Blacklisting and the ban: contesting targeted sanctions in Europe

This article examines the practice of targeted sanctions as they are deployed against individuals and groups suspected of financing and facilitating terrorism in Europe. Substantial academic attention and critique has surrounded targeted sanctions and blacklists, as these practices challenge existing logics of evidence, criminal culpability and proportionality. This article seeks to move the analysis of blacklisting beyond the breach of individual rights and toward an understanding of the wider political implications. It draws upon the work of Giorgio Agamben to offer a reading of blacklisting in terms of its symbolic function of banishment and exclusion, which simultaneously redraws the boundaries around normal, valued, ways of life. The article teases out the exceptional and pre-emptive nature of blacklisting as a security measure. It analyses in some detail the Kadi case before the European Court of Justice, and argues that blacklisting and its current contestations work to inscribe the principles of pre-emption into the international juridical order.