ABSTRACT
The period following the events of September 2001 marked a major watershed in the relationship between the British state and individuals living within its borders. In what can be described as a ‘frenzied’ approach to law-making, the last United Kingdom (UK) government, led by the Labour Party, enacted five major pieces of counter-terrorism legislation between 2000 and 2008. In the context of the heightened security environment, the legislation sought to enhance the collective security of the nation by promoting the freedoms of the so-called law-abiding majority at the expense of the civil liberties of the ‘suspect’ minority (Pantazis and Pemberton 2011a). Driving the processes of securitization has been a centre-right political consensus, an alliance between the ‘Blairites’ within the Labour Party and the ‘Tory hawks’ within the Conservative Party (Lambert 2011). A remarkably resilient ‘security hegemony’, resting on the powerful ‘new terrorism’ discourse, formed to augment populist opinion behind these reforms (Pantazis and Pemberton 2011a). This discourse purports that the new threat is both qualitatively and quantitatively different from past types of terror and is motivated by an extremist religious ideology, which shows no bounds in terms of the damage it is capable of inflicting (HM Government 2010, 2011). The ‘new terrorism’ discourse offers a platform from which other discourses may be built, insofar as the current threat requires a rebalancing of security and civil liberties – with the former serving to endanger the latter through its rationale of modernizing the criminal justice system by expanding counter-terrorism powers and encouraging a shift towards ‘pre-emption’ within the criminal justice system (McCulloch and Pickering 2009). Without doubt, the ‘new terrorism’ discourse served to legitimate the British state’s undermining of the most fundamental individual liberties, including the right to a fair trial, freedom from torture, freedom from discrimination and the right to liberty. However, it would be misleading to suggest that these encroachments have been untrammelled. Indeed, the Labour government was embarrassingly forced to retreat in a number of crucial areas of its counter-terrorism policy, for example, over its use of indefinite detention of terrorist suspects – a situation likened to the US’s Guantanamo Bay (Liberty 2003), while the policy of indiscriminate police stop-and-search tactics has since undergone significant
revision. We contend that the worst excesses of the securitization agenda, which unfolded over the past decade, have been slowly dismantled. Explanation for this lies in the frameworks of resistance that have emerged during this period to challenge the prevailing security hegemony. In this chapter, we identity three dominant frameworks of resistance, constituted by material practices and social action, as well as a series of discourses that have sought to contest these legislative developments. First, the ‘human rights framework’ has directly challenged the encroachment of individual liberty by the state by invoking human rights norms and instruments. These have been mobilized and have formed critical sites of resistance for a diverse range of actors, including politicians, judges and non-government organizations (NGOs). A second dominant framework revolves around the promotion of ‘freedom’. This framework defends a negative notion of freedom (Berlin 1958), seeking the removal of constraints on the ability of individuals to act and promoting the idea of being free from the ‘big state’. The Muslim community, in all its diverse forms, through representative bodies, as well as others, including policymakers, NGOs and academics (Hickman et al. 2010; Kundnani 2009; Pantazis and Pemberton 2009a; Choudhury and Fenwick 2011), has been instrumental in promoting the third major resistance framework, which focuses on the ‘criminalization of communities’. Here, the attention is on the corrosive impacts of expanded counter-terrorism powers on the religious and ethnic groups disproportionately affected, highlighting how ‘suspicion’ has come to define the experiences of ordinary law-abiding Muslims and other minority groups. The chapter seeks to evaluate the ways in which the security agenda outlined so far has been contested by these resistance frameworks. In doing so, three principal themes run throughout our analysis and form the basis of our conclusion. First, through an analysis of the strategies that are embedded within these frameworks, we can better understand their transformative capacity. Drawing on Michalowski’s metaphor of the ‘master’s tools’ (Chapter 16, this volume), a key concern we address is the extent to which these strategies become subsumed within the existing security agenda, therefore serving to legitimate the status quo. If, as Foucault (1981) suggests, resistance strategies should be considered as embedded within existing fields of power, the nature of power necessitates that we seek to identify which strategies are best placed to minimize the pervasive impacts of the security agenda. Second, the extent to which these frameworks represent a coalition of interests is explored. While the frameworks represent a broad resistance strategy, they are constituted by a wide range of ‘social audiences’ (Green and Ward 2000) with an array of interests and goals that at times conflict and potentially contradict one another. Third, drawing on Stanley and McCulloch (Chapter 1, this volume), we can assess the success of resistance frameworks in a variety of ways. Within this context, success can most obviously be defined in terms of the resulting reforms in counter-terrorism powers. Key indicators of success would include the removal of counterterrorism powers, the reduction in the level of discretion on which powers are based, and the reversal of the shift towards pre-emption. However, in many
respects, these would represent limited incursions into the security agenda. We contend that a more significant and sustained transformative project would also serve to undermine the security hegemony which has augmented populist support behind these counter-terrorism powers.
