Book Launch: Conor Gearty’s Homeland Insecurity: The Rise and Rise of Global Anti-Terrorism Law

The Bonavero Institute of Human Rights is delighted to host the launch of the book Homeland Insecurity: The Rise and Rise of Global Anti-Terrorism Law by Prof. Conor Gearty.

In this groundbreaking new book, Conor Gearty unpacks the history of global anti-terrorism law, explaining not only how these regulations came about, but also the untold damage they have wrought upon freedom and human rights. Ranging from the age of colonialism to the Cold War, through the perennial crises in the Middle East to the exponential growth of terrorism discourse compressed into the first two decades of the 21st century, the coercion these laws embody is here to stay. The ‘War on Terror’ was something that colonial and neo-colonial liberal democracies had always been doing—and something that is not going away. Anti-terrorism law no longer requires terrorism to survive.

Professor Conor Gearty

Conor Gearty is professor of human rights law at LSE, and an honorary King’s Counsel.  He is a member of Matrix Chambers from where he continues to practice, and is a bencher at both Middle Temple and the Honourable Society of the King’s Inn in Dublin.  He has honorary degrees from four universities in three different countries, Britain, Ireland and the United States. From 2020-24, Conor was Vice-President for Social Sciences at the British Academy. His cases as a barrister are mainly concerned with human rights issues and he has appeared in the High Court, the Court of Appeal and the (old) House of Lords.  Conor’s academic scholarship is concerned with issues related to human rights, civil liberties and terrorism law.  In 2021 he published a study on the role of the judges in relation to the use by British authorities of torture:  ‘British Judges Then and Now: the Role of the Judges’ (2021) 84(1) Modern Law Review 119-154: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-2230.12578   His study of the UK’s approach to human rights was published in 2016: On Fantasy Island. Britain. Britain, Europe and Human Rights (Oxford, 2016).  His most recent book was published in May this year: Homeland Insecurity: The Rise and Rise of Global Anti-terrorism Law.   He has also published ten or so other books, a number of edited volumes and scores of articles.

Dr Meera Sabaratnam

Dr Sabaratnam is an Associate Professor of International Relations in the Department of Politics and International Relations and Tutorial Fellow in Politics at New College. Her research explores the colonial and postcolonial dimensions of world politics in their various manifestations.

Dr Moiz Tundawala

Dr Moiz Tundawala is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, University of Oxford and Associate Professor of Law (on leave) Jindal Global Law School, Delhi NCR India. Moiz works in the areas of public law, legal and constitutional theory, intellectual history and Indian and global political thought.

Professor Michael Lobban

Professor Lobban is a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College. He works on the history of English legal thought and legal practice in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as on law and the British empire.

Professor Kate O’Regan

Kate O'Regan is the inaugural Director of the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights and a former judge of the South African Constitutional Court (1994 – 2009). In the mid-1980s she practiced as a lawyer in Johannesburg in a variety of fields, but especially labour law and land law, representing many of the emerging trade unions and their members, as well as communities threatened with eviction under apartheid land laws.  In 1990, she joined the Faculty of Law at UCT where she taught a range of courses including race, gender and the law, labour law, civil procedure and evidence. Since her fifteen-year term at the South African Constitutional Court ended in 2009,  she has amongst other things served as an ad hoc judge of the Supreme Court of Namibia (from 2010 - 2016), Chairperson of the Khayelitsha Commission of Inquiry into allegations of police inefficiency and a breakdown in trust between the police and the community of Khayelitsha (2012 – 2014), and as a member of the boards or advisory bodies of many NGOs working in the fields of democracy, the rule of law, human rights and equality.