Recently, the Transnational Institute released, Building Peace in Permanent War: Terrorist Listing and Conflict Transformation, which explains how counterterrorism laws and terrorist proscription negatively affects civil society actors, peacebuilding, and conflict resolution. Due to the increasing violence and activity of terrorist groups, the UN Security Council has added several parties it deems “associated with” armed violent non-state actors to terrorist lists.
Such counterterrorism laws and regimes have limited the ability of civil society organizations, who fear the “breaching terrorist sanction regimes or falling foul of laws criminalizing ‘material support’ for terrorism,” to provide humanitarian support to communities associated with proscribed terrorist organizations.
This report announcement says it highlights the strained relationship between counterterrorism and peacebuilding on various levels. It criticizes the legal and political framework of conflict resolution that “has transformed the way in which political violence and armed conflict is understood and managed.” The report suggests that the international counterterrorism structure weakens the core components of peacebuilding.
This report represents the first study to connect analysis of counterterrorism laws together with an attempt to assess the impact of terrorist proscription on peacebuilding. It focuses on the use of counterterrorism law and policy in the management of conflict with Al-Shabaab in Somalia, Hamas in the Occupied Palestinian territories, and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party in Turkey.
The full report is available here.