ABSTRACT
In June 2005, a few weeks before the London suicide bombings of 7/7, British public was presented with the following scenario: It is 12.45pm on Tuesday, 23 December 2004. Oxford Street, London is teeming with Christmas shoppers and office workers going to lunch. A post office van, later found to have been stolen, pulls up at the kerb. If readers had to guess the source of this excerpt, many would probably assume that it is the outline for a potential disaster movie set in London, or possibly a novel, but the excerpt is entirely unrelated to literary or cinematic entertainment. Joseba Zulaika contends that the “what if” logic of counter-terrorism is part of “a politics whose reality is to be decided by the experience of what could happen in the future as much as by what is happening in the present; by alleged plots as much as by real ones; by what does not happen as by what does.
