ERC Starting Grant · 2026—2031

Terrorism, Race and Embodied Security

A five-year research project investigating how counterterrorism is constructed, embodied and contested across European societies — and what it does to the people it targets.

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Context & state of the art

Since 9/11, states around the world have built up an ever-expanding apparatus to counter terrorism (CT): the rapid expansion of preparatory criminal offences and a shift towards “preventive justice” (Cornford, 2020; Garms, 2018; Mitsilegas, 2023), new administrative measures — citizenship stripping, entry bans, expulsions, cross-border data sharing (Bellanova & Glouftsios, 2020; Boutin, 2016; Vavoula, 2023) — and a “soft” prevention agenda that funds “countering violent extremism” (CVE) programmes domestically and internationally (Aguerri & Jimenez-Franco, 2021; Shanaah & Heath-Kelly, 2022; Simoncini, 2020). Together these trends amount to a “whole-of-society” approach to CT (Akintayo, 2024), where a “Prevent duty” draws schools, healthcare, social work and ordinary citizens into the identification of “radicalisation risk” (Baillergeau, 2021; Heath-Kelly, 2013, 2023; Sjøen & Mattsson, 2022).

This apparatus has only intensified. Since the 7 October 2023 attacks and Israel’s renewed “War on Terror” on Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, tens of thousands of civilians have been killed, civil liberties restricted, and student protests met with force across Europe and North America (Burstein, 2024; Orleck, 2024; Schotten, 2024) — developments that cannot be understood apart from the broader power dynamics behind the fight against terrorism.

Yet CT scholarship remains split across three largely disconnected research axes:

  • Legal scrutiny — constitutional and human-rights critiques of the “pre-crime” shift in criminal law (Ajil, 2024a; Ajil & Lubishtani, 2021; Bozbayindir, 2018; Zedner & Ashworth, 2019), of regimes of exception such as Guantanamo Bay (De Londras, 2020), and of the weak legal footing of measures like entry bans, citizenship stripping and inscription in databases such as the Schengen Information System (Sobol, 2024; von Rütte, 2023).
  • Securitisation — political-science and sociological accounts of how CT measures spread into education, healthcare, social work and development aid, implicating these sectors in identifying “radicalisation risks” and producing “chilling effects” on political dissent (Brambilla & Jones, 2020; Chantraine & Scheer, 2021; Fransen, 2023; Hermant & Bigo, 2019; Mathieson, 2021; Shall & Farmer, 2024).
  • Stigmatisation — criminological and anthropological work on how CT disproportionately targets Muslims and racialised populations — visibly religious Muslim women, Brown and Black men, foreigners — with lasting effects on belonging and democratic participation (Abbas, 2019; Ahmed, 2020; Aziz, 2012; Bhattacharyya, 2008; Busher, Choudhury & Thomas, 2019; Jarvis & Lister, 2013; Taylor, 2020).

These three axes rarely speak to one another, and none of them empirically traces what CT instruments actually do — in law, in practice, and on the body. TRACES closes this by building a single heuristic model, counter-terror power (CTP), and pursuing three research gaps in parallel:

  1. How are CT instruments applied? There is no cross-country empirical analysis of how criminal law, administrative law and PVE programmes actually construe and problematise terrorism, or of which groups and activities they target in practice. Addressed by WP1 (RO1: in-depth quantitative and qualitative examination of the application, outcomes and priorities of CT instruments).
  2. How is power deployed through those instruments? No study has examined how knowledge, stereotypes and hierarchies shape micro-level decision-making, or how different CT measures interlock to regulate the same social problem. Addressed by WP2 (RO2: how CTP manifests within and through CT instruments and the logics it pursues; RO3: how power operates differentially along race, ethnicity, class, gender, religion and legal status, reproducing social hierarchies).
  3. How do CT measures shape the lives of those targeted? CT scholarship is characterised by the near-total absence of the voices of those directly affected — it talks about, not with, securitised individuals and groups. Addressed by WP3 (RO4: tracing impacts on the everyday lives, bodies, subjectivities and performances of directly targeted individuals; RO5: revealing effects on groups with securitised social identities more broadly).

Theoretical framework

Counter-terror power (CTP) is postulated as the connecting force between otherwise disparate CT instruments — the biopolitical, intersectional and embodied logic that runs beneath laws, policies and everyday practices. The model draws on three bodies of theory:

Biopolitics

Analysing “structures” (laws, policies) alone cannot explain how states control and discipline human beings. Biopolitical analysis sheds light on the diffuse, everyday mechanisms through which social, economic and political life is governed — often beyond the visible reach of formal institutions (Genel & Carson, 2023).

Intersectionality

CTP does not operate uniformly. Intersectional analysis is used to study how it plays out differentially across social markers — race, ethnicity, class, gender, religion, legal status — and how these markers combine to shape outcomes (Crenshaw, 1989).

Embodiment

The literature on embodiment of security practices is mobilised to analyse how CTP is received and reacted to at the individual level — in bodies, affects and everyday performances, not just in legal or policy texts (Dixon & Marston, 2011).

Work packages

Data collection runs in Switzerland, Germany and Belgium — three countries that have invested heavily in CT over the past two decades, and are distinct enough in size, legal system and history of terrorism to allow genuine cross-contextual analysis. All data is integrated into MAXQDA for coding and transversal analysis.

WP 1 · RO1

The components of CTP

An in-depth analysis of how CT instruments are applied, to identify CTP’s priorities — across three instruments.

  • WP1.1 Criminal law — 50 publicly available terrorism-offence judgments per country, 2010–2025 (150 decisions total), coded for individual and offence characteristics, subjective elements, restraint measures, punishment and procedure.
  • WP1.2 Administrative law — 30–50 decisions per country on citizenship stripping, expulsions, entry bans, preventive police powers and asylum revocation (90 decisions total), coded for danger/risk qualification, concrete acts and justification.
  • WP1.3 PVE programmes — 75 prevention-of-violent-extremism programmes per country, 2015–2025 (225 total), coded for activities, funding, target groups, methodology and institutional anchorage.

WP 2 · RO2 & RO3

The mechanisms of CTP

Uncovering the values, ideologies and power relations that permeate CT instruments, using 30 complete case files (10 per country, several hundred pages each: police interrogations, reports, indictments) alongside the WP1 decisions.

  • WP2.1 Biopolitical analysis — Critical Discourse Analysis coded along five Foucauldian axes (systems of differentiation, types of objectives, means of power relations, forms of institutionalisation, degrees of rationalisation), then inductively coded via Grounded Theory.
  • WP2.2 Intersectional analysis — the same dataset coded for six intersectional markers (race, ethnicity, religion, class, gender, legal status), including how religious concepts and behaviours (jihad, shari’a, hijra, taqiya, shahid) are problematised.
  • WP2.3 Practitioner interviews — 18 semi-structured interviews with law enforcement, legal officials and PVE practitioners across the three countries, to triangulate the findings of WP2.1–2.2 against professional practice.

WP 3 · RO4 & RO5

The embodiment of CTP

Examining how CTP is lived by directly and indirectly targeted individuals and groups, through high-risk, high-reward ethnographic methods.

  • WP3.1 Longitudinal ethnographic interviews & immersion — 9 participants (at least 2 women) with lived experience of CT measures, interviewed annually for 4 years (36 interviews total), each paired with 2 days of ethnographic immersion in their daily lives (72 immersion days total).
  • WP3.2 Courtroom ethnography — 5 observation days of terrorism trials per country (15 days total), tracing how power manifests through gesture, body language, tone and the silencing of certain voices.
  • WP3.3 Focus groups — 2 focus groups per country, ~4 participants each (6 groups, 24 participants total), with racialised citizens, activists on Arab-Muslim causes, and individuals scrutinised as “extremist”.

Innovations & impact

The first cross-contextual, mixed-method examination of how CT instruments are applied in practice — shedding light on CT’s implicit priorities.

Uncovering the hidden power dynamics that run through CT instruments, and the ways they reproduce social inequalities.

Revolutionising our understanding of how CT instruments change the lives and behaviour of those directly and indirectly targeted.

TRACES emerges from Ajil’s conviction that security for some should not come at the expense of insecurity for others. It advances sociolegal studies by introducing a robust empirical protocol for studying “law in action”, and accelerates the shift within security studies and criminology towards vernacular security — the study of security through the experiences of those affected by it. In anthropology, it is pivotal in advancing research on the embodiment of governance and control. The aim throughout is to generate insights that can reduce harm and inform fair, just and sustainable CT policymaking in Europe and beyond.

At a glance

Duration

5 years

2026 — 2031

Funding

ERC Starting Grant

Horizon Europe

Host

University of Lucerne

Behavioural Sciences

Field sites

CH · DE · BE

Comparative

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