The A list

Abstract

This book critically examines the UN ISIL and Al-Qaida 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 radically 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 preemptive security that are recon fi guring 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. Studying global security law empirically from the local sites that it inhabits provides a more dynamic and nuanced account of emergency in motion.