Time will tell: Defining violence in terrorism court cases

Abstract

Calculating the potential risk of future terrorist violence is at the core of counter-terrorism practices. Particularly in court cases, this potential risk serves as legitimization for the preemptive criminalization of suspicious (financial) behaviour. This article argues that the preemptive temporality seen in such court cases is a practice of ‘sorting time’ and producing distinct legal definitions around future violence. Building on postcolonial and feminist scholarship on temporality, the article examines preemptive temporality as the material, embodied and multiple engagements with time that are enacted in terrorism court cases. Through the use of empirical data obtained from court observations, court judgements and interviews with legal practitioners, accounts of empirical temporalities are traced to illuminate other forms of violence that until now have been overshadowed by the dominant (and relatively unchallenged) perception of future terrorist threats that is enacted in the courtroom. In this way, the article makes two important contributions. First, it advances the theoretical debate on preemptive security through an examination of how legal and security practices co-produce temporality by defining future terrorist violence. Second, it contributes empirically by showing how temporality is constructed in multiple ways, paying specific attention to temporalities resisting dominating perceptions of future terrorist violence.

Courtroom Ethnography in the Context of Terrorism: A Multi-Level Approach

“…They are, first, presented as existential threats—as terrorists—and, second, located in a public discourse on jihadism and violent conflict in Syria and Iraq that reiterates hegemonic narratives opposing East and West, secular and religious, democratic and theocratic. Anwar (2021, p. 5) argues that terrorism trials are situated at a politicized intersection of the epistemic fields of “security” and “law” and are consequently subject to tensions that have to do with inherent and juxtaposed knowledge practices from the two fields. While security sector agencies align actions and decisions toward managing the future through pre-emption and intervention and therefore work with undisclosed data and knowledge, legal reasoning is oriented towards reconstructing past events in a plausible and legally sound manner and therefore aims to disclose and deliberate on the quality of case-related knowledge.…”