Description
Socio-legal and security scholars have explored how, in terrorism trials, there occurs an intense affective clash between the spectacular and the mundane (De Goede & De Graaf 2013; Anwar & Aardse 2024). Pre-emptive imaginaries have constructed 'precursor offences' of financial transactions or internet downloads, bringing banal, everyday micro-happenings into the arena of national terrorism trials. This paper does not explore terrorism trials but instead explores how post-terrorist inquiries and reviews also place the mundane centre-stage. Like trials, inquiries construct knowledge about spectacular, sensationalised violence as - paradoxically - the product of extremely mundane moments. Inquiries and reviews locate danger in the mundane moments leading up to an attack – domesticating it within long accounts of perpetrator movements, phone calls, Amazon purchases, and gym memberships. This is very different from the securitised imaginaries of foreignness and religiosity often promoted by security officials. But pre-emption still underscores this work: by knowing the minute-by-minute precursors to a past attack, we might be able to spot these same signs in the future and intervene. The pre-emptive imaginary of the mundane allows the identification of technocratic failures that facilitated misrecognition of threat. These can then be projected into the future as technocratic fixes, while evacuating the political, the international and the historical from the frame.
