New research investigates the legal mechanisms available to democratic states to counter the threat of extremist political groups

Nicole Bolleyer has been awarded £8188 by  the British Academy’s Research Awards Committee for the BA/Leverhulme-funded project ‘Democratic Self-Defence Before and After 9/11: Anti-Extremist Measures in Established Common Law Democracies’. 

This project will be jointly directed by Nicole Bolleyer (Exeter) and Anika Gauja (Sydney) and investigates the legal mechanisms available to democratic states to counter the threat of extremist political groups. Comparing regulation in six established common law democracies (UK, US, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Ireland) and focusing on rights-restrictive mechanisms such as limitations on basic freedoms and group bans, it analyses if, and how, this repertoire of measures has changed since 9/11 – an event widely regarded as having blurred the distinction between internal and external security threats. Essentially, the project examines whether these democracies have shifted their approach to democratic self-defence (which protects civil and political rights by pre-emptively restricting them in case of abuse) and thereby transformed mechanisms for internal democratic preservation into instruments to fight terrorism.