CPL Lunchtime seminar: 'Homeland Insecurity. The Rise and Rise of Global Anti-terrorism Law'

Speaker: Professor Conor Gearty (LSE)

In the decades following the 9/11 attacks, complex webs of anti-terrorism laws have come into play across the world, promising to protect ordinary citizens from bombings, hijackings and other forms of mass violence. But are we really any safer? Has freedom been secured by active deployment of state power, or fatally undermined? In his recent book, the title of this lecture, Conor Gearty unpacks the history of global anti-terrorism law, explaining not only how these regulations came about, but also the untold damage that he claims they have wrought upon freedom and human rights. Ranging from the age of colonialism to the Cold War, through the perennial crises in the Middle East to the exponential growth of terrorism discourse compressed into the first two decades of the 21st century, the coercion these laws embody is here to stay. The ‘War on Terror’ was something that colonial and neo-colonial liberal democracies had always been doing―and something that is not going away. Anti-terrorism law no longer requires terrorism to survive. And with Israel's recent destruction of Gaza it is clear that for it and its Global North supporters, anti-terrorism no longer needs law of any sort to claim legitimacy.

Conor Gearty is professor of human rights law at LSE and a practising barrister at Matrix Chambers. He is a Fellow of the British Academy (of which he was until recently a Vice-President), a Member of the Royal Irish Academy, an honorary KC, a Bencher of Middle Temple and of the King's Inn in Dublin, and has four honorary degrees from universities in the UK, Ireland and the US. He has recently many books and articles on terrorism, civil liberties and human rights, and is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books, Prospect, and The Tablet.