Academy Scholar, Harvard Academy for International & Regional Studies, WCFIA, Harvard University; Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology & Anthropology, Hebrew University
October 17, 2017
4:00pm - 6:00pm
CMES, Rm 102, 38 Kirkland St, Cambridge, MA 02138
** Event Location: Please note that this event is not held at CES. Consult the event details above for the correct location. **
The proliferation of anti-terrorism and counter insurgency laws
are often embedded within the contemporary discourse of “the global war
on Terror” and practices of homeland security. Security laws are rarely
viewed as the sites in which state bureaucracies participated in the
construction of citizenship and loyalty to the state. Yet, as these laws
define security threats, they also define the limits of legitimate
political opposition. Last year, Israel introduced an anti-terrorism
law, a process that offers an opportunity to challenge the contemporary
discourse by offering an alternative legal history about the colonial
origins of these security laws and their relation to citizenship. In
this paper, Dr. Berda discloses an alternative analysis of the ways the
anti-terrorism bill encapsulates the use of emergency laws in the
British Empire. She argues that this legal toolkit enshrines a triple
bind between security, loyalty and identity, which the state fashions
through bureaucratic means. Through a comparative study security laws in
Israel and India, she shows how the British colonial roots of security
practices, focused on population management and its classification as
loyal to the state, or suspicious, formed the boundaries of citizenship
after independence. She argues that the institutionalization of British
colonial emergency laws, which occurred differently in Israel and India,
deeply impacted the scope and authority of executive power to justify
consistent violation to civil rights.