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Terrorism is one of the most serious challenges confronting states today. Yet terrorism is difficult to define. Who decides what constitutes terrorism or who qualifies as a terrorist is influenced not only by legal interpretation but also by broader political considerations.
Most domestic terrorism laws reflect this definitional ambiguity. For instance, the UK Terrorism Act 2000 defines terrorism in exceptionally broad terms. It includes acts involving serious violence against persons or threats to life, as well as serious property damage and the disruption of electronic systems. Compared to many other jurisdictions, the inclusion of serious property damage within the UK’s definition played a decisive role in the designation of groups, such as Palestine Action, as terrorist organisations. This move has attracted serious criticism from international human rights bodies.
While the definitions of terrorism vary across jurisdictions, they share a common feature: vagueness. Although legislators typically justify anti-terrorism laws as tools to combat non-state ideological violence, many state actions may also satisfy the formal elements of terrorism as defined in domestic legislation. This tension has contributed to the emergence of concepts such as state terrorism, challenging the assumption that terrorism is exclusively the domain of non-state actors.
Examples of a Global Drift Toward Permanent Emergency
In the literature, the use of terrorism charges to neutralise opposition figures in electoral autocracies is well documented. What is more troubling, however, is the growing reliance on similar tactics in established democracies experiencing democratic erosion. In the United States, where institutional backsliding has intensified during Donald Trump’s second term, terrorism-related accusations have increasingly been deployed in politically sensitive contexts.
Criticism of Israel’s military actions, including academic op-eds calling on universities to reconsider their logistical, informational, or technological support for the Israeli government and the IDF, has in some cases been framed as support for Hamas. As a result, academics and students have been detained for months in the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities or subjected to deportation proceedings. High-profile cases, such as that of Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish-origin postdoctoral researcher at Tufts University, and Mahmood Khalil, a Palestinian student at Columbia University, illustrate how allegations of terrorism or its support can be mobilised to undermine free speech in general and academic freedom in particular. Statements by senior officials like the US Secretary of State Marco Rubio have further suggested that the era of political activism for foreign students in the United States may be coming to an end.
In France, the state of emergency introduced after the 2015 attacks was supposed to be temporary. Instead, many of its extraordinary powers were folded into ordinary law through the new anti-terrorism law. The law gave police broad authority to conduct raids, restrict movement, and shut down places of worship with limited judicial oversight. This has raised concerns that France was normalizing a permanent state of emergency in the name of security. By 2021, France was no longer treating emergency counterterrorism measures as temporary exceptions. A new bill moved several powers introduced after the 2015 attacks, including expanded police access to private homes, security zones, and the closure of religious institutions, into ordinary law. Critics argued that measures once justified as emergency responses were becoming a permanent part of the French legal system. This, no doubt, has triggered concerns about the normalization of exceptional state powers.
In Australia, the post-9/11 era brought a dramatic expansion of counterterrorism powers. Despite experiencing relatively few large-scale terrorist attacks, Australia passed more than 90 anti-terror laws, many of them backed by major political parties. Critics argue that these laws weakened civil liberties through broad surveillance powers, preventative detention measures, and extreme secrecy provisions that make public scrutiny almost impossible. Under some regulations, individuals can be detained without charge, while even revealing the existence of a detention can become a criminal offense. At the same time, journalists and whistleblowers who exposed alleged state wrongdoing increasingly faced prosecution themselves. The case of military whistleblower David McBride became one of the clearest examples of how national security laws could be turned against those attempting to reveal abuses rather than commit them.
Presenting itself as the only liberal democracy in the Middle East, Israel has built one of the region’s most extensive security-centered legal systems. Over time, its counterterrorism framework expanded far beyond armed groups and increasingly reached into civil society, with Palestinian NGOs, activists, journalists, and humanitarian organizations being labelled as security threats or accused of terrorist links. But this reflects a broader logic of “security exceptionalism,” where extraordinary powers justified by national security become normalized and permanently embedded in everyday governance. In this sense, what was once framed as an emergency response gradually evolved into a system of “permanent emergency,” in which security concerns routinely override civil and political freedoms.
Resistance from Within: How Durable Is It?
At this point, an important clarification is needed. Even in contexts where democratic erosion is increasingly visible, judicial institutions in relatively well-functioning democracies such as the United States and the United Kingdom still provide a meaningful degree of resistance. High courts, in particular, have occasionally struck down or significantly narrowed broadly framed counterterrorism and security measures. This usually happens when such laws are found to conflict with constitutional or human rights standards. In this sense, courts continue to operate as partial safeguards against executive overreach, even as security-driven legislation expands.
But this form of resistance is neither automatic nor guaranteed. In the United States, judicial authority has increasingly come under political pressure during the rise of populist leadership. This was especially visible under Donald Trump, when courts themselves became part of a broader political struggle. Similar tensions have emerged in other established democracies, including France, where the French Constitutional Court struck down certain provisions of anti-terror legislation.
That is why growing tensions between populist elites and established institutions have raised concerns about the long-term resilience of institutional resistance, particularly within the judiciary. Indeed, organisations such as the V-Dem Institute and Freedom House have long warned about global democratic backsliding. One key concern is not only the expansion of executive security powers, but also efforts to weaken or delegitimise the institutions that are meant to constrain them.
Perhaps because of the very challenges that even established democracies face, Issacharoff rejects the conventional classification between established and flawed democracies. Instead, he offers a crucial insight: all democracies are potentially fragile; we call some “established” only because they have not yet been seriously tested.
The current global landscape seems to vindicate Issacharoff’s observation. Significant advances in democratic governance and human rights protections have undoubtedly reshaped modern constitutional systems. Yet even regimes widely perceived as stable and well-functioning are now confronting profound institutional stress, raising difficult questions about how “established” these democracies truly are.
Referring to U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s suggestion that the era of political activism may be coming to an end, one question arises: are we witnessing the end of political activism, or the gradual erosion of the free speech that makes it possible? And if so, what becomes of democracy itself?
