From contestation to conviction: terrorism expertise before the courts

Abstract

This article asks how terrorism expertise has been mobilized in recent trials on terrorism financing. How is expert knowledge concerning ongoing and complex political situations involving alleged terrorism translated into factual evidence before a court of law? What kind of sources do courts use in terrorism cases, and what kind of expert knowledge is acknowledged or ignored? Through analysis of concrete cases under the United Kingdom (UK) Terrorism Act ( 2000) and the Dutch penal law Article 421Sr, we show how contested terrorism expertise becomes 'certified knowledge' that holds together as grounds for conviction before a court of law. This article contributes to socio-legal debates on legal knowledge in two ways. First, we analyse the everyday, material practices of gathering, presenting, and contesting expertise in relation to security. Second, the article analyses new case material and a particular kind of knowledge -namely, security knowledge and terrorism expertise -to identify patterns in what is deemed relevant for the court.This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

Traditional Healing and Law in Contemporary Senegal: Legitimacies, Normativities and Practices

“…This includes explorations of the layered processes through which policy and regulatory knowledge is constituted, while other forms of expertise become seen as less relevant to public decision-making (Jasanoff, 1990(Jasanoff, , 1995. The institutional positioning of individuals and disciplines, the possibility of translating expert perspectives into relevant policy registers, or pre-existing sociocultural constructions of what rational knowledge looks like, contribute to such triage, which once established can become difficult to unsettle (Jasanoff, 2006;Anwar and De Goede, 2021). The type of knowledge on which law depends is also shaped by multiple influences, rather than fixed and objectively definable.…”