Abstract
“Innocent lives” would be put at risk, Theresa May, then UK Home Secretary, told the House of Commons in January 2015, unless new legislation would give the security agencies “the capabilities they need” in the surveillance of email, social media, and other communications data (May 2015a). Her statement came one week after the terrorist attacks on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket in Paris, which had evoked worldwide solidarity with the attacked (“Je suis Charlie”). In the face of “such threats” to the United Kingdom, May reaffirmed five months later, there was a “duty” to ensure that security services had the powers they needed “to keep us safe” (May 2015b).
A twenty-first-century political science that focuses on peaceful conflict settlement may be facing a number of domestic and international security dilemmas. These dilemmas might not least be cast in terms of the need to develop concepts of “soft” policing and de-radicalization strategies against millennialist violence, rather than relying solely on repressive measures which threaten fundamental democratic values, without actually offering prospects of success.
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Notes
- 1.
Former Washington District Judge James Robertson, who had served on FISC from 2002 to 2005, criticized in 2013 that the court had “turned into something like an administrative agency”, not least because it was ruling on “entire surveillance systems” (Braun 2013).
- 2.
Along with the US Senate Select Committee’s on Intelligence Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program. Executive Summary (Washington 2012, Declassification Revisions and Release 2014), Blakeley’s and Raphael’s article provides required reading for anyone wishing to obtain a realistic picture about the dehumanizing impact of covert practices under the “war on terror” umbrella. (Ruth Blakeley is Professor of Politics and International Relations at Sheffield University. Sam Raphael works at Westminster University as Senior Lecturer in the same field.) In this context, Henning Glaser’s observation on the “functional value” of the recourse to torture warrants consideration: “The systematic transgression of a taboo conveys an important message. By breaking the taboo, the perpetrator [i.e., the United States] can demonstrate the fact of a sovereign foundation of a new order” (Glaser 2017b: 325). Using a term coined by Judith Butler, Blakeley and Raphael argued that UK agencies, exploiting the international extension of sovereign US power with regard to torture, were able to emerge as “petty sovereigns” (Blakeley and Raphael 2016: 245/246, 261). Their article also reveals that the extent of the UK government’s dissembling on British involvement in prisoner abuse would make a fitting addition to this book’s chapter on mendocracy.
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Eisfeld, R. (2019). Radicalization, Terrorism, Subversion of Civil Liberties. In: Empowering Citizens, Engaging the Public. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-5928-6_11
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