The Social Life of Anti-Terrorism Laws (original) (raw)

2008, The Social Life of Anti-Terrorism Laws

Intrinsic evil defies all attempts at rational comprehension or criminological explanation. There can be no mutual intelligibility, no bridge of understanding, no real communication between "us" and "them". To treat them as understandable […] is to bring criminals into our domain, to humanize them, to see ourselves in them and them in ourselves' (Garland 2001: 184). The externalisation of 'the enemy' is, of course, all the more plausible when the explanation for their 'difference' is strengthened by reference to 'a different culture' and its fundamental 'otherness' or the perception of a 'new terror