Of Haunted Speech

Abstract

The preponderance of thinking in UK counterterrorism circles is that speech that incites terrorism (at least online) is not only a contributor to terrorism but it is also a form of terrorism/radicalisation/extremism in and of itself. Thus, there is a perceived need to preemptively suppress such speech. Accordingly, counterterrorism laws and regimes in the post 9/11-7/7 era are marked with a distinct urgency or vigilance that seeks to pre-empt speech that incites terrorism. However, inasmuch as these incitement to terrorism legal and regulatory regimes (e.g., the incitement to terrorism provisions under the Terrorism Act 2000, the Terrorism Act 2006 and the Public Order Act 1986) appear to be stable, they are still marked with traces of indeterminability or undecidability that not only expand law’s exclusionary violence but also makes law self-inadequating. Such traces of undecidability are reflected in the opacity of the law and its overlaps with other criminal laws such as soliciting murder, malicious communications and incitement to racial hatred. Another key trace of undecidability is evident in the arena of online regulation, which seems to flounder in the sense that it struggles to contain the cross-territorial ephemerality and polyphony of online speech. Consequently, this thesis seeks to examine and verify two hypothetical claims, that: 1) speech that incites terrorism cannot be contained because speech is inherently divergent and iterable. In this sense, regulating speech is thus inescapably confusing, mistake-laden (e.g. with false positives online) and inoperable at times; and 2) incitement to terrorism legal provisions and policies as well as the fair balancing principles of human rights law are undecidable and self-inadequating because they are irretrievably troubled by aporetic conceptual operations. In an attempt to destabilise the calculability and stability that pervades much of contemporary thinking on incitement to terrorism regulation enforcement and criminalisation in the UK. These claims are critically unpacked through the concept of hauntology, a deconstructive concept derived from critically engaging with Jacques Derrida’s scholarship on spectres, différance, dissemination, autoimmunity and undecidability. By showing that incitement to terrorism laws and practices bear the deep imprint of a pervasive lack of definitive determinability, this thesis allows for the tentative ethical possibility of reconfiguring what calculable absolutist frames of “incitement to terrorism”, law enforcement, and regulation currently disavow.