The British Journal of Criminology 49(5)

The Transformation of Violence in Iraq
Penny Green and Tony Ward

This article explores the connections between various forms of organized political violence and ostensibly private, non-political violence in post-invasion Iraq, focusing on gender-based violence and the links between militias and organized crime. We argue that, as in other civil wars, much of the violence is ‘dual-purpose’, simultaneously serving private and political goals, and that despite a decline in violence since 2007, the situation created by the overthrow of the previous dictatorship remains extremely dangerous.

Pre-Crime and Counter-Terrorism: Imagining Future Crime in the ‘War on Terror’
Jude McCulloch and Sharon Pickering

This article looks at pre-crime in the context of counter-terrorism. Pre-crime links coercive state actions to suspicion without the need for charge, prosecution or conviction. It also includes measures that expand the remit of the criminal law to include activities or associations that are deemed to precede the substantive offence targeted for prevention. The trend towards anticipating risks as a driving principle in criminal justice was identified well before 2001. However, risk and threat anticipation have substantially expanded in the context of contemporary counter-terrorism frameworks. Although pre-crime counter-terrorism measures are rationalized on the grounds of preventing terrorism, these measures do not fit in the frame of conventional crime prevention. The article argues that the shift to pre-crime embodies a trend towards integrating national security into criminal justice along with a temporal and geographic shift that encompasses a blurring of the borders between the states’ internal and external coercive capacities. The counter-terrorism framework incorporates and combines elements of criminal justice and national security, giving rise to a number of tensions. One key tension is between the ideal of impartial criminal justice and the politically charged concept of national security. Pre-crime counter-terrorism measures can be traced through a number of interlinking historical trajectories including the wars on crime and drugs, criminalization and, more fundamentally, in colonial strategies of domination, control and repression. The article concludes by identifying a number of challenges and opportunities for criminology in the shift from post-crime criminal justice to pre-crime national security.

From the ‘Old’ to the ‘New’ Suspect Community: Examining the Impacts of Recent UK Counter-Terrorist Legislation
Christina Pantazis and Simon Pemberton

The ‘war on terror’ has emerged as the principal conflict of our time, where ‘Islamic fanaticism’ is identified as the greatest threat to Western liberal democracies. Within the United Kingdom, and beyond, this political discourse has designated Muslims as the new ‘enemy within’—justifying the introduction of counter-terrorist legislation and facilitating the construction of Muslims as a ‘suspect community’. In this paper, we develop Hillyard's (1993) notion of the ‘suspect community’ and evidence how Muslims have replaced the Irish as the main focus of the government's security agenda whilst also recognizing that some groups have been specifically targeted for state surveillance. We conclude that the categorization of Muslims as suspect may be serving to undermine national security rather than enhance it.

Prison Islam in the Age of Sacred Terror
Mark S. Hamm

Research indicates that Islam is the fastest growing religion among prisoners in Western nations. In the United States, roughly 240,000 inmates have converted to the faith since the 9/11 attacks. According to federal law enforcement, Saudi-backed Wahhabi clerics have targeted these prisoners for terrorist recruitment. The present research examines this claim from several different perspectives. First, it reviews the literature on prisoner conversions to Islam and concludes that there are opposing viewpoints on the matter. One side of the debate takes an alarmist stance, arguing that prisons have become incubators for Islamic terrorism; the other side asserts that Islam plays a vital role in prisoner rehabilitation. Second, results of a two-year study of prisoner radicalization and terrorist recruitment in US prisons are reported. The motives for prisoner conversions to Islam are discussed along with the effects of conversion on inmate behaviour; the role played by gangs and charismatic leaders in radicalizing prisoners; and the social processes by which inmates move from radicalization to operational terrorism. Third, two case studies are presented. One involves a terrorist plot waged by a gang of Sunni prisoners at California's New Folsom Prison; the other looks at the inmate-led Islamic Studies Program at Old Folsom Prison, which has adopted a de-radicalization agenda. It is argued that inmate self-help programmes may do more than the state to prevent radicalization and terrorist recruitment behind bars.

Exceptionalism and the ‘War on Terror’: Criminology Meets International Relations
Claudia Aradau and Rens van Munster

Criminology and International Relations (IR) share a relatively wide vocabulary: political violence, crime, security, deterrence, war on terror, risk, human rights and freedom. Particularly in the case of the ‘war on terror’, similar concerns and conceptual tools have increasingly surfaced on both sides. Nonetheless, one debate—namely Carl Schmitt's theory of the exception and its uptake in IR—has travelled less well. This article argues that there is value in engaging with the IR debates on the exception. From the perspective of IR, the exception makes possible different insights about the dialectics between law and crime by unpacking the constitutive role of the politics of fear, the importance of the ‘international’ and the transformed relationship to the future. It also exposes the deteriorating effects of the ‘war on terror’ on justice, democracy and social transformation.

Justice in a Time of Terror
Barbara Hudson

The war on terror has seen the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan; the use of torture on detainees in Guantanamo Bay; extension of periods of detention without trial, and increased levels of surveillance and control in the United Kingdom and the United States. Although being fought in the name of justice and democracy, the war on terror seems to have brought about curbs on freedom to citizens of the Western democracies and brutality rather than justice to those who are designated enemies and suspects in the war. This article looks at aspects of the war on terror from the perspective of a concern to defend the ideal of justice. Under headings of justice and legality, the lesser evil, the threat to liberal values, and justice and the other, war and occupation, torture, curtailment of civil liberties and the extent to which we each have a responsibility to protect the rights of those who are not our fellow citizens and who do not appear to share our values and our commitments to rights and freedoms are discussed. Recent writings by Michael Walzer on just and unjust wars, Michael Ignatieff on the use of the lesser evil, Jacques Derrida on the rights of the stranger to hospitality and Drucilla Cornell on the need to defend our ideals at the time when we are most likely to forsake them are drawn upon to help examine the fate of and the prospects for justice in a time of terror.

The British Journal of Criminology, September 2009: Volume 49, Issue 5