Legislating for Otherness: Proscription Powers and Parliamentary Discourse This article offers a discursive analysis of UK Parliamentary debate on the proscription of terrorist organisations between 2002 and 2014. It argues that these debates play an important constitutive role in the (re)production of national self and terrorist other that remains largely overlooked in existing work on this counter-terrorism mechanism. The article begins with an overview of this literature, arguing it is overwhelmingly oriented around questions of efficacy and ethics. While important, this focus has concentrated academic attention on the causal question of what proscription does, rather than the constitutive question of what is made possible by proscription. The article’s second section situates our analysis within discursive work in International Relations, upon which we investigate three pervasive themes in Parliamentary debate: (i) Constructions of terrorism and its threat; (ii) Constructions of specific groups being proscribed; and, (iii) Constructions of the UK self. We argue that these debates (re)produce an antagonistic relationship between a liberal, open and responsible UK mindful of cultural and religious difference, on the one hand. And, on the other, its illiberal, irrational terrorist others conducting immoral violences on behalf of particularistic identity claims. This analysis, we conclude, has significance for contemporary debate on security politics, as well as for studies of counter-terrorism and international politics more generally. Key words: proscription; counter-terrorism; terrorism; Parliament; discourse analysis; identity; United Kingdom. Introduction
discussions of ‘balance’; miscellaneous); (iv) Constructions of otherness (sub-themes: general descriptions of terrorism; articulations of the terrorist threat; descriptions of the specific groups under consideration for proscription); (v) Miscellaneous (no sub-themes, but included material on the naming of specific events and discussion of related matters). Although this article draws on each of these, its focus is primarily on material identified in themes (ii) and (iv) as appropriate to our interest here in the (re)construction of self and other. (Re)Producing Self and Other The remainder of this article explores constructions, in turn, of: the terrorist threat; specific organisations being considered for proscription; and, the UK self. We then argue that the repetitive nature of these debates has contributed to the production of a relatively coherent antagonistic relationship between the UK and its terrorist others. The terrorist threat Parliamentary debate around proscription is saturated by references to terrorism in general, and the threat posed thereof. Much discursive work is done by familiar metaphors, including those associated with animalism - ‘Abu Qatada, one of the spiders at the centre of the terrorist web in Europe’; disease - ‘the awful scourge and threat of terrorism’; and, monstrosity - ‘[counter-terrorism] is like battling a hydra’. Terrorism, here, is deceitful and opportunistic: ‘there are those, terrorists among them, who crawl on the back of human disasters….such as earthquakes, and the money directly funds terrorism’; cowardly: ‘cowards like to target civilians’; calculating, ‘[we were] horrified by the death of Drummer Rigby a few weeks ago, in a manner that was not only bestial, but designed to shock and grab national and international headlines’; and, immoral,