Terrorism and Human Rights in the New Millennium: In Search of Equilibrium

Abstract

The aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks has seen a resurgence of sociologically-informed writings on terrorism and the tension between counterterrorist measures and human rights policies. This study of the intersection of counterterrorism and human rights is not novel by any means. In Leviathan Thomas Hobbes argued that individuals in a state must give up some of their rights in order to gain security. Nicolo Machiavelli made a similar claim in The Prince, asserting that individuals are willing to surrender certain powers to the state in return for better personal security. More recently, at the end of the twentieth century, scholars such as Christopher Hewitt, Paul Wilkinson, Martha Crenshaw, and David Charters have written on the tradeoff of counterterrorist policies and rights, usually focusing on the fight of democracies against terrorism and on the prices of this fight. However, since 9/11 there has been an influx of new writings, largely focused on the fight against the “new terrorism” and juxtaposing it with what some call the “global human rights regime.” These two terms (“new terrorism” and “the global human rights regime”) demand further elaboration. While there is no consensus over what “new terrorism” is and over how genuinely different it is from the “old terrorism,” there are a number of elements which appear to be more prevalent in the terrorism of the new millennium. These include acts that are increasingly motivated by cultural and religious (rather than national) justifications, a Qual Sociol (2010) 33:205–210 DOI 10.1007/s11133-010-9147-z