International Counterterrorism Bureaucracies In The United Nations And The European Union

Since the attacks of September 11, 2001 a complex web of international structures and rules for the fight against transnational terrorism has emerged. However, previous research disregarded the organizational basis of counterterrorism cooperation. Using the example of bureaucratic actors in the United Nations and the European Union, this study examines how and to what degree international counterterrorism bureaucracies exercise autonomy and perform distinct functions. The book reveals the special ambivalence of counterterrorism cooperation for international bureaucracies, which need to reconcile calls for effective counterterrorism with the need to maintain an impression of technical impartiality in a particularly contested policy-field. They respond to this challenge with different strategies of politicization and depoliticization.

Since the attacks of September 11, 2001 a complex web of international structures and rules for the fight against transnational terrorism has emerged. However, previous research disregarded the organizational basis of counterterrorism cooperation. Using the example of bureaucratic actors in the United Nations and the European Union, this study examines how and to what degree international counterterrorism bureaucracies exercise autonomy and perform distinct functions. The book reveals the special ambivalence of counterterrorism cooperation for international bureaucracies, which need to reconcile calls for effective counterterrorism with the need to maintain an impression of technical impartiality in a particularly contested policy-field. They respond to this challenge with different strategies of politicization and depoliticization.

This book traces the evolution of the UN Security Council’s actions against terrorism and extremism. The work examines the progression of the UN Security Council’s fight against international terrorism and its development of practices to prevent radicalisation and extremism. It also looks at the consequences of these processes and how they have deeply moulded global counter-terrorism. The book looks at the discursive construction of a global threat and tracks how this construction evolved in relation to the Council’s establishment of legal practices and bodies, and by its Members’ discourses. It argues that the very specific definition the Council provided on international terrorism in the 2000s is profoundly shaped by global hegemonies, relations of power shaping the international community, and its own identity. To demonstrate this, it offers a long genealogical perspective of the structure of the UN since the 1930s and then focuses specifically on the developments taking place in the 2000s. The book thus looks at the Security Council’s fight against international terrorism as a global, globalised, and globalising enterprise. This book will be of much interest to students of critical terrorism studies, security studies, global governance, and International Relations.

Philip Jessup coined the term "transnational law" in his Storrs Lecture on Jurisprudence delivered in 1956 to describe law that regulates activities or actions that transcend national borders. The term redefined the development and practice of the law, and became a distinct field of study. In 2001, Neil Boister applied Jessup’s concept to the field of criminal law and identified the emergence of transnational criminal law in a formative article published in the European Journal of International Law. Inspired by Boister’s work, the editors of the journal Transnational Legal Theory sought contributions from leading academics and practitioners for a symposium issue on transnational criminal law. In their papers, the authors built upon and developed novel approaches to legal issues arising in an increasingly globalized world, where both crimes and the regulation of crimes transcend borders. The publication of this book marks the sixtieth anniversary of Jessup’s seminal lecture and exemplifies the significant impact that Jessup, and later Boister, have had on legal scholarship and practice in the area of criminal law. We are honoured to publish the symposium as a monograph and to contribute to this rapidly evolving field. This book was previously published as a special issue of Transnational Legal Theory.

Justice and Home Affairs is one of the fastest expanding areas of research in European Studies. The European response to security concerns such as terrorism, organised crime networks, and drug trafficking as well as to the challenge of managing migration flows are salient topics of interest to an increasing number of scholars of all disciplines, the media and general public. This handbook takes stock of policy development and academic research in relation to justice and home affairs and analyses the field in an unprecedented thematic depth. The book comprehensively investigates the field from the perspective of the three dimensions central to European integration: the sectoral (policies), the horizontal (states, regions) and the vertical (institutions, decision-making) dimensions. It also discusses the most important theoretical approaches used in this research area and provides the reader with a state of the art picture of the field. By adopting such a comprehensive and broad-based approach, the handbook is uniquely positioned to be an important referent for scholars, practitioners and students interested in the area of justice, home affairs and European politics.

This interdisciplinary book investigates the problematization of global challenges in world politics by analyzing what they are and how they come to be. Offering a conceptual framework, including four modes of construction—universalizing, bundling, upscaling, and creating urgency—this book provides a heuristic method for understanding how the process of rendering an issue a “global challenge” unfolds. It examines the role of the global challenges discourse, which may either reinforce or challenge the dominant orders of world politics, such as the capitalist market-based system and the liberal international order. As a consequence, the global challenges discourse facilitates the emergence of new actors and policy fields. The book will be of interest to students, academics, and practitioners of global governance, international organizations, and, more broadly, international political economy and international relations.

Although there is a vast body of literature covering the ongoing debates concerning the novelty and gravity of the contemporary terrorist threat, as well as the most appropriate response to it, few authors have thus far analysed the complex set of counterterrorism measures that both the individual Member States and the European Union (EU) have attempted to develop. This volume offers a critical analysis of the measures the European Union has taken to combat terrorism and how, in a number of key areas, EU counterterrorism policy is more of a paper tiger than an effective counterterrorism device. Several legal EU counterterrorism instruments have not been properly implemented at the national level and questions have been raised regarding their effectiveness, appropriateness, and proportionality. The capabilities of EU agencies in the area of counterterrorism remain rather weak and the EU Counterterrorism Coordinator does not have any real powers apart from persuasion. However, this does not mean that EU level action cannot offer any value-added in the fight against terrorism. There are several areas where the EU can provide genuine value-added in the fight against terrorism due to the transnational nature of the contemporary terrorist threat and the nature of a borderless Europe.