Terrorism, Race and Embodied Security

Over the past two decades, counterterrorism (CT) has quietly reshaped the infrastructures of European societies. It operates through visible measures — criminal offences, expanded policing powers, terrorism trials — but also through a dense web of less visible actions: denial of asylum, citizenship stripping, solitary confinement, the closing of bank accounts, restrictions on employment, housing and movement, and an ever-widening prevent duty drawing teachers, social workers and healthcare professionals into the detection of "radicalisation risk". Despite the scale of this apparatus, the actual risk of dying in a terrorist attack remains extremely low, and public spending on CT bears little relation to the threat. What justifies the investment is not evidence but the framing of terrorism as an exceptional problem — one that justifies exceptional means.

TRACES treats contemporary CT as a social phenomenon in its own right. It asks how state and non-state actors, legal and extra-legal powers, hard and soft tactics combine into a single assemblage — a form of counter-terror power (CTP) that diffuses responsibility, normalises the state of exception, and disproportionately targets Muslim and racialised populations. To unpack this matrix, TRACES develops a heuristic model grounded in three bodies of theory — biopower, intersectionality and embodiment — and confronts it with an original multi-country empirical protocol.

Three work packages

Research objectives

1. An in-depth, quantitative and qualitative examination of the application, outcomes and priorities of CT instruments.
2. An analysis of how counter-terror power manifests itself within and through those instruments, and of the logics it pursues.
3. An intersectional analysis of CTP — across race, ethnicity, class, gender, religion and legal status — to surface the social hierarchies it reproduces.
4. A tracing of how CT measures reshape the everyday lives, bodies, subjectivities and performativities of the individuals directly targeted.
5. A revealing of how CT measures affect groups with securitised identities — ordinary citizens of Muslim or racialised background, activists, and political communities under suspicion.

Why TRACES, why now

CT scholarship has so far examined legal questions, processes of securitisation and the stigmatisation of Muslim communities in relative isolation — without a unifying framework and without empirical attention to what CT actually does, in law, in practice and on the body. TRACES closes this gap by collecting seven original datasets across Switzerland, Germany and Belgium (criminal and administrative decisions, PVE programmes, complete case files, practitioner interviews, ethnographic interviews with directly-affected individuals, courtroom fieldnotes and focus groups) and subjecting them to a transversal, abductive analysis. The aim is to produce the first holistic account of how contemporary counterterrorism works — and what it costs.