Search Results (20)

The rise in international terrorism has led to a rise in citizenship deprivation. Depriving a person of citizenship represents a harsh national security measure. Although both Australia and the UK have citizenship deprivation legislation, the judicial response has differed. In Australia, two laws providing for deprivation of citizenship have been found unconstitutional. In the UK, significant challenges to citizenship deprivation decisions have failed, including those relating to Shamima Begum, deprived of UK citizenship in 2019, whose request for permission to appeal in respect of the decision was rejected by the UK Supreme Court in August 2024. In this context, it is striking that despite the lesser degree of human rights protection under the Australian Constitution and federal statutes compared with the UK, the Australian courts may have arrived at a significantly rights protective approach to citizenship deprivation, leading to an important procedural safeguard by requiring courts to make decisions on citizenship deprivation. This underlines interesting features of the Australian system, in which the development of doctrines under a written constitution that limits legislative power, such as through the separation of powers, can sometimes lead to significant (if uneven) rights protective outcomes. Short of a shift in UK constitutional law doctrine around the separation of powers (which is unlikely), the Australian decisions cannot be mirrored in the UK. However, they may point towards the possibility of stronger procedural safeguards in the context of citizenship deprivation, as well as some potential human rights law implications. Full article

Terrorism is a global threat that has caused immense suffering and loss of life. The United States’ Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA) is an important piece of legislation that allows victims of terrorism to hold foreign entities accountable for their actions. However, there is a need to evaluate the act from the perspective of Civil Procedure to determine its effectiveness in providing remedies for victims and addressing the challenges of holding foreign entities accountable. This paper’s analysis is based on the JASTA, for the evaluation of its position and application from a pre-litigation of Civil Procedure perspective. The two most significant parts of Civil Procedure in the segments of preliminary issues including Parties to the Suit and Cause of Action are examined to determine their susceptibility to being exploited in the process of executing the intention and purpose of the act concerning foreign entities, as highlighted in JASTA. Preliminary aspects must be considered before initiating a civil suit based on JASTA. This analysis is important in understanding the strength and weaknesses of JASTA in the civil suit and it involves a qualitative method of research. For the most part, the research methodology adopted will be pure legal research. Since the research will focus on JASTA, the regular method of analysis adopted is by referring to the sources and data discussing JASTA and procedural law. The findings of this work could be used to establish better laws from JASTA and provide the opportunity for the citizens who are victims to bring legal action against foreign states that are also responsible for their loss and suffering. Moreover, other countries faced with litigation initiated under JASTA could also benefit from the findings as they could be used in establishing better laws for countries that had also suffered greatly due to actions resulting from terrorism or the war against terrorism. Future research related to this topic is also recommended in this analysis. Full article

Law enforcement authorities deal with terrorism in two ways: prevention and legal procedures to establish the offence of forming a terrorist organization. Setting up the offence of a terrorist organization requires proof that the members of the organization acquire distinct roles in the organization. Until today, this procedure has been based on unreliable, biased or subjective witness statements, resulting in questionable criminal court proceedings. A quantitative, unbiased methodology based on Network Theory is proposed in order to address three research questions: “How can the presence of distinct roles among the members of a terrorist organization be revealed?”, “Is the presence of distinct roles related to terrorist activity?”and “Are there early signs of imminent terrorist activity?”. These questions are addressed using selected global indices from network theory: density, small worldness, centralization, average centrality and standard deviation of centrality. These indices are computed for four real networks of terrorist organizations from four different countries. Full article

Electricity sector reforms have transformed the structure and organization of the sector worldwide. While outcomes of reforms in developed and developing countries have been extensively examined, there is limited analysis of the reforms in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). This paper analyses the performance of electricity sector reforms in 37 SSA countries between 2000 and 2017. We use a stochastic frontier analysis approach to estimate a multi-input multi-output distance function to assess the impact of reform steps and institutional features on indicators of investment and technical efficiency. Results indicate a positive correlation between reforms and installed generation capacity per capita, plant load factor, and technical network losses. The presence of an electricity law, sector regulator, vertical unbundling, and private participation in the management of assets were positively correlated with reform performance. Perceptions of non-violent institutional features such as corruption, regulatory quality and governance effectiveness do not seem to have had a significant effect, but perceptions of political stability, violence, and terrorism influenced reform outcomes. We conclude that a workable reform in SSA involves vertical unbundling with an electricity law, a regulator, and private ownership and management of assets where feasible. However, positive outcomes go hand in hand with higher technical network energy losses which indicates higher investment in the generation segment than in the network segment. Hence, emphasis should be placed on decoupling the energy losses from power generation. Full article

Legal feminist theories have troubled dominant conceptions of statehood, revealing the threat of the ‘Other’ as integral to the hegemonic masculinity of powerful states. In this paper I provide a critical gendered discourse analysis of the UN Security Council’s response to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIL). I consider the role of personification in constituting legal subjects as states (persons) and excavate this from the Council’s resolutions concerning Iraq. In constituting ISIL as a barbaric, hypermasculine terror group in relational opposition to the state of Iraq, the Council draws on gendered normativities ordinarily veiled by seemingly objective legal criteria as to the creation of states. Whilst the state of Iraq is constituted through the hegemonic model of statehood, one premised upon democratic, liberal Westphalian ideals, it is still subject to the paternalism of the Security Council. In this way, the state of Iraq is framed as failing to reach a particular masculine standard of statehood, and is thus subject to the continuation of ‘civilising’ discourses. Thus, instead of asking whether ISIL is or is not a state under international law, it is revealing to consider how responses to it work to maintain and (re)produce a graded, hierarchical international community of states. Full article

This article explores the notion of the Gefährder, the German term for a ‘potentially threatening individual’, in the context of the latest expansion of both the spaces of prevention and preemption, particularly through the new anti-terror law (PMT) in Switzerland that drew widespread criticism from the international community for its wide judicial reach and vague terminology around terrorist activities, thereby breaching a series of international legal norms and treaties. The term Gefährder represents a historical and political assemblage that exists across space and time in various iterations based on the colonial and racialized Other. This article argues that the latest prototype emerging out of the current Swiss counterterrorism architecture has unique qualities. The Gefährder serves as a bio- and ontopolitical governance tool, through its bodily and affective qualities, that exerts Swiss state control, and reaffirms Swiss national identity and national conservative underpinnings to preserve a particular kind of Swiss futurity. This research aspires to contribute to a body of research on counterterrorism regimes and its affective and bodily subjects in post-imperial nation-states. Full article

Wars, terrorist attacks, as well as natural catastrophes typically result in a large number of casualties, whose distributions have been shown to belong to the class of Pareto’s inverse power laws (IPLs). The number of deaths resulting from terrorist attacks are herein fit by a double Pareto probability density function (PDF). We use the fractional probability calculus to frame our arguments and to parameterize a hypothetical control process to temper a Lévy process through a collective-induced potential. Thus, the PDF is shown to be a consequence of the complexity of the underlying social network. The analytic steady-state solution to the fractional Fokker-Planck equation (FFPE) is fit to a forty-year fatal quarrel (FQ) dataset. Full article

In recent years, law enforcement authorities have increasingly used mathematical tools to support criminal investigations, such as those related to terrorism. In this work, two relevant questions are discussed: “How can the different roles of members of a terrorist organization be recognized?” and “are there early signs of impending terrorist acts?” These questions are addressed using the tools of entropy and network theory, more specifically centralities (degree, betweenness, clustering) and their entropies. These tools were applied to data (physical contacts) of four real terrorist networks from different countries. The different roles of the members are clearly recognized from the values of the selected centralities. An early sign of impending terrorist acts is the evolutionary pattern of the values of the entropies of the selected centralities. These results have been confirmed in all four terrorist networks. The conclusion is expected to be useful to law enforcement authorities to identify the roles of the members of terrorist organizations as the members with high centrality and to anticipate when a terrorist attack is imminent, by observing the evolution of the entropies of the centralities. Full article

The following legal-historical research is critical of “Islamist” narratives and their desacralized reverberations claiming that Arab-Muslim receptivity to terror is axiomatic to “cultural experiences” figuring subjects conforming to Arab-Islamic philosophical theology. The critique is founded on deconstructing—while adopting a Third World Approach to International Law (TWAIL)—the (im)moral consequences resulting from such rhetoric interpreting the Arab uprising of 2011 from the early days as certainly metamorphosing into an “Islamist Winter”. This secular-humanist hypostasis reminded critics that International Law and International Relations continues to assert that Latin-European philosophical theology furnishes the exclusive temporal coordinates required to attain “modernity” as telos of history and “civil society” as ethos of governance. In addition, the research highlights that such culturalist assertation—separating between law and morality—tolerates secular logic decriminalizing acts patently violating International Law since essentializing Arab-Muslims as temporally positioned “outside law” provides liberal-secular modernity ontological security. Put differently, “culture talk” affirms that since a secular-humanist imaginary of historical evolution stipulates that it is “inevitable” and “natural” that any “non-secular” Arab protests will unavoidably lead to lawlessness, it therefore becomes imperative to suspiciously approach the “Islamist” narrative of 2011 thus deconstructing the formulation of juridical doctrines (i.e., Bethlehem Legal Principles) decriminalizing acts arising from a principle of pre-emption “moralizing” demographic and geographic alterations (i.e., Operation Timber Sycamore) across Arabia. The research concludes that jus gentium continues to be characterized by a temporal inclusive exclusion with its redemptive ramifications—authorized by sovereign power—catalyzing “epistemic violence” resulting in en-masse exodus and slayed bodies across Arabia. Full article

Terrorist attacks are harmful to lives and property and seriously affect the stability of the international community and economic development. Exploring the regularity of terrorist attacks and building a model for assessing the risk of terrorist attacks (a kind of public safety risk, and it means the possibility of a terrorist attack) are of great significance to the security and stability of the international community and to global anti-terrorism. We propose a fusion of Inverse Distance Weighting (IDW) and a Multi-label k-Nearest Neighbor (I-MLKNN)-based assessment model for terrorist attacks, which is in a grid-scale and considers 17 factors of socio-economic and natural environments, and applied the I-MLKNN assessment model to assess the risk of terrorist attacks in Southeast Asia. The results show the I-MLKNN multi-label classification algorithm is proven to be an ideal tool for the assessment of the spatial distribution of terrorist attacks, and it can assess the risk of different types of terrorist attacks, thus revealing the law of distribution of different types of terrorist attacks. The terrorist attack risk assessment results indicate that Armed Attacks, Bombing/Explosions and Facility/Infrastructure Attacks in Southeast Asia are high-risk terrorist attack events, and the southernmost part of Thailand and the Philippines are high-risk terrorist attack areas for terrorism. We do not only provide a reference for incorporating spatial features in multi-label classification algorithms, but also provide a theoretical basis for decision-makers involved in terrorist attacks, which is meaningful to the implementation of the international counter-terrorism strategy. Full article

The resurgence of a deterministic mode of representation mythologizing Arabs as figuring (threatening) Saracen by judging their epistemological commitments as hostile to Enlightened reason-based ideals is demonstratively identifiable after 9/11, and more so following the Arab uprisings in 2011, when we notice that the Arab in general, and Muslim in particular, was historicized as the “new barbarian” from which (liberal-secular) Westphalian society must be defended. Such neo-Orientalist representations disseminate powerful discursive (symbolic) articulations (i.e., culture talk) —in tandem with the (re)formulation of legal concepts and doctrines situated in jus gentium (i.e., sovereignty, immanence, and pre-emptive defense strategy)—legally adjudicating a redemptive war ostensibly to “moralize” a profane Arabia. Proponents of neo-Orientalism define their philosophical theology as not simply incompatible with Arab epistemology (Ar. العربية المعرفة نظرية), but that Arab-Muslims are an irreconcilable threat to Latin-European philosophical theology, thus, accentuating that neo-Orientalism is constituted by an ontological insecurity constituting Arab-Islamic philosophical theology as placing secular modern logic under “siege” and threatening “civil society”. This legal-historical research, therefore, argues that neo-Orientalism not only necessitates figuring the Arab as Islamist for the ontological security of a “modern” liberal-secular mode of Being, but that such essentialist imaginary is a culturalist myth that is transformed into a legal difference which proceeds to argue the necessity of sanctioning a violent episode transforming a supposed lawless “Middle East” receptive to terror, into a lawful “New Middle East” receptive to reason. This sacrilegos process reveals the “inclusive exclusion” temporal ethos of (a positivist) jus gentium which entails maintaining a supposed unbridgeable cultural gap between a (universalized) sovereign Latin-European subject, and a (particularized) Arab object denied sovereignty for the coherence of Latin-European epistemology. Full article

The water and wastewater sector is an important lifeline upon which other economic sectors depend. Securing the sector’s critical infrastructure is therefore important for any country’s economy. Like many other nations, South Africa has an overarching national cybersecurity strategy aimed at addressing cyber terrorism, cybercriminal activities, cyber vandalism, and cyber sabotage. The aim of this study is to contextualise the water and wastewater sector’s cybersecurity responsibilities within the national cybersecurity legislative and policy environment. This is achieved by conducting a detailed analysis of the international, national and sector cybersecurity stakeholders; legislation and policies; and challenges pertaining to the protection of the water and wastewater sector. The study found some concerning challenges and improvement gaps regarding the complex manner in which the national government is implementing the cybersecurity strategy. The study also found that, along with the National Cybersecurity Policy Framework (the national cybersecurity strategy of South Africa), the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act, Critical Infrastructure Protection Act, and other supporting legislation and policies make provision for the water and wastewater sector’s computer security incidents response team to be established without the need to propose any new laws or amend existing ones. This is conducive for the immediate development of the sector-specific cybersecurity governance framework and resilience strategy to protect the water and wastewater assets. Full article

This study aims to examine Islamic narratives heard at mosques and in study groups in the greater metropolitan area of Jakarta, Indonesia. The article asks if youth and leaders of youth organizations in Jakarta are receptive to radical/terrorist discourse or if they deliberate and weigh what certain narratives mean. Qualitative in-depth interviews were conducted with 24 subjects. These included Rohani Islamic group leaders who hold extracurricular study groups after middle and high school classes, as well as Islamic Mission organizations or Lembaga Da’wah Kampus (LDK—literally translates as Campus Mission Organization; they are some senior students and may invite Islamic scholars or themselves teach Islam and preach to students who are willing to learn Islam specially only at the university as an extracurricular activity; in this article, we translate it as Islamic Mission organization.). which exist on Jakarta’s university campuses where radical narratives are discussed. Other organizations and their leaders were also included. Questions posed to members of these organizations by the authors of this article asked if they accepted, rejected, or negotiated certain ideas regarded as radical by the Indonesian government. Respondents were asked if they believed violent acts against non-reform Muslims and non-Muslims were justified. Respondents were also asked if the Indonesian constitution, Pancasila, should continue its secular democratic legal format, or if it should be replaced by sharia law. Ultimately, most informants took more moderate stances, somewhere in between pure secularism and pure radical terrorism. In this way, this study disproves scholars such as Martin van Bruinessen (2013) who claim that Indonesian Islam is becoming more conservative, and others such as Harsono who claim Indonesian Islam is becoming more violent. While violence was condoned by some respondents, this article reveals that a majority of respondents rejected the view that sharia law should prevail. Ultimately most respondents in this study decided a balanced viewpoint was the best. Thus, this article reveals the degree of moderation of most Jakarta residents, and the nuance and depth of consideration that devout individuals give to a range of contemporary ideas as they negotiate their stance on religion, the state, and their local identities. Full article

Raphael Lemkin, the man who founded the term ‘genocide,’ did so with a view to protecting not only physical beings from systematically imposed extinction, but also protecting their cultures from the same fate. However, in the wake of the atrocities and bloodshed of WWII, cultural genocide was omitted from the 1948 Genocide Convention, and as a result, does not constitute an international crime. This omission has left a lacuna in international law which threatens minority groups. Not a threat of loss of life but rather loss of the culture that distinguishes them and identifies them as a minority. Powerful States with indifferent attitudes towards their international obligations face no significantly harsher punishment for cultural genocide than they do for other human rights transgressions. Consequently, cultural genocide continues as minority cultures are rendered extinct at the hands of States. The Case Study of this article investigates the present-day example of the Uyghur minority in China and analyzes whether this modern cultural genocide can pave the way for the recognition of cultural genocide as an international crime or whether the Uyghur culture will become a cautionary tale for minorities in the future. Full article

This article examines how international law in form of treaties deals with the intersection of the three concepts. Our hypothesis is that international law, in the form of treaties, has been reluctant to engage with national security when dealing with migration, leaving this to national law. Instead, the intersection of national security—most commonly in the form of concerns about terrorism and migration—takes place in political discourse, which acts as a passerelle for various types of state violence against people classified or suspected of being migrants. We examine this mechanism that we call an insecurity continuum driven by the politics of fear in a European context. This is a politics that takes place outside of international law but has the effect of limiting access by individuals to international law protections, particularly in the case of people who claim international protection against persecution or torture. Full article