Description
This paper looks to the history of pre-criminal technologies, presenting a methodology that can expose the persistence of coloniality within contemporary countering terrorism and trace convergences in tools used across democracies and autocracies. This feminist methodology provides a fragmented view of contemporary authoritarian tools as shared global phenomena, similarly dependent upon the marginalisation of racialised, classed and gendered subjects.
Pre-criminal tools – which purport to ‘catch’ potential extremists before they are ‘radicalised’ – are primarily understood to be new exceptional post 9/11 developments within the west that erode liberal democratic values. By looking to the relationship of pre-criminal thinking with colonial law-making in British-occupied Egypt, however, I demonstrate that these tools are instead part of normal and everyday legal and administrative governance central to the development of both liberal democracies and autocracies. This paper uses archival research and contemporary interviews to show how the development of pre-emptive governance is dependent upon the colonial erasure and re-writing of marginalised modes of thinking and being through occupation. By interrogating the legitimising effects of (western) law-making, this approach provides the tools to disrupt narratives that would posit contemporary Egyptian law-making as qualitatively different to that in Britain. Finally, by looking to forms of everyday violence, this paper also provides a methodology that holds together the local and the intimate with the national and the global, contending that contemporary counter terrorism is dependent upon the everyday production of categories of difference and classifications of suspicion.
