The Policing of Terrorism: Organizational and Global Perspectives (review)

The world after 9/11 witnessed unprecedented expansion of the counterterrorist institutions and activities. In the United States, the primary target of the 2001 terrorist attacks, a whole set of far-reaching measures purported to deal with the challenge of global terror was introduced, including adoption of the USA PATRIOT Act and creation of a new powerful agency, the Department of Homeland Security. To all those who are interested in these transformations, Mathieu Deflem's new book provides an extraordinary amount of invaluable information. Extending argument developed in his earlier monograph Policing World Society (2002), The Policing of Terrorism shows how 9/11 resulted in the dramatic restructuring of policing institutions around the world.

Deflem's book presents a balanced and impartial academic analysis of the institutional changes and developments in this area. The author carefully avoids normatively framed debates, which, I believe, is a rational strategy, given a controversial nature of the object of his research. The book examines neither origins of international terrorism nor global sociopolitical contexts of counterterrorist activities, which, from my viewpoint, should not be seen as its limitation. Discussion of these complex issues would lead the author far beyond the carefully delineated scope of the study, whereas staying consistently within a criminological perspective allows keeping the finely calibrated focus of the investigation.

Looking across nations, Deflem identifies two styles of counterterrorist activities: a criminal justice counterterrorism, which deals with acts of terror within a framework of law-enforcement, and a military counterterrorism, which views terror as a threat to national security to be countered with little concern for legalistic considerations. The former, law-directed, type of counterterrorist activities is typical for Western democracies. The latter, repressive type of counterterrorism is more typical in Russia, Turkey, Israel and some Arab countries. During George W. Bush's administration, the United States agencies operated within a framework of the global "War on Terror" but recently President Barack Obama discouraged using this framing and made steps towards better integration of ongoing counterterrorist activities in a law-enforcement framework.

It is difficult to disagree with the author that repressive counterterrorism becomes increasingly counterproductive. Not only does it fails to eradicate terrorist organizations, it provokes social resistance and leads to greater violence. Police operations in Russia, particularly an operation against an armed band of the "cops-fighting rebels" in Primorsky Region in June of 2010, indicate that force-oriented technologies used by the government to fight Chechen terrorists in the Northern Caucasus tend to be generalized and applied to deal with crime suspects by local police far from the primary area of terrorist activities. Violence on the part of police is countered by anti-police violence of the population. In absence of effective rule of law, there emerge incidents of organized resistance to police misconduct, in which the "rebels," like the "cops-fighters," adopt cultural scripts and symbols typical of the Islamic terrorists.

Although Deflem acknowledges the danger of politicizing counterterrorist work in the West, he argues that democratic societies are bound by notions of civil liberty and individual freedom and are, therefore, less likely to undergo such transformations. For more critically-minded scholars, there are reasons to be skeptical with regard to civil rights as an effective deterrent. Even before the onset of the War on Terror, advanced liberal democracies effectively depoliticized public sphere and criminalized political protest. The modern legal-scientific-media complex ignores the structural origins of political problems and denies rationality of political views different from those officially prescribed. In such context, threats to national security, whether real or fabricated, provide unprecedented opportunities for institutional monitoring, control and prophylactics that make the whole discourse of civil rights and liberties unpractical and obsolete.

In the "Concluding Reflections," Mathieu Deflem argues that unilaterally conceived counterterrorism produced negative consequences and welcomes greater international cooperation in policing terrorism. Pointing to inadequacy of the President Bush's War on Terror, he offers instead a more realistic vision of counterterrorism as a routine and permanent function of policing. These apt...