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Human Rights and Terrorism: Issues and Overview

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International Human Rights and Counter-Terrorism

Part of the book series: International Human Rights ((IHR))

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Abstract

Modern debates on the intersection between human rights and counterterrorist measures are deeply rooted in a long history of scholarship on the tensions between states’ obligation to civil and human rights principals on the one hand and their responsibility to provide security to their citizens on the other hand. Already in the seventeenth century, Thomas Hobbes famously argued in Leviathan that individuals must give up some of their rights in order to gain security from the state. Niccolò Machiavelli made a similar claim in The Prince, asserting that individuals are willing to surrender certain powers to the state in return for better personal security. More recently, at the end of the twentieth century, sociologists and political scientists, such as Christopher Hewitt (1984), Paul Wilkinson (1986), Martha Crenshaw (1983), and David Charters (1994), have written extensively on the tradeoffs of counterterrorist policies and rights. They focused on the fight of democracies against terrorism and emphasized the costs of such fights in terms of civil liberties and human rights violations.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada

    Eran Shor & Daniel Sailofsky

Authors
  1. Eran Shor
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  2. Daniel Sailofsky
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Eran Shor .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. McGill University, Montréal, QC, Canada

    Eran Shor

  2. University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

    Stephen Hoadley

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© 2019 Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

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Shor, E., Sailofsky, D. (2019). Human Rights and Terrorism: Issues and Overview. In: Shor, E., Hoadley, S. (eds) International Human Rights and Counter-Terrorism. International Human Rights. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-3894-5_1-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-3894-5_1-1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore

  • Print ISBN: 978-981-10-3894-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-981-10-3894-5

  • eBook Packages: Springer Reference Law and CriminologyReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Business, Economics and Social Sciences

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