Post 9/11 and the global war on terror, there has been a proliferation of counterterrorism legislation in many parts of the world, including postcolonial nation-states. This paper traces the colonial genealogy of counterterrorism legislation in India and Egypt. By studying the entanglements of counterterrorism policies in the postcolonial present and colonial logics of governmentality, this article shows how legacies of colonialism produce similar logics of exceptionality in juridical norms across postcolonial contexts. This paper thereby aims to explore how we might think of the agency of postcolonial states when it comes to negotiating colonial logics in the realm of exceptional, emergency legislation and how statist notions of carceral ‘justice’ are negotiated in these moments. We conceptualise counterterrorism laws not only as a form of emergency politics but as modes of governing where dilemmas about the postcolonial nation-state’s negotiation with coloniality are staged.
