Legacies of 9/11: Blurring the Boundaries of Terrorism

The ‘War on Terror’ declared by the US after 9/11 unleashed a reign of terror around the world in the name of protecting its citizens. Porous definitions of terrorism and even looser constraints on how states implemented the terror laws have swept up human and civil rights in their ever-expanding net. But this porosity just got leakier after the Israeli invasion (if an occupier can be described as invading the territory it occupies) of Palestine in October 2023 and the re-ascension of Donald Trump to the throne in 2025.

Before 9/11, terrorism was generally understood as political violence carried out by non-state actors in the cause of national liberation; such actors included the IRA, the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, and the PKK representing the Kurds of Turkey, all of whom were (and are) proscribed and suppressed. This conception of ‘terrorism’ gave rise to the trope, ‘One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter’. It was essentially an unstable term which morphed according to context and power (who gets to define it). After 9/11, it became identified with Islamist terrorism, which became conveniently locked into the figure of the Muslim, the other, and in time, the refugee. The amorphousness of the term does not restrain the severity of the crackdown against its targets, as we can see in the actions of ICE and other immigration agents in the US today; but more on that later. Omar El Akkad, who writes brilliantly on Gaza, where Western morality goes to die, writes in One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, ‘In my adult life, which began around the time of the September 11 attacks, there has been no greater totem of fear in the Western world than the terrorist’.

In the UK context too, especially after the 7/7 London bombings in 2005, the national narrative fixated on Muslims as terrorists. A white man planting a bomb outside a mosque was at most motivated by hate or possibly mental illness, as if only migrants, the unassimilated other, could be motivated by the political desire to undermine the state. The increasingly draconian terror laws with their selective targets, at the expense of the much valued civil and human rights of Western liberalism, appear to reflect the unarticulated recognition/fear of imperial states that there will be a reckoning for the grotesque injustices they have inflicted across the world. While counter-terrorism programmes like Prevent, a government initiative to identify and derail potential future terrorists, have increasingly recognised the role of the white far-right as nascent terrorists, it is still generally true that white violence is rarely framed as terrorism.

Although legal definitions of terrorism have not changed much, the list of offences counted as terrorism, the kinds of material and ideological support for it, and the powers available to crack down on it have grown exponentially. The UK Terrorism Act of 2000 defined terrorism broadly enough to include acts of serious violence, damage to property, threats to life, risks to public safety, and interference with electronic systems, carried out to influence government or spread fear among the public. Police were given enhanced powers of stop and search, arrest without a warrant, and extended detention without adequate judicial oversight.

Around the world we have seen a deliberate blurring of extremism and terrorism; extremist ideologies are being constructed as potential drivers of terrorism, effectively creating a continuum from thought to violent action. In 2019, Saudi Arabia denounced feminism, atheism, and homosexuality as extremist ideology; in 2023, the Duma in Russia drafted a law labelling feminism as extremist. These proposals have not made it on to the statute books yet.  

In the febrile public debate following 7/7, Tony Blair terrifyingly proposed another offence, that of ‘glorifying terrorism’, another catch-all, woolly concept that would have a huge impact on legitimate political protest. Despite huge opposition, it made it into the Terrorism Act of 2006 under the ‘encouragement of terrorism’ clause. This too was an attempt to corral extremist ideas into the terrorism net. How many of us, on the left, have had a history of supporting armed struggle, of seeing that as the only way for the dispossessed of this world to gain justice? A poll conducted in the 1970s in Germany found that 20 per cent of Germans under the age of thirty expressed ‘a certain sympathy’ for the Baader-Meinhof Group, which aimed to overthrow the West German government through violent means. Ten per cent would even have sheltered a member of the group for the night.

The principle of glorifying terrorism lies behind the government’s debacle with Palestine Action (PA), a direct-action protest group set up in 2020. After the government added PA to the list of proscribed organisations in 2025, more than 3,000 protestors have been arrested for holding up placards which declared, ‘I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action’ at demonstrations organised by Defend Our Juries to test the proscription and bring the criminal justice machinery to a grinding halt by flooding it with ‘terrorists’, half of whom are over 60 years old. My partner was arrested too and is still awaiting charges, nearly a year later. One man was even briefly arrested for wearing a T-shirt with the logo ‘Plasticine Action’ in an attempt to highlight the sheer absurdity of the legislation.

In February 2026, the High Court ruled that the banning of PA was unlawful. One of the huge problems with the blurring of the boundaries of terrorism was acknowledged by the government’s own lawyer when arguing that the ban on PA should be kept in place. He acknowledged that PA was not Hamas or the IRA; the distinction he drew was that with those two groups, ‘there is an almost unique overlap between those who are engaged in the terrorist activity and those who support it’. This is the same chilling conflation of Hamas with all Palestinians that Israel makes to justify genocide: at a press conference in October 2023, Israeli President Herzog effectively declared that there were no innocent civilians in the Gaza Strip. In June 2026, the earlier ruling was overturned and the PA ban was upheld.

As if the terrorism laws did not give the government enough leeway to flout the principles of natural justice, in the recent case of the ‘Filton Four’, the judge used a sleight of hand by withholding from the jury his intention to use terrorism sentencing powers even though the original charges were not related to terrorism. These four PA activists were among those who took direct action against the Elbit factory which supplies Israel with arms. They were charged with aggravated burglary, criminal damage, violent disorder, and grievous bodily harm (GBH) and convicted of criminal damage and a reduced GBH charge. The jury verdicts may well have been different if the judge had disclosed his intentions. Not only that, during the trial, the judge prevented the defendants from explaining their political motives by using the terms ‘genocide’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’ and barred the defence counsel from telling the jury that they had the right to acquit. When Rajiv Menon KC, defence counsel, did exactly that, contempt of court proceedings were brought against him, an unprecedented step in British legal history. Initially, they failed on a technicality. But proceedings have been revived and Menon is waiting for his challenge to the High Court’s jurisdiction to undertake contempt proceedings against him to be heard.

Such are the times we live in that the illiberalism of the UK seems positively benign in comparison to what is happening in the US under Trump. The extremism of the US in fact lends cover to erosions of democracy elsewhere. The spectre of terrorism has justified Trump’s anti-immigrant drive. If white citizens are not deemed capable of terrorist activity, then surely it has to have been imported from abroad. This justified Trump’s anti-Muslim travel bans in his first term and now justifies the violent and random deportation of immigrants by immigration agents in his second term. In an executive order from 2017, the argument for tightening immigration rules is framed as ‘Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry’. The ICE website explicitly sees itself as a ‘key player in the global counterterrorism mission’. The significant expansion of their budget and powers under Trump has unleashed a reign of terror across US cities, resulting in the arrest of hundreds of US citizens as undocumented migrants. Like the terrorism of non-state actors, state terrorism also works by spreading fear in the populace. It was not until the shooting of US citizens Alex Pretti and Renée Nicole Good that US immigration agents were forced to maintain a lower profile.

Alongside immigration, drug smuggling has been reframed as a form of terrorism, giving the US powers to carry out extrajudicial killings with impunity—230 at the time of writing—of ‘narco-terrorists’ in the Caribbean and the Pacific. What used to be a law enforcement issue, in which the US Coast Guard, alongside the Navy, would arrest and prosecute suspected drug smugglers, has provided target practice for the US military under the guise of tackling narco-terrorism. The most audacious, unevidenced, and deceitful use of ‘narco-terrorism’ as ideological cover came with the kidnapping and arrest of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife in January—the final kick in the teeth for lofty ideals of international law and order. The actual danger that Venezuela posed to the US under Maduro was the fact that it was a major part of a growing trend of de-dollarisation caused by increased trade with China in renminbi, a trend which is undermining American hegemony.

Meanwhile, some feminists fed up with the glacial pace of action against domestic and sexual violence have been arguing for these crimes to be upgraded to terrorism. A feminist activist, Lidia Lydia, was so incensed to discover that, around the world in 2017, 50,000 women and girls had been killed at the hands of intimate partners or family members—a count which did not include all those who died as a result of human trafficking, war, starvation, or fatal ill-treatment—that on International Women’s Day 2019, she self-funded a mobile billboard van which was emblazoned with the statement ‘In 2017 in Europe 184 people died as victims of terrorism, 3000 females died as victims of femicide’ and driven through the streets of London. Lydia wanted to draw attention to the fact that while there was no definition of femicide in European laws, the laws dealing with terrorism and policy measures aimed at its prevention were well-developed, even though the harm caused by terrorism was infinitely less than the homegrown terror of women’s daily lives.

Does it help the feminist case to enter these shark-infested waters? Some, like Jay Sloan-Lynch, are concerned that domestic abuse is still seen as a private matter and not treated with the seriousness it deserves by the community and state despite the fact that what appear to be individual acts of violence actually prop up a system of patriarchal control. Some argue, for example, that Axel Rudakubana, a lone, violence-obsessed individual who went on the rampage and killed three young girls in Southport in 2024, was clearly driven by misogyny and that thus misogyny should be recognised as an ideology to be combatted. Incel-related killings are also frequently used to bolster this argument. Legal scholars have explored whether counterterrorism-style control orders should be used to manage high‑risk domestic violence offenders.

However, the number of feminists arguing for this ‘upgrade’ is small in number. Other feminists warn that this development would become state-centric, instead of survivor-centric. I put this question to Sukhwant Dhaliwal, senior lecturer at London Metropolitan University, who said:

We need to make a clear distinction between security and securitisation. That is the difference between women’s right to safety, to be protected from violence, and securitisation which is the state protecting and privileging itself. We do this by channelling resources into self-organised and autonomous women’s groups to support survivors, not by feeding the tentacles of an unaccountable counter-terrorism apparatus.

When states extend the definition of terrorism, it is to avoid the accountability that working within the legal framework of a democracy with respect for civil and human rights should enforce. They wish to transcend law enforcement. When feminists call for an extension, they are trying to ensure law enforcement.

When Keir Starmer wants to redefine terror laws to be able to sweep up individuals like Axel Rudakabana, and Donald Trump wants to include drug cartels, they are trying to expand the remit of terrorism laws by removing one of the central planks that once defined terrorism: the political ideology driving it. Rabah Kherbane, a barrister at Doughty Street Chambers, makes the interesting proposal that the concept of terrorism should indeed be delinked from ideology.

In relation to the Rudakubana case, she points out that one of the main reasons Prevent did not take further action against him was because there was no clear ideological motive behind his obsession with violence. She says, ‘This obsession with “ideology” is linked to post-9/11 counter-terrorism policing’ and argues that this became an easy way of targeting the other as ‘any terrorist threat…readily identifiable as a person or group with distinct or foreign beliefs’. This led to both the over-policing of some communities and the overlooking of threats posed by people like Rudakubana who have no identifiable ideological baggage. Kherbane argues that if public safety is the issue, then law and order policies should pivot on the notion of the ‘risk of harm to the public’ rather than on ideology.

I find this a compelling argument, an eminently reasonable approach, but one that may not appeal to governments which, still in the shadow of 9/11 twenty-five years later, extract maximum political capital from expansive anti-terrorism laws.