ABSTRACT
The ‘war on terror’ and the associated spectre of terrorist attacks in the developed world – and on a global scale – has become perhaps the most potent international geo-political issue of the early twenty-first century. The political imperative to be seen to be doing everything possible to reduce the risk of terrorist attack has helped drive a new front in the politics of fear. Our apparent level of concern about the possibility of a terrorist strike has made us willing to trade off our hard earned rights and freedoms in the name of ‘exceptional circumstances’ and the need to increase national security. Fear of terror has helped, or been used to justify, the passage of a plethora of illiberal and potentially repressive legislation in democratic states such as Britain, the US and Australia. Yet we argue that this new politics borrows from an old model and a tried and tested blueprint (see also Smith and Pain, Chapter 4, in this book). Fear of terrorism did not need to be invented, it is assumed – even, as we shall see, in the absence of empirical evidence. Indeed, there is a continuum between fear of crime and fear of terrorism. The parallels between crime control and national security discourses are striking and both are characteristic of early twenty-first century modes of government where sovereign states reassert themselves in the face of a new globalised order (Garland 2001; O’Malley 2001).
