This study examines the protective principle of extraterritorial criminal jurisdiction in international law and its use for combatting the threat of international terrorism. The study is, generally speaking, one of two parts. The first part explores the rationale of protective jurisdiction and the interests that it serves, and assesses the importance of the rationale of this jurisdiction for combatting transnational crimes, including the problem of international terrorism. It also sheds important light on the modern historical development of protective jurisdiction and the various public and private efforts made to codify this ground of jurisdiction during the first half of the twentieth century. The second part of the study provides original, empirical research into contemporary State practice, in an effort to examine whether, and, if so, to what extent, States have used protective jurisdiction for combatting the threat of international terrorism. It also enumerates, based on this practice, as well as the use of a range of other primary sources, including relevant treaty and U.N. Security Council practice, a list of vital interests that have been included under the ambit of protective jurisdiction lex lata and around which a basic level of agreement appears to have clustered. The study proposes that it may be possible to define protective jurisdiction in contemporary customary international law based on a ‘shared vital State interests' approach. That is, the protection of certain vital interests is in conformity with the practice of the international community of States. The study concludes that, in the light of the findings of State practice inter alia and the recent decision of the International Law Commission to include the topic of extraterritorial jurisdiction in its long-term programme of work, the codification of protective jurisdiction is necessary and desirable more than ever before. The most important advantages of the adoption of such an instrument are that it could be used as a persuasive source to guide States and courts in the adoption and interpretation of domestic laws; provide for the more effective protection of shared vital State interests by the international community; and complement the existing legal framework and ‘fill in' gaps left by ad hoc sectoral treaties for combatting the increasingly complex, diffuse and evolving threat of international terrorism.

This thesis constitutes a critical intervention in contemporary research on terrorism. It seeks to address the problems resulting from a reductive understanding of terrorism and from a predominant concern with terrorism after 9/11. For this purpose, this thesis charts and critically engages certain watershed moments in the history of terrorism since its emergence in the French Revolution. The aim is to show that terrorism is not a historically constant and readily identifiable form of violence but a variable element in a wider context of power relations. The discourses of terrorism examined in this thesis show that conceptions of terrorism are tied to and function within a wider context of changing political interests and an evolving modern economy of power. I show that there are reasons for the different meanings and roles of terrorism across time and between societies, and that these reasons shed light on larger social, political, cultural or economic developments. It is in this context that particular discourses of terrorism help to legitimate political and legal regimes and allow for the selective exclusion of individuals, groups and ideologies from the political realm. I argue that a historically grounded and theoretically thorough analysis of terrorism can provide important insights into how the state has been able to sustain itself by incorporating and mobilizing different types of power. By way of a genealogical study of terrorism, my project attempts to map these forms of power as well as their dependence on various frameworks that are used to legitimize violence, to dismantle legal norms, and to expand power in the name of freedom and democracy. This thesis thus not only responds to the epistemological, methodological and temporal limitations of contemporary terrorism scholarship but is also of practical political relevance.

This research project addresses the question of how violent groups emerge and act under specific identity mantles in complex local, national and transnational conflict environments. It takes as a case study the example of violent Islamist groups in sub-Saharan Africa, and seeks to understand what influences the emergence and dynamics of violence under this specific 'brand.' It explains Islamist violence as a strategic tool in contexts of political and socio-economic marginalisation, deliberately mobilised under an Islamist brand in order to leverage a powerful and cross-ethnic identity among otherwise disempowered communities. The project explains variation in the intensification of conflict, use of anti-civilian strategies, and groups' relationships with transnational actors, as strategic choices, shaped by features of the wider conflict marketplace, including the presence, relative strength and transnational linkages of conflict actors. Using quantitative conflict event data, supplemented by qualitative fieldwork, the findings of this research project are four-fold: first, it demonstrates that Islamist violence should not be conceived of as unique from other non-state violence. Rather, Islamist violence can be studied in comparative context, and through some of the same explanatory frameworks that have effectively traced the origins, drivers and dynamics of other forms of non-state armed violence. Second, it finds that Islamist violence is a strategic response to local political environments, shaping the emergence and dynamics of violence under different brands. Third, it presents evidence that in spite of a dominant narrative of a single, homogeneous, global threat of Islamist violence, local conditions shape this phenomenon, and undermine the assumption of a highly transnational, mobile and rootless network of homogenous militant groups. Finally, it shows that the contours of those local environments - reflected in the number, strength and relative activity of other non-state armed groups - shape the intensity and targeting of Islamist violence in important ways.

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