
• Index