The Techno-Legal Co-Production of Terrorist Suspects

Abstract

From domestic lists to kill-lists deployed in counter-terrorism operations, lists have been a central tool in tracing, targeting and identifying terrorist suspects. Such lists increasingly make use of algorithms and surveillance technologies, quickly filtering through vast amounts of data in a promise of providing more accurate and almost real-time updates on the terrorist threats. In this article, we empirically study how different lists in domestic and international contexts are becoming central to the classification of terrorist behaviour and suspects, and how they (re)shape legal definitions and possibilities for intervention. The empirics show that traditional logics of the law that classify measures into legal regimes, separate the domestic from the international, isolate digital infrastructures and divide terrorists from non-terrorists fail to capture the complex and messy socio-technical security assemblage that works to produce these terrorist suspects. Based on the empirical analysis, the article addresses three concerns about traditional legal reasoning based on strict categories and straightforward solutions and argues instead that legal approaches need to be better attuned to the complex associations that produce terrorist suspects in these security and counter-terrorism spaces.