The Law of the List UN counterterrorism sanctions and the politics of global security law

This book critically examines the UN Al-Qaida counterterrorism listing regime as a novel form of global security law. It shows how the list works as an ordering device to render the uncertain future threats of global terrorism amenable to legal intervention in the present. I argue that the Law of the List is altering the relationship between national and international law and is best understood as a global legal assemblage. It is also generating new knowledge practices, governance techniques and mechanisms of pre-emptive security that are reconfiguring how legality works at a granular level. Understanding how law is transformed through globalisation, or how the governance of uncertainty transforms legal practice, requires grappling with the politics of expertise and seemingly mundane technical practices of problem management. This book shows how studying global security law empirically from local sites provides a more dynamic and nuanced account of emergency in motion.
The aim of this book is to open up novel ways of thinking about global security law and governance by providing a detailed sociolegal account of the listing assemblage in motion. The book is structured around three empirical chapters that examine the listing assemblage from different sites. Each chapter engages with a particular problem and traces how it is negotiated by a range of different actors to help me address the key research questions.