Speakers

Clive Walker Professor University of Leeds, United Kingdom

Clive Walker is professor of Criminal Justice Studies at the School of Law, University of Leeds, where he has served as the Director of the Centre for Criminal Justice Studies (1987–2000) and as Head of School (2000–2005, 2010). He has been a visiting professor at George Washington and Stanford Universities in the USA, and Melbourne and New South Wales in Australia. He has researched and written extensively on terrorism issues, including a book, Terrorism and the Law (OUP 2011), which was funded by an AHRC fellowship. He is currently the special adviser to the Home Office’s Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation and has served as a special adviser to the UK Parliamentary select committee which scrutinised what became the Civil Contingencies Act 2004. That experience resulted in another book, The Civil Contingencies Act 2004: Risk, Resilience and the Law in the United Kingdom (OUP 2006). He has also published extensively on media law, most recently an edited collection, Free Speech in an Internet Era (Carolina Academic Press 2013).

Terrorism speech and militant democracy

When faced with terrorism, the state should be ‘militant’ but, state action must recognise that terrorism often represents endemic reactions to modernity and late modernity. The ‘smart militant state’ must therefore work out forms of militant reaction which become more or less permanent and which must adopt forms which can be accommodated within fundamental values rather than displacing them even during a temporary period of ‘emergency’. Having thus set the scene for action by a ‘smart militant democracy’, it is intended in this paper to consider the performance by the United Kingdom state in the context of a classical dilemma facing a militant democracy. That context is the appropriate response to militant speech—speech which in some ways encourages extremist political violence but which is delivered in a mode which avoids participation in violence or even the traditional inchoate crimes of incitement or solicitation. Just two responsive state measures of militancy will be selected for discussion in this paper. Both were enacted by the Terrorism Act 2006, and both relate to indirect incitement and glorification of terrorism.