Counter-terrorism and the Prospects of Human Rights: Securitizing Difference and Dissent

This book offers a systematic analysis of how the interaction between language of security and language of rights produces policies which not only affect everyday functioning of democracy, but also redefine the understanding of sovereignty. Demirsu presents a rich theoretical framework and a novel methodological design, premised on a multi-method qualitative research that offers a comparative analysis of counter-terrorism and human rights in Turkey and the United Kingdom. While Part I offers an analysis of the evolution of these two key policy-areas in relation to each other, Part II presents the findings of the frame analysis of parliamentary debates, both concluding by mapping out cross-cutting patterns in these two cases. As a result, the author demonstrates in detail how discourse and policy-making are mutually constitutive from a comparative angle. 

Ipek Demirsu is a post-doctoral research fellow at Sabanci University, Istanbul. Her research interests are in international and comparative politics, including human rights, security studies, qualitative research methods, and migration studies.