ABSTRACT
The counter-terrorism policies introduced by most European governments in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks have stirred up many political and academic controversies. In the political realm, their defenders have persistently presented them as vital for the protection of the people and denied any possible jeopardizing of domestic civil rights and liberties, while their opponents have strongly denounced their resulting brisk strengthening of the executive power and the subsequent weakening of human rights and the rule of law.1 In the academic community, several scholars sought to explain this normalization of the exceptional in the Western legal systems and saw in it either a form of ordinary governance2
or, on the contrary, the emergence of a new form of governmentality.3
Others sought to address the issue at the discursive level and focused on the arguments used by the US and/or European political leaders to justify the introduction of emergency measures at domestic level and the recourse to military action at international level.4
