The British Journal of Criminology 49:603-608 (2009)
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Introduction
* Professor of Criminology, Social Policy and Criminology, The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes MK76AA, UK; r.walters{at}open.ac.uk.
On 20 September 2001, the former US President, George W. Bush, declared what is now widely, and arguably infamously, known as a ‘war on terror’. In response to the fatal 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington, DC, President Bush identified the US military response as having far-reaching and long-lasting consequences. It was, he argued, ‘our war on terror’ that began ‘with al Qaeda, but ... it will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated’ (CNN 2001). This was to be a war that would, in the words of former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, seek to eliminate a threat that was ‘aimed at the whole democratic world’ (Blair 2001). Blair claimed that this threat is of such magnitude that unprecedented measures would need to be taken to uphold freedom and security. Blair would later admit that it was a war that ‘divided the country’ and was based on evidence ‘about Saddam having actual biological and chemical weapons, as opposed to the capability to develop them, has turned out to be wrong’ (Blair 2004). The failures of intelligence ushered in new political rhetoric in the form of ‘trust me’ because ‘instinct is no science’ (Blair 2004).
The war on terror has been one of the most significant international events in the past three decades, alongside the collapse of the former Soviet Union, the end of apartheid in South Africa, the unification of Europe and the marketization of the People's Republic of China. Yet, unlike the other events, it will not be remembered for advancing democracy or sovereignty, but for the conviction politics of particular politicians who chose to dispense with international law and custom in pursuit of personal instincts that proved fatal.
Since the invasions of Afghanistan in October 2001 and Iraq in May 2003, there have been numerous events that have continually captured international media headlines and served to provoke ongoing academic as well as political debate. The outgoing UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, criticized the war, claiming that ‘No nation can make itself secure by seeking supremacy over all others. No state can make its own actions legitimate in the eyes of others .... When power, especially military force, is used, the world will consider it legitimate only when convinced that it is being used for the right purpose—for broadly shared aims—in accordance with broadly accepted norms’. Indeed, it has recently been reported that innocent people around the world are now paying the price for the ‘Iraq effect’ (Annan 2006).
The unsanctioned invasions have witnessed large civilian and military fatalities, with the civilian Iraqi death count at upwards of 275,000 people f(Green and Ward this volume), theft and destruction of cultural heritage (McKenzie 2005), corruption and corporate profiteering throughout occupation (Whyte 2007) and widespread human rights abuses. Contempt for international law has resulted in the resignation of cabinet ministers, criticism from senior armed forces personnel and widespread public opposition on a global scale. More recently, we have witnessed an unprecedented rise in the number of US soldiers applying for conscientious objector status (O'Brian 2009).
For numerous commentators, the war on terror has been a political, economical, environmental and humanitarian failure of colossal proportions. The case for war; the falsification of intelligence; the deaths of innocent civilians; Abu Graib; rendition flights; the trial and execution of Saddam Hussein; the corporate plunder of Iraqi resources and contracts; the conviction of a senior White House official for obstructing justice (to name just a few incidents) have all provoked international debates and raised questions that call for academic engagement across a range of disciplines. Issues of human rights; the rule of law; policing and civil liberties; notions of security, sovereignty and freedom; and the role of international law and enforcement have all been questioned, challenged and hotly contested politically. They are also within the domain of law, of political science, of philosophy and, of course, of criminology (Wilson 2005; Scraton 2002; Sengupta and Cockburn 2007).
If criminology is to be a dynamic and evolving discipline, it must engage with these significant international events, and extend its thematic scope beyond its well worn topics. It has sometimes been suggested that working on new areas and themes requires moving from criminology to another discourse. Carol Smart (1995: 13), for example, wrote of ‘abandoning criminology’ to engage with law and sexuality, while Stan Cohen (1993) describes himself as having ‘stopped doing criminology’ and, instead, ‘doing human rights’. It is not, as Smart points out, criminology's focus of study that is abandoned, but its disciplinary frameworks.
Criminology has, however, proved itself capable of encompassing new themes and new paradigms, as can be seen in its inclusion of, for example, state crime, the criminalization of migration, transitional justice, diversity, post-colonial theory and critical race feminism. While criminologists engaging in these new problematics may not have found it necessary to abandon criminology, they have certainly had to ‘transgress’ criminology, to use Maureen Cain's (1989) term. Criminology has always been defined more by its areas of concern than by any single-disciplinary nature, having its roots in law, sociology and social-psychology. Inclusion of new themes and problems has involved further excursions into these disciplines, and it has also occasioned borrowing from, for instance, psychology, political science, history and philosophy.
This special issue of the British Journal of Criminology seeks to ask, what can criminology say about the war on terror? How can criminologists contribute to understandings, analyses and critiques of the war on terror? This special edition exemplifies some of the ways in which criminological discourses can contribute to issues of pressing global significance. Moreover, its purpose is also to contribute to the building of a focused literature for the purposes of research and teaching in an area of growing criminological concern. The purpose of this edition is not to establish a ‘criminological blueprint’ of the war on terror, but to present a collection of voices capable of critiquing the complexities of governmental strategies in the war on terror. The articles included follow the precedents of ‘transgressive criminology’ found in explorations of war crimes, human rights violations and human trafficking, for example (Jamieson 1998; Cohen 2000; Lee 2007), in bringing criminological forms of analysis together with insights from neighbouring discourses. The edition also builds on literature on state crime and the war on terror established in this journal (Green and Ward 2004; Mythen and Walklate 2006; Whyte 2007).
Although the articles focus on different aspects of the war on terror and engage with different discourses, some themes are addressed by more than one of the authors. The idea of the construction of a new ‘suspect community’, drawing on Hillyard's ideas of the criminalization of the Irish (Pantazas and Pemberton); the ideology of the threat of terrorism as an ‘exceptional’ circumstance, which therefore mandates exceptional measures (Aradau and van Munster; Hudson); the movement from crime to ‘precrime’ and from the logic of risk to the logic of precaution (Pickering and McCulloch; Aradau and van Munster), recur and their growing influence is analysed and critiqued. Hamm, and Green and Ward, though, see aspects of normality rather than exceptionalism in radicalization of prison inmates and violence in Iraq: the normality of the pains and deprivations of imprisonment; the reversion to patterns of violence that had been suppressed under Saddam's regime.
The elusiveness of justice in contemporary Iraq is examined by Penny Green and Tony Ward in the opening article of this issue. They demonstrate that an increase in ‘tribalism’, ‘warlordism’ and ‘sectarianism’ in post-invasion Iraq has eroded justice while exacerbating violence. The rise in organized and conventional crime continues to destabilize fundamental social services while producing fatal and brutal circumstances for marginalized groups such as women, gays and transgendered people. This rise in ‘gendered-violence’, argue Green and Ward, is a convergence of political and criminal violence brought about by the means adopted by the United States/United Kingdom alliance's overthrow of the Saddam regime and represents the new ‘internal terror’ facing Iraqi civilians.
As the contours of the war on terror moved from the threat of weapons of mass destruction to the war against radical fundamentalists, this edition demonstrates how entire communities and particular individuals have become the ongoing suspects of state surveillance and intervention. Jude McCulloch and Sharon Pickering question the rise of surveillance and control technologies for ‘all suspected terrorists’. In their analysis of ‘pre-crime’, they identify how the integration of national security policies with criminal justice processes has served to erode due process and civil liberties. In doing so, the eye-of-the-state has been widened to include all citizens within a pre-emptive logic that supersedes fundamental human rights. As a result, the cornerstones of criminal justice are being jolted, jettisoned and reshaped by an imposing and intrusive counter-terrorism agenda that continues to compromise and undermine long established traditions of criminal law.
The politics, policies and practices of counter-terrorist initiatives within the United Kingdom are pursued in two articles in this edition. Christina Pantazas and Simon Pemberton draw upon examples of Irish hate and exclusionalism in the United Kingdom, to demonstrate how Muslim peoples in Britain have become the new ‘suspect communities’. They argue that the hybridization of criminal justice to include counter-terrorism has served to alienate entire segments of the population. For them, Muslim people in the United Kingdom have become the targets of what they call the ‘terror of prevention’, where proactive policing has unjustifiably abused law-abiding British Muslims in the name of national security.
Mark Hamm explores the radicalization thesis within the contexts of US prisons. His original fieldwork inside high-security correctional facilities identifies that radicalization exists among inmate subcultures. Its root causes, however, are ‘overcrowded maximum security prisons with few rehabilitation programs and a shortage of chaplains to provide religious guidance to spiritual searchers’. These root causes, Hamm claims, are being ignored. Hamm contests the view that prisons have become incubators for procuring large numbers of newly converted Islam-inspired terrorists. For him, there is a reality of specific charismatic individuals radicalizing a small percentage of inmates to join terrorist networks upon release. At the same time, however, he observes an inmate-led rehabilitation programme that is productively guiding inmates away from violence and terrorist-spawned networks. Hamm argues that involving experienced Muslim personnel at the grassroots, in his case inmates in US prisons rather than clerics in communities, deserves institutional support as a proactive and positive counter-terrorism initiative.
The article by Aradau and van Munster engages with the notion of exceptionalism that has been used to justify the sort of measures that contravene the traditional values of democratic societies. They argue that criminology and international relations theory both focus on what Ericson has termed counter-law—law that seems to undermine the fundamental values of the rule of law. Criminology and international relations discourse both have perspectives through which to critique governmental practices in the war on terror. A shared insight is that the war on terror can be explored fruitfully in relation to the notion of ‘precautionary risk’. This, they argue, buttresses new forms of exceptionalism in which sovereignty becomes unaccountable, law turns into a technology for catastrophe aversion, and subjectivity is fostered through techniques of preparedness and resilience.
The final article by Barbara Hudson questions the fate of justice when the state discards its liberal democratic values. She critiques the ways in which law was used and abused in the war on terror, in the name of ‘exceptionalism’, and argues that the idea of ‘the lesser evil’ has become an ideological justification of torture and other deplorable practices. Hudson explores Michael Walzer's arguments about justice not only in going to war, but also throughout occupation and beyond. She echoes Cornell's argument that our ideals need to be defended when we are most likely to disregard them, and concludes by arguing that while the Obama era may have ushered in newly found optimism through the planned closure of Guantanamo Bay and the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, ‘justice is never secure as long the human tendency to define others as enemies undeserving of rights and protections persists’.
The special issue questions the extent to which criminology is able to capture and engage with emerging global political and economic landscapes. Criminology clearly has international and comparative reach, but is it global? Should criminology be global and, if so, why? The war on terror provides a basis to explore the fundamental tenets of globalization, namely human migration, international trade and the movement/integration of financial markets. The ongoing ‘flows’ of production, information, markets, culture, etc. bring to our attention a range of issues involving harm, regulation and violence that necessitate criminological inquiry. The war on terror has also precipitated a range of new laws in the United States and other Western nations that will have significant influence on future criminological agendas.
While President Barak Obama declares that 31 August 2010 will mark the end of the US ‘combat mission in Iraq’, and plans are in place for exit strategies in Afghanistan, the use of terms such as ‘victory’ and ‘success’ are noticeably absent from political rhetoric. Instead, we are told that ‘Iraq is not yet secure, and there will be difficult days ahead. Violence will continue to be a part of life in Iraq. Too many fundamental political questions about Iraq's future remain unresolved. Too many Iraqis are still displaced or destitute. Declining oil revenues will put an added strain on a government that has had difficulty delivering basic services’ (Obama 2009).
No victory, no success and, to date, no public inquiry. While the latter has been suggested for mid July 2009 in the United Kingdom, the extent to which its parameters will critically examine issues of law, justice, power, politics and harm remains uncertain. Yet, this issue aims to do what politicians avoid and what academics must—to examine thoroughly the actions and consequences of those who govern, and to ensure that well researched and theoretically informed critical scholarship is centre stage in debates about the war on terror.
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