ABSTRACT
The preoccupation with the challenges posed by violent actors has long existed for many states, whether such actors are characterized as terrorists, insurgents, or non-state or paramilitary actors. The events of 11 September 2001 brought a new urgency and vibrancy to state action in the realm of counter-terrorism, illustrated by both the response of national legal systems as well as more concerted efforts to achieve multilateral and multilevel counter-terrorism responses on the international plane (Ní Aoláin 2003). From a feminist perspective, it is notable that terrorism and counter-terrorism have long been of marginal interest to mainstream feminist theorizing (Gardam 2010; Herman 2010: 258; Höglund 2003). This is partly because of the sustained absence of women’s voices in the regulation of armed confl ict and war, as well as the exclusion of women from the war zone, aptly illustrated in Homer’s pithy phrase that war constitutes “men killing and men being killed” (quoted in Gaca 2011: 76). Particularly in the legal fi eld, men have mostly dominated national security discourses. Women scholars have generally not articulated a feminist perspective on the ways in which states respond to violent challengers.2 More particularly, the legal quandaries that result from the use of law as a management tool to address terrorism have not generally garnered a feminist response. Some recent theorizing around how feminism responds to crisis (Otto 2011: 75; Charlesworth 2002: 377) points to interesting and new territory for thinking about the relationship between “normal” and “exceptional” legal regulation, and what counterterrorism responses bring for women in the post-9/11 “War on Terror.” As Otto rightly notes, “[t]he language of ‘crisis’ has become ubiquitous in international law and politics. Rising to a crescendo with the 9/11 crisis of international terror, ‘emergencies’ now dominate global intercourse” (2011: 75). An interesting question is how certain actions come to be defi ned as terrorism and some do not, and why violence against women is rarely included within the defi nitional parameters of national security discourses. Recent scholarly work refl ecting on femicide as terrorism encourages us to think about the targeted murder of women in political contexts as coming within the defi nitional boundaries of terrorism discourse (Kamp 2011: 56). Addressing the systematic and targeted murder of Muslim
women who unveiled in Uzbekistan between 1927 and 1930, Marianne Kamp argues that:
The male power structure made a brutal effort to enforce an unequal social order (a gender hierarchy) through violence by terrorizing an entire group . . . even in the 1920s those who described the murder of Uzbek women referred to them as “terrorism,” and defi ning it as terrorism was important in stopping the murder wave.
