In this exclusive extract from the forthcoming book documenting Talha Ahsan’s case and the campaign around it, Nisha Kapoor finds much to learn from and much to gain strength from in our increasingly difficult times.
At a time when despair seems to be suffocating hope, when the stronghold of authoritarianism is bent on razing resistance, revisiting the story of Talha Ahsan – both a footnote to the ascendancy of the post-liberal hyper-securitised British state and a chapter of victory in the long-running chronicle of anti-racist struggle – is usefully timely. For the significance of Talha’s case lies in its role as a forewarning of the kind of Orwellian state that would burgeon under the ‘War on Terror’ casting its net much wider than over the Muslim communities who felt the early sting of its wrath. And in its promise, of the fruits of effective solidarity and the mass mobilisation of anti-racist resistance.
The story of Talha Ahsan, a young Muslim man arrested, detained for eight years without charge or trial, extradited to the USA, incarcerated in a US supermax prison in solitary confinement, brought home the War on Terror. Along with the many other Muslim men arrested and detained around the same time, his case was immersed in the circularities of imperialist war, the proximities between ‘here’ and ‘there’, and a stark reminder of the racially-coded delimitations of British citizenship. It was indeed during the period of his arrest and incarceration that the legislative framework pertaining to the granting and withdrawal of British citizenship would be significantly altered in ways that have institutionalised the executive’s ability to denaturalise citizens on a whim, with diminishing scrutiny or judicial oversight, and often in response to reactionary populist calls for ever more punitive action against racially-vilified scapegoats.
Though certainly not the first, and unfortunately not the last, Talha’s voice, his poetry and ability to eloquently articulate injustice, the nature of state violence and the limits of the liberal state cuts to the politicisation of policing and incarceration that the war on Terror burgeoned. Where Babar Ahmad’s case brought to bear the criminalisation of freedom of expression, of dissenting media narratives, state domination of police and manipulation of political thought, Talha’s case showed how even the most banal of actions, activities and behaviours, when performed by Muslims, could now be categorised under ‘terrorism’ and so be open to criminalisation, holding a light to the racism of collective punishment and guilt by association. The necessity of criminalising a population in order to create and sustain a moral panic against which the expansion of law and order could be legitimated was understood clearly by prisoners and perceptively articulated by Talha himself. When I interviewed him following his release from prison in 2015 and asked about the nature of the judicial and sentencing process, he explained:
Interviewer: Can you tell me a little about your experience of the plea bargaining process and how you went about preparing, with your lawyers, for the sentencing?
Ahsan: First they picked a number- fifteen years, then we negotiated the charges to suit the number, then we argued facts to suit the charges.
If this Kafkaesque approach to justice, a routine approach to sentencing in the US, was also manifest in parts of the British administrative legal system designed to deal with ‘national security’, the Special Immigration Appeals Commission, which hears some proceedings in closed court, being a case in point.
What seemed to have been less understood amongst society as a whole, but also amongst sections of the left and anti-racism, anti-Islamophobia activists is that the ramifications of the War on Terror were not limited to state violence targeting Muslim populations in Europe, Africa and Asia. It acted, more broadly, as a key tool in the conditioning rhetoric of securitisation that both had traction for cultivating liberal consensus and worked to mobilise a reactionary populism with an unsatiable thirst for carcerality and deportation ‘at the border’, of ‘Muslims’, ‘immigrants’, queer people and dissidents. That is, in enhancing the power of the executive and establishing a permanent threat of terror, the early days of the War on Terror, in which Talha’s case is firmly located, paved the way for the routinisation of liberal authoritarianism. This has involved broadening the scope of counter-terrorism legislation, and further scaled up and legally institutionalised assaults on democratic political and civil rights, just as the vitriol against ‘extremism’, ‘radicalisation’ and ‘illiberal values’- discursive signifiers that mark racially othered subjects as less than civilized – tapped into mass resentment of material decline and melancholia for imperial times past (Gilroy), feeding campaigns for Brexit and Trump.
From the margins to the centre
Fourteen years ago one of the key pivots of the campaign for justice for Talha Ahsan and other Muslim men who then faced extradition to the US was to point to the hypocrisy of British parliamentarians who invoked liberal human rights principles to argue for the overreach of extradition treaties with the US, as they impacted (white)British citizens such as Gary McKinnon. At the time, the double standards proclaimed by MPs such as Dominic Raab were not at all subtle. In a parliamentary debate on the US-UK treaty he argued that ‘in taking the fight to the terrorists and the serious criminals after 9/11, the pendulum [had] swung too far the other way’ and that ‘Gary Mckinnon should not be treated like some gangland mobster or al-Qaeda mastermind’. The second-class status of Muslim men, never quite British or human enough, went unquestioned and the debate proceeded along the familiar lines of liberal institutional racism. To be designated a ‘terrorism suspect’ meant to be denied sovereignty and so to be denied the right to a fair hearing. And, of course, the racist targeting of Muslims by the British state in these cases was systematically institutionalised on a much broader scale through the pre-emptive policing initiative of Prevent, a multi-agency policing initiative that interchanged synonymously ‘terrorism’ and ‘Islamic extremism’ and extended the police state as it did so. That Prevent was at its core designed and practised to identify signs of ‘radicalisation’ amongst Muslim youth was evident across policy, practice and outcomes where vast numbers of Muslim young people found themselves logged on police databases.
But we now find ourselves in a very different phase of western liberal hypocrisy; one where, to quote Arundhati Roy, the carcass of western liberal democracy lies, alongside slaughtered Palestinians, under the rubble in Gaza. Earlier policing interventions that criminalised by association, or for ‘material support’, were largely driven by the need to create a ‘suspect community’, a pariah population against which imperialist and racist violence could be justified whilst also neutralising the critical thought and political dissent of those targeted. In our present era, counterterrorism is sharpening its knives against the mass as a whole; the full obscenity of colonial and imperialist violence in Palestine and West Asia which overtly pays no heed to even the pretence of complying with human rights or the protocols of international humanitarian law has required ever more coercive tactics to manage anger, despair and the ever expanding Palestine solidarity movement at home. In Britain, the criminalisation of Palestine solidarity protests has led to the arrest of over 2000 people objecting to the proscription of direct action groups, some of those people belonging to civil society organisations, other simply politicised publics, many of whom are pensioners. Where earlier efforts to codify anti-imperialist resistance as ‘terrorism’ were legitimated through discourses of Islamophobia and racism, now that racially-coded logic has expanded to incorporate a much broader sway of dissent marking a significant expansion of the authoritarian state.
At the forefront of criminalisation for Palestine solidarity is the incarceration of at least 33 people for taking direct action against arms companies fuelling genocide. Prisoners for Palestine, the collective representing all those who have been detained under charges related to Palestine liberation, have been interned for lengthy pre-trial periods, some for as many as two years, arrested by counter-terrorism police often in violent pre-dawn raids, and been imprisoned as terrorism suspects even though the charges against them fall under regular criminal law. They have had their communications restricted and censored and, as often happens in terrorism cases, have not been privy to all documents related to their case. Where historically an open trial for direct action activists offered an opportunity to put arms companies such as Elbit on trial exposing the deep links between the British state and its military contracts with arms suppliers to Saudi Arabia and Israel, the effective construal of Palestine solidarity as akin to ‘support for terrorism’ enables the government to shut down such exposure. Defendants now are not permitted to explain the political context of their actions, only to admit or deny the actions they undertook without circumstance. And this is facilitated by the broader assault on the judicial system often championed by the political and media class which permits more use of closed evidence procedures, retraction of trial by jury and repeals of judicial safeguards and standards. Even human rights lawyers representing those accused of national security offences and/or challenging authoritarian practices by the state are being targeted under counterterrorism stop and search powers, while pro-Palestine journalists are arrested.
Arguably, one of the key developments here, emergent in the early years of the War on Terror and now in a later stage of maturity, is the centrality of the Home Office as ‘Ministry of Fear’ to the operation of government. Dog whistle politics and the related draconian policies and cruel indifference associated with the Home Office has long been known and felt intensely amongst the racially-marginalised quarters battling asylum, deportation, immigration and national security. But over the last fifteen years ‘authoritarianism as spectacle’ has advanced to become the prominent face of government such that the Home Office and the Home Secretary have risen notably in standing with no shortage of brown faces to front the house. As Richard Seymour observes ‘politics has changed to reflect the priorities of the Home Office’ whereby ‘the ongoing performance of crisis justifies the securitisation of politics’. The prominence of ‘rule by fear’ tactics operates in tandem with, and is moreover the necessary disciplinary mechanism for, the ongoing politics of austerity where capitalist accumulation of public assets and infrastructure requires a fortified infrastructure of control.
As ever, the broadening sway of counterterrorism powers remains deeply connected to business interests in the military-industrial complex. A year prior to the British government’s proscription of Palestine Action, former Labour MP John Woodcock, aka Lord Walney, published a report in his capacity as the government’s ‘independent adviser on political violence and disruption’ that set out to curb public protest and ‘protect politicians and institutions from intimidation’. Disdain for the Palestine solidarity marches and protest actions featured heavily as did contempt for ‘far left’ environmental activism. The clear conflict of interest in the appointment of Woodcock to this role was not foremostly, as is sometimes suggested, his support for and from Israel, exemplified in the funding he has received from Israeli lobbyists including the European Leadership Network, by his former role as Chair of Labour Friends of Israel 2011-2013, and by his frequent ‘solidarity visits’ to Israel. Rather, it was that he is deeply invested in the UK’s defence sector. In his capacity as a paid lobbyist for the defence industry and engagement director of the Purpose coalition, including the ‘Purpose Defence Coalition’ and vice-chair of the all parliamentary group for AUKUS which has received substantial funding from defence companies including BAE systems, it was in the interests of Woodcock and those he represents to enhance police powers to curb and prosecute anti-genocide, anti-imperialist and climate activism whilst securing additional protections for defence and energy business and industries. The recommendations of the report, which advocate for greater research and scrutiny of ‘left-wing extremism’ at the same time that it suggests the reactionary ‘incel-related violence should not be routinely categorised as terrorism’ (p.284), propose the government ‘should consider introducing a civil measure making it easier for businesses to pursue extreme protest organisers for damages’; work to ‘ensure increased resilience of supply for defence manufacturers and energy providers’; restrict rights of protests groups to assembly and fundraise; and explore the potential issue of ‘juries acquitting defendants and judges applying laws differently when they are transgressed in the name of progressive causes like climate change and anti-racism’. For lobbyists such as Woodcock and defence lobby groups such as ADS, social movements for Palestinian liberation and climate justice obstruct the UK’s billion dollar defence industry and the multiple related industries (tech, energy, communications) which it anchors. These protest movements compromise the UK’s role as a leading defence exporter with all the diplomatic and strategic relationships that such a position promotes.
And where in structural terms the state seeks to mitigate against the merging synthesis between environmental and anti-Zionist protesters by broadening the scope and target of its counterterrorism powers, in cultural terms the defence and fossil fuel industries have invested deeply in an alternate strategy: namely heavy investment in far right ideologues who simultaneously dismiss and deny climate change as a key source of material vulnerability, insecurity and economic instability whilst redirecting mass anger, fear and depression arising out of experienced decline towards scapegoated figures of the ‘immigrant’, ‘asylum seeker’ and ‘Muslim’. As Andreas Malm and the Zetkin collective explain: ‘every time a European far-right party denies or downplays climate change, it makes a statement about immigration. It says: the problem facing our societies has nothing to do with climate – forget about that hoax – the real danger is the presence of too many non-white foreigners and, to be more precise, too many Muslims in our land’. With the growth in support for the far right over recent years, the corresponding centrist party pandering to racist vitriol from both Conservative and Labour governments as a way to appeal to and incorporate Reform voters into their base has worked to legitimise populist mobilisation for vigilante violence expressed most fervently in recent times in the ‘Stop the Boats’ patrols. Where populist mobilisation in 2001 took the form of letters to David Blunkett demanding that Abu Hamza be deported and resulted in the instigation of citizenship deprivation legislation which would burgeon into a much greater set of exceptional powers as we now have it, the reactionary populism of our current moment has manifested in the largest far-right marches that the UK has ever witnessed, virulent hate riot outside accommodation housing asylum seekers, anti-immigrant riots and white patriotism. Correspondingly, there has been a significant surge in racist violence over the past year notably perpetuated every time moral panics relating to the aforementioned erupt.
As the centrist state responds to intensifying inchoate fascisms by legislating for and thereby further institutionalising the racist anti-immigrant rhetoric of the far right, there is a parallel dynamic that is burgeoning across civil society, the administrative class, civil servants, police, teachers, police and health and social care workers that is equally worrisome. One of the key legacies of the domestic war on terror was to institutionalise in society systems of lateral community surveillance as a means to encourage psychological conditioning and manipulation of Muslim suspect communities, organised through Prevent. Over the last decade we have seen the growing use of Prevent interventions for other forms of ‘extremism’, particularly for signs of ‘far right’ extremism alongside anecdotal evidence documenting referrals for ‘environmental extremism’. In the latest statistics published for 2025 figures showed that 56% of referrals were for individuals with ‘no identified ideology’. Though these statistics have been met with suggestions that they show there is no indication of ‘racial bias’ in the ways in which prevent is administered, a suggestion which refuses to acknowledge the structural architecture through which Prevent was designed and developed, this entire debate deliberating on who continues to be disproportionately affected by the programme tends to overlook the key point of this alarming trend.
The legacy of Prevent as a policy initiative aimed at neutralising dissent and critical thought has been to spurn a mass public sector workforce now trained in and expected to identify ‘signs of extremism and radicalisation’ in order to pre-emptively intervene. Following the stabbings of three children in Southport by Axel Rudakubana when it was identified that the assailant had been previously referred to Prevent but not pursued on account that they did not show signs of commitment to any particular ideology, some political figures argued for expanding the definition of ‘extremism’ to incorporate ‘behaviours of concern’, not just ‘ideology’. Though this broadened definition has not yet been officially embraced by the Home Office, it may well be a way in which powers are ramped up in the near future and would not be out of sync with the thought policing powers and protocols in full sway at Palestine solidarity demonstrations. But the point is the effect of this kind of rhetoric alongside the pressures on education and welfare professionals to improve referrals and interventions is to nurture and encourage an ever more regularised culture of surveillance and suspicion that identifies for correction any non-normative behaviours or ways of being all performed through a bureaucratic banality of evil.
As indicated in Home Office reporting data, there was a significant spike in referrals to Prevent following the Southport attacks, perhaps in part as a result of the riots that followed, but also perhaps because professionals were under pressure to improve referrals and pre-emptive interventions. That many of these were for ‘no identified ideology’ speaks to the deep psyche of ‘Thought Police’ culture which now circulates. This continues a trend in which a growing number of students with learning disabilities are being referred alongside the reported referrals for ‘environmental extremism’, as a result of young people mobilising in schools following Greta Thunberg’s call for ‘Fridays for Future’ school strikes. These students are considered not in terms of expressing their political and socialised subjectivities but as being potential extremists; in Orwellian terms, in need of vaporizing.
Nisha Kapoor is Associate Professor in Sociology at the University of Warwick. She is the author of Deport Deprive Extradite. 21st Century State Extremism (Verso, 2018), and was funded by an ESRC Future Research Leaders Award (2015-2018). The three-year project examined race, citizenship and the state in the context of the War on Terror. Documenting stories and cases of individuals subject to extradition, citizenship deprivation and passport removals, incarceration and deportation, the research asked what such techniques and technologies illuminate about the broader features and operations of the security state.