Dr Paul Anderson: Fighting Terrorism or Repressing Democracy?

The focus of critiques of authoritarianism today lies increasingly in the use by liberal governments of exceptional powers. These are powers in which an imminent threat to national security is judged to be of such importance as to warrant the restriction of liberties and other socially repressive measures in order to protect national security. Terrorism has offered a particularly salient source of justification for a level of social repression that would be intolerable in normal times. A dominant line of criticism is that the use of exceptional powers to this end has gone too far. Critics emphasize the need to curtail such power by bringing it into line with basic human rights standards. As pertinent as this critique may be, focus on the proper extent of the social repression tends to assume, Scheuerman, Herman and Peterson point out, there is a real threat of terrorism, and that repression by an expansion of executive of executive authority, is itself an appropriate response to that threat. A less noticed yet critical feature of governments use of anti terror power is the prior erosion of democratic oversight and control, which has enabled repression to appear a plausible response to what is, in many respects, an as yet unspecified threat. The erosion is essentially three pronged. The first aspect of democratic control to have been eroded is the power to define what constitutes a threat. In the absence of meaningful control, governments are able, Clive Walker explains, to ascribe to whatever political violence is being encountered, attributes of novelty and extraordinary seriousness, so as to justify correspondingly alarming incursions into individual rights and domestic accountability. Governments are able to do so, in no small part because of the semantic fog that surrounds the core concepts of national security, threat and terrorism by which exceptional powers are usually evoked. Terrorism, for instance, is a concept that resists consistent definition. Commonly understood by governments as the use of threat or use serious violence to advance a cause, the term eludes legitimate resistance to occupation and oppression with senseless destruction.