Description
Post 9/11 and the global war on terror, there has been a proliferation of counter terrorism legislation worldwide. However, the majority of scholarly work that investigates counter terrorism is focused on the liberal western state in various manifestations of a ‘state of exception’. This paper aims to add a postcolonial angle to such debates through attending to themes of security, agency, and legitimacy in two formerly colonised states (India and Egypt). The primary contention of this paper is that counter terrorism laws can be conceptualised as sites of negotiation with colonial modes of thinking and imperial legal logics in postcolonial contexts. We argue that coloniality features in these two postcolonial sites as the refashioning of colonial forms of governance in ways that both perpetuate the hierarchies of colonial law-making and create them anew in a globalised context.
This paper uses a genealogical and comparative approach that investigates the legal and political architecture of India and Egypt’s security infrastructure. We highlight two legal manifestations that we argue are colonial in origin and continue to shape counter terrorism work in India and Egypt’s attempts to manufacture authority. These are a ‘hyperlegal’ set-up, or an excessive use of law as a means to foreclose civic freedoms, and a ‘collective’ outlook, whereby the state groups people together as a means of criminalisation. We demonstrate that the multifarious and messy terrain of counter terrorism law-making is reflective of these postcolonial states’ anxieties around statehood, sovereignty, and territorial integrity.
