T12
Exam Information
Exam Date: Wednesday, 11/06/2025 at 13:30.
Location: 460.2.029 ECL 1 - Lecture Theatre [Rows 9-13].
Duration: 120 minutes plus reading time.
Accommodations: Access plan student accommodations are managed by the Exams Office.
Format: Answer 5 out of 9 questions.
Time per question: Approximately 20 minutes.
Answers: Should be structured.
Questions: Broadly thematic, requiring responses to a proposition with examples.
Revision: Unit guide discussion questions are a good focus.
Liberty vs. Security: A Trade-Off?
Quotes:
Philip Ruddock (2014): "We don’t live in an ideal world… There will always be a trade-off between national security and individual rights."
Benjamin Franklin: "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Post-9/11: The balance between security and liberty has been intensely debated.
Metaphor of ‘balance’: Requires scrutiny regarding what is being weighed, what influences the balance, and who benefits.
Key Questions Regarding Liberty and Security
Is liberty and security a zero-sum relationship?
How do prevailing ideas of security influence this relationship?
How has this translated into policy?
Has there been an adequate ‘balance’ in the War on Terror, counter-terrorism, and CVE (Countering Violent Extremism) policies?
What constitutes security: freedom to vs. freedom from?
Baldwin's Seven Questions on Security (1997)
Security for whom?
Security for which values?
How much security?
From what threats?
By what means?
At what cost?
In what time period?
Perspectives on the Security vs. Liberty Balance
Engelmann:
Dangers in confusing counterterrorism/CVE with the defense of democracy.
Conflating the two is a misuse/misunderstanding of democracy.
Ashworth:
The notion of ‘balance’ is a rhetorical device.
Presupposes ‘balance’ is a worthy goal, substituting for real argument.
Waldron:
Problematic connotation of quantity and precision in the language of ‘balance’.
Assumption that the relation between security and liberty is a zero-sum game.
Zedner:
Fundamental rights are non-derogable (absolute).
Giving up liberties allows terrorists to win.
Neocleous:
The idea of ‘balance’ is a liberal myth.
Liberalism's key category is security, not liberty.
Moeckli:
Balancing language is based on a generalizing notion of liberty.
Suggests everyone's human rights are equally affected, which is rarely the case.
The state is not an impartial guardian but a subjective part of the security threat.
Yoo:
A protracted ‘war without end’ and sustained threat of terrorism differs from other states of emergency.
Some curtailment of liberties may be justified.
The US Post-9/11
Preventative program post-9/11:
Considered harsh, coercive, and pre-emptive action as necessary.
Altered grounds for going to war.
Waterboarding and other forms of torture.
Disappearances into ‘black site’ CIA prisons.
Indefinite detention of anyone labeled an enemy combatant without due process.
Pre-emptive violence undermined due process and restrictions on coercive state intervention.
Obama:
Rejected the false choice between ‘safety and our ideals’.
Return to fighting ‘within the law’.
Bypassed via secrecy and lack of transparency (drones, NSA, etc.).
Trump (1st and 2nd term):
Extensive use of executive orders.
‘Security’ as a projection of militarized power.
Security as transactionalism.
Extreme securitization of migration.
Biden:
Revived Truman doctrine with a call to wage a ‘global struggle for freedom’.
Withdrawal from Afghanistan but recommitment to maintain “over the horizon” counter-terrorism capability.
Continuation of use of force anywhere in the world.
Evidence and Effectiveness of Security Measures
Little conclusive evidence: Restriction of liberties/rights is necessarily effective in enhancing societal security from terrorism and violent extremism.
Post-COVID-19: This question has been revisited due to wide-scale restrictions.
Whose security and whose liberties: Uneven and often inequitable experience.
Manipulation: Counter-terrorism measures can be manipulated by political or economic interests.
Public receptiveness: Shaped by perception of the likelihood and severity of a future attack.
Sense of threat: The greater the sense of threat, the lower the support for civil liberties.
Trust in government: The lower people's trust in government, the less willing they are to trade off civil liberties for security.
Post-9/11 Trends
Structural change:
Increased blurring of the borders between the domestic and the foreign.
Domestic security linked to external circumstances.
Organizational Change:
Trend of centralization and the amalgamation of police, secret service, and military tasks together with migration.
Examples: Homeland Security, Home Affairs, Border Force.
Breaking down barriers between domestic and military secret services.
Technological Change:
Increasing reliance on information technology including AI.
Shift away from ‘ears on the ground’ (MetaData, NSA, OSINT).
The Security State
Reduced scope of state activities: States have characteristically reduced activities and delegated tasks, but national security is largely an exception.
Impact on civil rights: The national security state has impacted civil rights and democratic political systems.
Resource requirements: Resource requirements have risen substantially.
Problems: Problems of controlling executive action in this area have become evident.
Effectiveness: No terrorist attacks on a scale comparable to 9/11, but whether this is a direct result of security state measures is unknowable.
Authoritarian governments: Have used international support for C/PVE to crack down on opposition and dissent, exploit communities, and discriminate against vulnerable groups.
Political illiberalism: Has also driven political illiberalism in democratic countries.
Pre-Crime
Definition:
Term coined by Philip K. Dick in 1956.
Perceives crime as sets of probabilities and risks.
Conventional vs. Emerging Practices:
Conventionally, crime is regarded principally as harm or wrong and ordering practices arise post hoc.
In emerging pre-crime practices (TC & CVE), crime is conceived essentially as risk or potential loss and ordering practices are pre-emptive.
Characteristics:
Anticipatory, risk-oriented, and society-wide responsibilising.
Shifts the temporal perspective to anticipate and forestall that which has not yet occurred.
Imposing punitive measures at increasingly earlier stages of the prosecutorial process.
‘Predictive policing’ and profiling ‘at risk’ individuals or communities.
Challenges:
Can challenge fundamentals of criminal justice, such as presumption of innocence.
'Radicalized Mainstream'
Mainstreaming of extremism: Capture of the political middle.
Factors:
Polycrisis: Intersecting multiple crises have strained social tensions and deepened mistrust of institutions.
New technologies as amplifiers.
Celebrity influencers as endorsers.
Politicians as legitimisers: Pandering to far-right and conspiracy-myth endorsing population segments.
Shared sense of grievance and skepticism: Radicalised individuals are influencing the mainstream.
Stochastic terrorism:
The idea that influential individuals may demonise target groups or individuals, inspiring unknown actors to take up terroristic violence against them (Angove, 2023).
“The use of mass media to provoke random acts of ideologically motivated violence that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable” (Hamm & Spaji, 2017).
CVE Policies and Reciprocal Radicalisation
Liberal Western democracies: Willingness to “trade” civil liberties for increased security in the immediate years of the War on Terror.
Softer CVE: Obscured this debate but also taken place in contexts of increasing illiberalism.
Securitization: CVE policies mark unprecedented securitization of public policies and life (Heath-Kelly and Strausz, 2019) and can be counter-productive.
Drivers of CVE: Extent of CVE implementation driven by both real (experience of terrorism) and socially constructed (size of Muslim minorities) threats (Shanaah & Heath-Kelly, 2022).
Reciprocal Radicalisation:
A process where different extremist groups feed off each other’s narratives and actions, escalating tensions and reinforcing each other’s ideologies.
Process::
CVE policy targets Group A → Group A feels marginalized. Group B sees Group A as threat
Group A radicalizes further → Group B (opposing group) sees this as confirmation of threat.
Group B radicalizes in response → Group A sees this as confirmation of persecution.
Polarization and Reciprocal Radicalization
Perceived Targeting and Marginalization: CVE policies can foster a sense of stigmatization and alienation.
Media Amplification and Political Rhetoric: Extremist groups may use media coverage to justify their actions.
Community Distrust and Reduced Cooperation: Heavy-handed/targeted CVE programs can erode trust between communities and authorities.
Symbolic Polarization: CVE policies can become symbolic battlegrounds in broader cultural or identity conflicts.
Moving Forward
Evolving trends: Stochastic terrorism, ideological diversity of violent extremism, and its drivers will continue to present fundamental challenges to liberal societies.
Mainstreaming of extremist narratives: Will continue to test parameters of free speech and the security imperatives for evolving modes of surveillance/monitoring.
Discussion
How does the normalization of extremist rhetoric in mainstream political and media discourse challenge traditional approaches to counter-extremism, and what are the implications for democratic societies?