Ka Lok Yip (Hamad Bin Khalifa University) has posted Gazing into Terror – A Phenomenological Investigation into the Double Standards on ‘Terrorism’ in International Law on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This article investigates the experience of ‘double standards’ on ‘terrorism’ in international law phenomenologically by analysing the structure of this experience. It describes, from the first-person perspective of an international lawyer applying two ‘terrorism’ suppression conventions, how the legal characterisations of some entities or actions, but not others, as ‘terrorist’ appear to involve the phenomenon of double standards. It locates the objective conditions of possibility for the phenomenon in the indeterminacy of international law exploitable for different ends. It then locates the subjective conditions of possibility for the phenomenon in the different presuppositions about what constitutes likeness or difference between these entities or actions, which determines whether their differential ‘terrorism’ characterisations are experienced as unfair or fair. Finally, it traces the psychic processes interwoven with the experience of double standards in ‘terrorism’ characterisation under international law: Othering, subject formation and the defence against the ‘terror from within’ through external projection.