Description
This paper focuses on the often-overlooked impacts of counterterrorism programming on children and families who, while not direct recipients of interventions, are nevertheless implicated through their relationships. Using Friedman and Ketola’s (2023) concept of relational harm—the broader harm that individuals and communities experience through the targeting and control of their intimate relationships—this study examines how contemporary security practices generate harm through relational and affective networks rather than only through direct state intervention.
Taking a critical and feminist approach, I examine the policies of migration governance and diaspora politics in the UK to ask how is familial harm produced through the securitisation of whole communities, and how do connections to others become a source of (in)security and vulnerability? Using discourse analysis to analyse public records, community documents and individual experiences, I offer insights into the relationship between the family, state practices of ‘security’ and the process of ‘securitisation’, revealing how racialised and gendered security logics extend deeply into the social fabric, (re)producing familial harm and reshaping everyday life.
As International Affairs looks to the next 50 years, this paper shows how Britain’s security infrastructure remains rooted in colonialist, patriarchal and racialised norms, where ‘security’ is contingent. Through an innovative methodological and theoretical approach grounded in ethics, care and relationality, the paper contributes to rethinking what rights and protections are required to enable security at the individual and family level, and how counterterrorism policy and practice must adapt to minimise experiences of harm for those who interact with counterterrorism infrastructure. In doing so, it invites counterterrorism scholars and practitioners to move beyond critique and toward the dismantling of existing institutional structures to enable more just futures—ones grounded in feminist principles of rights, humanity, and equity, and responsive to the emerging global challenges of the coming decades.
