This paper seeks to understand the varying degrees to which security agencies perpetrate or collude in torture in the context of state responses to terrorism. The empirical focus is on British involvement in torture in the context of two of its key counterterrorist campaigns: against Irish republican terrorism in the 1970s, and against Al Qaeda-inspired terrorism since 2001. In the former case, British security agencies carried out coercive interrogations; in the latter, they have not used such practices, although they have allegedly facilitated abusive interrogations by foreign intelligence services. Why does the extent of British agency involvement in torture vary between the two periods? The role of (and interactions between) three potentially relevant factors will be assessed: (i) an evolution in the justification and interpretation of the anti-torture norm in the UK; (ii) institutions, the law and the likelihood of legal sanction; and (iii) the magnitude and location of the perceived threat. Building on previous work by the author on norm contestation in counterterrorist policy, the paper will assess in particular whether the anti-torture norm was contested in different ways in these two British cases, and if such variation can help us to understand the relative robustness of this norm during the two periods under study. The work departs from an IR constructivist standpoint, though it also seeks to draw on other disciplines and theories to provide a fuller understanding of how norms evolve in the context of security policy. The paper is part of a larger project, which analyses case studies from Britain, Spain and the United States with a view to identifying the conditions under which the security agencies of democratic states violate human rights, and seeks to shed light on the conditions that may be able to induce security agency complicity with human rights.
