By examining US anti-terrorism policy since 9/11 this paper develops a critique of liberal international society and the way it deals with political violence. The exceptional character of the 9/11 attacks prompted a new approach to confronting global terrorism. The Bush administration for the most part rejected the law enforcement approach of its predecessors in favour of war paradigm that treated terrorist suspects as enemy combatants. War may be exceptional, but it is not unusual to liberal international society. The effort to construct new laws for a new type of warfare signalled, however, that the Bush administration’s counter-terrorism approach was not merely suspension of the norm. It was instead based on exclusionary normative hierarchies that in many respects replicate the norms of a pre-Westphalian epoch or the age of imperialism. This is illustrated with reference to the linear and discriminatory thinking that underpinned US legal reasoning on the use of force, as well as the detention, interrogation and prosecution of terrorist suspects. The paper will provide the latest information on US policy in these areas, which will likely illustrate elements of continuity between the Obama and Bush administrations.
