The Counterterrorism War Paradigm versus International Humanitarian Law: The Legal Contradictions and Global Consequences of the US “War on Terror”

Abstract

Since 2001, we have witnessed the development of a counterterrorism war paradigm built to advance claims about the post-9/11 scope and discretion of US executive power and to articulate specific interpretations of national security interests and strategic objectives in the “war on terror.” What makes this a paradigm rather than merely a conglomeration of evolving policies is the cohesiveness and mutual reinforcement of its underlying rationales about the rights of the US government to prosecute a territorially unbounded war against an evolving cast of enemies. Drawing on Bourdieu’s concept of a juridical field, the article focuses on how officials who constructed a legal framework for this paradigm, rather than disregarding international law wholesale, have engaged in interpretations and crafted rationales to evade some international humanitarian law (IHL) rules and norms while rejecting the underlying logic or applicability of others. This article traces the counterterrorism war paradigm’s development and explains how it now competes with and threatens to supersede the customary law principles enshrined in IHL.

Detention in the context of counterterrorism and armed conflict: Continuities and new challenges

“…Whereas the focus here has been on the use of IHL powers in counterterrorism, post-9/11 counterterrorism practices also served as testing grounds for readings of IHL (and international human rights law) that create even more freedom for States, putting pressure on these legal regimes and their capacity effectively to regulate future conflicts. 160…”

Reassessing the camp/prison dichotomy: New directions in geographic research on confinement

“…During its early years, Guantánamo was the most visible site of a larger archipelago of camps, whether camps managed by the US military or secret facilities managed by the CIA, the so-called “black sites” (D’Arcus, 2014; O’Neill, 2012; Scott-Clark and Levy, 2021). But at the end of his second term, President Bush began abandoning detention and interrogation as military tactics, and Obama continued this process by either shutting down the camps or transferring them under Afghan or Iraqi authority (Hajjar, 2019). Following Weima and Minca, we must examine these closures not for what they terminate, but for the possibilities that they open into the circuit of which they are a part of.…”

Dynamic Governance in Countering Terrorism in Indonesia: A Discourse Network Analysis on Online News Media

“…This is also a research novelty because the literature review test through Scopus and Science Direct with the keywords terrorism and dynamic governance shows less than 100 research articles, while if you add the keyword discourse network analysis, this is the first time this research has been conducted. This article analyzes the findings of previous studies with similar themes, namely (1) "The Counterterrorism War Paradigm versus International Humanitarian Law: The Legal Contradictions and Global Consequences of the US "War on Terror " and (2) " The Move toward Dynamic Governance in Indonesian Public Service" (15,16). First article show related discourse countering terrorism in the United States with various paradigms including sistematisasinya, while the second related to the capabilities of dynamic governance in addressing public issues.…”