The Global Diffusion of Anti-Terrorism Law and Its Impact on Human Rights

International efforts to strengthen the global anti-terrorism legal regime prompts many countries to make significant changes to their domestic laws criminalizing terrorism-related offenses. This project investigates variation in the incorporation of anti-terrorism law into domestic legal systems worldwide and examines the human rights consequences of these laws.

Many have debated the impact of anti-terrorism laws on civil liberties, weighing questions about how societies ought to balance respect for individual freedoms with a desire to protect national security. Yet most existing studies of anti-terrorism laws focus on European countries and great powers. This study provides a more comprehensive analysis of anti-terrorism law and its human rights impacts.

This project is the first to provide a systematic cross-country study of the human rights impact of anti-terrorism laws, offering insights into how governments and intergovernmental organizations like the UN can continue to combat terrorism and associated forms of political violence, while ensuring protections for human rights worldwide.

Although international anti-terrorism efforts were intended primarily to address the threat from transnational terrorist groups, this project considers how concern regarding internal (domestic) threats impacted government decision making regarding the adoption and implementation of new anti-terrorism laws. Governments that perceived significant internal threats to their domestic political power adopted expansive anti-terrorism laws – made possible by the inability of countries to agree on a definition of terrorism at the international level - and used these laws as a tool to repress domestic political opposition, often in violation of citizens’ human rights.

In its global analysis of the anti-terrorism legal regime, this project examines the adoption, implementation, and human rights impact of anti-terrorism laws using an original, cross-national data set on domestic anti-terrorism laws in 193 countries from 1945 to 2020. This new data set includes detailed information on the scope and content of laws criminalizing five major terrorism-related offenses: terrorist acts, terrorist financing, recruitment of individuals to terrorist groups, provision of weapons or safe haven to terrorist groups, and incitement of terrorism.

In addition to making these new data available for quantitative research, the project will create an online searchable database of anti-terrorism laws worldwide, thus expanding access to reliable data on the global legal regime for countering terrorism. Complementing the quantitative analyses are a series of qualitative case studies investigating the origins of anti-terrorism laws and their consequences for human rights.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.