Speakers: Professor Mark Finnane - ARC Australian Professorial Fellow and Chief Investigator, ARC Centre of Excellence in Policing and Security, Griffith University.
Ms Sue Donkin - PhD Scholar, ARC Centre of Excellence in Policing and Security, Griffith University.

Abstract: Within criminology and criminal law the reception of post-9/11 counter-terrorist law has generally been critical, if not hostile. The undeniable proliferation of preventive and punitive statutes has been regarded as incompatible with conventional liberal norms in criminal law and as dangerously innovative in its embrace of new strategies and new categories of control. In many such critiques neologisms and semantic shifts abound – pre-emption, pre-crime, securitisation – in an effort to capture what appears to be a whole new world of actions and meanings.

It is not directly the intention of this paper to interrogate or reconstitute the legal and criminological regimes which may be seen to characterise counter-terrorism in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Rather we wish to undertake a different kind of inquiry, one that is aimed at recalling kinds of governmental response to perceived and real threats to public safety other than those within the conventional purview of criminal law. We argue that a more historically grounded understanding of the governmental and geopolitical contexts of security (domestic and international) will provide a surer foundation on which to construct the frameworks of interpretation of contemporary counter-terrorism law.

Accordingly we explore here three governmental innovations that developed as expressions of the liberal state’s desire to ensure the safety of its citizens in times of peace and war. These are mental health law, habitual criminal controls, and civilian internment in war-time. By re-examining these strategies of government and their legacies in the longer history of liberal states we seek to open up the discussion within criminology and criminal law about the rationales and accountabilities of contemporary counter-terrorism law.

Date and Time: Wednesday 4 August, 2010 (12:15 pm arrival for) 12:30pm - 2.00pm
Venue: Nathan campus, Room 2.06, Building N54 (Bray Centre)
with videoconference link to:

• Gold Coast Campus, Room 1.04, Building G34 (The Chancellery) and;
• Logan Campus, Room 2.27, Building L03 (Information Services)

RSVP: Joanne or Clare on (07) 3735 3747 or slrc-events@griffith.edu.au

Flyer

Photo above right: Professor Mark Finnane, Professor Brad Sherman and Ms Sue Donkin (L - R)