TRACES · Terrorism, race and embodied security: Unpacking the matrix of contemporary counterterrorism

Practices and policies of counterterrorism (CT) have been criticised for killing innocent civilians, challenging the rule of law, infringing on civil liberties and silencing political dissent. As the “War on Terror” intensifies in the Middle East, scholarly scrutiny of the broader impacts of CT has be-come more pressing than ever.However, scholarship on CT remains inchoate. It struggles to provide measurable evidence of how CT instruments (i.e., laws and policies) operate in practice (gap 1), fails to demonstrate how power dynamics permeate CT instruments and reproduce social hierarchies (gap 2) and lacks fundamental insights into how CT impacts lives and societies (gap 3).TRACES, a five-year project involving a PI and three team members, aims to address these short-comings by building a heuristic model of counter-terror power (CTP) that draws on biopolitics, intersectionality and theories of embodiment:•TRACES will address gap 1 by conducting a hitherto unseen mixed-method analysis of a large dataset of legal decisions and prevention programmes in Switzerland, Belgium and Germany to uncover CTP’s outcomes and priorities (WP1).•It will address gap 2 by applying Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to legal decisions and case files to trace textual manifestations of CTP and examine how knowledge hierarchies and social markers such as race, religion, class or gender, impact decision-making at the micro level (WP2). •Finally, it will address gap 3 by studying the everyday lives of humans directly and indirect-ly targeted by CT measures using ethnographic methods to reveal the physical, psychologi-cal and behavioural repercussions of CTP.TRACES seeks to transform how we understand the intersections of security, race and power in modern societies. Its ground-breaking research protocol will provide a comprehensive examination of contemporary CT practices and make significant advancements in the fields of criminology and anthropology, sociolegal and security studies.