Is anti-terrorism law in the Arab world part of the authoritarian package, or is it wrapped up in a global parcel of neocolonial legality? Particularly in the years after 9/11, answers to this question in law, security studies, politics and history, have tended to be both, but with emphasis on one or another. Fatemah Alzubairi provides an answer that connects the two historically through colonial legacies of law, but also through the ambitions for control of the postcolonial state and the neo-colonial order. Egypt and Tunisia provide case studies for a study that covers late European colonial legislation, anticolonial action and state efforts to define and control it, state formation and legislation in the postcolonial international order, and state and neo-colonial efforts to define and control terror and counterterror within the current War on Terror.

Colonialism, Neo-colonialism, and Anti-Terrorism Law in the Arab World begins with a discussion of the terms through their historical development in French and British imperial cultures of control, which continued in the post-colonial period and “re-emerged in new forms of neo-colonialism” (p. 48). The newness of these forms inhere not in their logic nor in their global distribution of power, but in their filtering through supranational institutions, the focus of Chapter 2, and evolving national definitions of terror and security in the Arab world (Chapter 3). In these chapters, a new concern for the impact of Russian interests and intervention emerges, which remains somewhat underexamined throughout, but provides an important complication to the concept of “European” or “Western” imperialism. The chapters that follow explore the cases of Egypt and Tunisia through British and French colonialism, independence, and the development of concepts of terrorism through state efforts to counter opposition, and internal conflict, and bolster internal security, with input from Western powers. Alzubairi argues that colonial legislation provided tools for the identification and control of enemies in wartime, which were then deployed against domestic opponents in peacetime (p. 3), and that authoritarian ambition fuels an ongoing convergence between colonial and postcolonial approaches to terrorism. The colonial criminalization of anticolonial nationalism and anticolonialism continues through the language of insurgency; legislation on terrorism that includes the monitoring and regulation of speech, finance, and state procedures continues to serve the interests of authoritarian governments, as it used to serve those of the colonial state, and serves the aims of particular Western interventionist policies in the Arab world.

Alzubairi concludes by sketching out the theoretical contours of these continuities between the colonial, the authoritarian, and the neocolonial in two ways: problems caused by the lack of a precise definition of terrorism at the international level, and “migrations of law” between the colonial, authoritarian, and neo-colonial. She ends with a discussion of a fundamental shift in crime control, from “identifying wrongdoings” to “identifying terrorists…from crime control into threat control…countering terrorism and maintaining a climate of order have allowed the return of the colonial rule of the exception” (p. 201). The maintenance of order, domestic and international, therefore, makes the object of crime control the threat, not the act, the insecurity, not the violence, is the problem the state aims to solve.

The text is clear, well structured, and thorough, with rich insight drawn from legislation, judicial decisions, policy documents, and reports; the major contribution of this work is the way in which these materials are combined to provide an expansive analysis, both historical and legal, of the ways in which current Arab authoritarian systems are the legatees of European colonialism, but also inform ongoing global legislation and policy on terrorism. Undergirding the analysis is a line of questioning, of the ways in which rule of law might serve the interests of democratic inclusion and human rights, rather than either authoritarianism or neocolonialism. Throughout, this is a thoughtful, provocative, and compelling work, accessible for the classroom, and addressed to a readership concerned both theoretically and politically about the interactions of law, power, and history in the Middle East and in the international order.