'Why Do They Hate Us?...They Hate Our Freedoms' : The Globalisation of Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism

While most terrorism remains localised, aspects of some transnational terrorism and counter-terrorism have been simultaneously enabled and constrained by globalisation. This paper addresses both the material, causative and legal dynamics of globalisation in relation to terrorism and counter-terrorism. That is, firstly, how terrorism and counter-terrorism are immediately enabled by certain material characteristics of globalization (the movement of goods and people, transport, communications technology and international finance); secondly, how terrorism is 'caused' by resistance to certain dynamic or systemic processes of globalisation (particularly hegemonic economic, political and cultural forms); and thirdly, how legal responses to terrorism often have globalising ambitions or effects (paradoxically sometimes fuelling further terrorism). Legal responses to terrorism have been ‘global’ and pluralistic, encompassing international, regional, national, non-State and private norms and processes (including the top-down incorporation of international treaty norms into domestic law; the more decentralised domestic incorporation of Security Council obligations; the transplantation of domestic norms across domestic legal orders; and the uplifting of national norms to the international plane). The promise of globalization for countering terrorism is that it enables a cosmopolitan dialogue in the face of shared global risks, which may ultimately help to ease the inter-cultural angst, religious differences, and economic and political alienation which drive the construction of some terrorist identities and animate their recourse to violence