ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 shows the significant conceptual departure in contemporary global governance of terrorism from earlier periods. It argues that contemporary discourse positions the state as an independent outsider, occupying the role of a central coordinator of an assemblage for a global ‘common good’, that is, security. A discourse analytic study of international legal instruments, UN documents and policy initiatives, shows the overarching cosmopolitan narrative that is underpinning global counter-terrorism efforts. This narrative defines terrorism within the prism of the rights and responsibilities (or victimhood and culpability) of the ordinary individual and has underwritten the aggressive expansion of global regulatory response to terrorism into personal spaces, further and further removed from terrorism activities.
