Description
The global expansion of counterterrorism practices following 9/11 has fundamentally reshaped security governance, with policies increasingly permeating domestic spaces through surveillance programmes and targeted interventions. Contemporary counterterrorism policies instrumentalise care relationships, institutions, and discourses for security purposes, creating fundamental tensions between care ethics and security logics. Investigating the intersection of care and counterterrorism is significant to understand how these ostensibly contradictory domains have become entangled in contemporary security governance, enabling identification of both harms generated and potential alternatives. This scoping review aimed to evaluate social science literature concerning care and counterterrorism intersections. We employed the PRISMA methodology to evaluate literature from databases. A total of 91 articles were identified, with 13 meeting the inclusion criteria. The findings reveal systematic patterns in how care relationships and institutions are appropriated for security purposes and thematic analysis generated seven themes: intersection of security and care, surveillance infrastructure embedded in care systems, racialised targeting and harm in securitised care, professional identity crisis in securitised care, medicalisation and pathologisation of political behaviour, mass responsibilisation for counter-terrorism surveillance, and resistance and agency within securitised care. Based on our findings, the importance of developing care-based alternatives to militarised counterterrorism that maintain clear boundaries from security logics is highlighted.
