Academic

Sciullo on Poststructuralist Critique of the Global War on Terror

By Lawrence Solum

Nick J. Sciullo (West Virginia University College of Law) has posted The Ghost in the Global War on Terror: Critical Perspectives and Dangerous Implications for National Security and the Law (Drexel Law Review, Vol. 3, 2010) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

In this article, I set out to discuss the dangerous implications the Global War on Terror (GWOT) and, more generally, the attempts of the United States government to address notions of terrorism, and its affect on the safety of U.S. and world citizens. I am primarily concerned with engaging a poststructuralist critique of the GWOT to strengthen legal discussions of terrorism and national security policy the current system is lacking. While many in the legal academy have focused on particular issues relating to terrorism, I will engage on a macro-level analysis of the way the legal academy conceptualizes terrorism, not how it discusses acts of terrorism. While I am concerned with the legal basis for the GWOT, I am more concerned with how our idea of terrorism affects our ability to address it in our legal and political lives and how these decisions affect our national and personal security. I will utilize the concept of the ghost in the machine, discussed below, to help further the poststructuralist criticism utilized herein. Next, I will demonstrate the utility of poststructural and postcolonial criticisms to terrorism and the Global War on Terrorism. Lastly, I will argue that the GWOT has far-reaching implications that threaten to debase our legal system, casting our civil rights regime into the refuse bin of legal history. The goal is to provide a poststructural and postcolonial legal framework, available in the legal literature, for scholars, students, and practitioners to use in their further work on terrorism.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on October 14, 2010 (boomark / email).