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During the 2001 war in Afghanistan hundreds of people associated with the Taliban or al Qaeda were arrested by United States forces and transported to the Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The legal status and treatment of these detainees has been an ongoing problem over the last five years. The majority have been given no recourse to justice and allegations of inhuman treatment and torture have been frequent. The first issue raised by the incarceration of these people is whether any of them may be entitled to Prisoner of War status. The evidence shows that, in general, the Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters were not lawful combatants, and hence they are not entitled to Prisoner of War status. While the rights of Prisoners of War are well documented and generally uncontested, the rights of people not entitled to Prisoner of War status are not so easily definable. Despite classification as unlawful or unprivileged combatants, the detainees are not in legal limbo - they are still entitled to the benefit of certain fundamental human rights. There are applicable protections under the Fourth Geneva Convention, Additional Protocol I, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the United Nations Convention Against Torture. The main rights upheld by these documents are the right to liberty and freedom from arbitrary detention; the right to a fair trial; and the right to life. Furthermore, there is a requirement of humane treatment and an absolute prohibition on torture. Reports from international humanitarian watchdogs such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch suggest that the United States Government is not upholding the rights held by the detainees. It is essential that the United States Government recognises the fundamental rights owed to the detainees and ensures that they receive the requisite treatment and access to justice.

The Guantanamo issue refers to the classic question concerning the role of ethics in international relations. That is why the purpose of this research was to, by relating to the dilemma between national security and human rights, study the current Obama Administration's standpoint given to the Guantanamo prisoners in reference to three different ethical views. These three ethical views are Joseph Nye's innovative perspective on morality within international relations, which constitute the theoretical frameworks of this research and they are sceptics, state moralists and cosmopolitans. With help of the descriptive and explanation approaches within ideology and argumentation method, I studied speeches of the representatives of the Obama Administration as well as executive orders and reports which focus on the Administration's statements and decisions given to the Guantanamo issue. The analysis of the material in reference to the theorethical framework of this research, lead to a conclusion that the Obama Administration underlines the importance of both national security and human rights  given to the Guantanamo prisoners. Analysis of this research displays also that the Obama Administration has not change its line of argumentation since 2008 as well as the Administration's decisions are affected first and foremost by state moralist view point.

abstract: Guantánamo: The Amen Temple of Empire connects the fetishization of the trauma of nine/eleven with the co-constitution of subjects at Guantánamo—that of the contained Muslim terrorist prisoner silhouetted against the ideal nationalistic military body—circulated as ‘afterimages’ that carry ideological narratives about U.S. Empire. These narratives in turn religiously and racially charge the new normative practices of the security state and its historically haunted symbolic order. As individuals with complex subjectivities, the prisoners and guards are, of course, not reducible to the standardizing imprimatur of the state or its narratives. Despite the circulation of these ‘afterimages’ as fixed currency, the prisoners and guards produce their own metanarratives, through their para-ethnographic accounts of containment and of self. From within the panopticon of the prison, they seek sight lines, and gaze back at the state. This dissertation is thus a meditation on US militarism, violence, torture, race, and carceral practices, revealed thematically through metaphors of hungry ghosts, nature, journey and death, liminality, time, space, community, and salvage. Based on a multi-sited, empirical and imaginary ethnography, as well as textual and discourse analysis, I draw on the writing and testimony of prisoners, and military and intelligence personnel, whom I consider insightful para-ethnographers of the haunting valence of this fetishized historical event. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Religious Studies 2018

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The aim of my thesis was to examine in how far Barack Obama was capable to realize his promises he had given to American voters during his electoral campaign. This task were completed in two time lines: Firstly, I focused on realization of his agenda during the fist year in the office. Secondly, I researched how many of the promises and how far did he manage to realize before the Midterm election changed the constitution of the Congress to his disadvantage. To provide a solid analysis, I chose to narrow the topic and concentrated on three spheres only: tax policy, health care reform and foreign policy. However, the last one mentioned was far too extensive, so I selected three main issues Obama was addressing during his campaign: the war in Afghanistan, Iraq and the detention facility in Guantanamo. During the research I examined Obama's promises and actual policies. To illustrate what Obama was getting into I also characterized the situation in the field before his presidency.

Biopolitics is a concept that, much like the apparatus it refers to, has kept evolving ever since Foucault coined its modern meaning in 1976. Its usage and interpretation have especially changed with the recent publication of The Birth of Biopolitics and Society, Territory, Population, books that helped expand its perceived field of application, specifically vis-à-vis the modern governmental rationales of neo-liberalism and, by association, neo-conservatism. In a separate development, the Western dispositif (apparatus) of biopolitics has undergone a dramatic transformation as a result of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, attacks after which, to quote Donald Rumsfeld, ‘everything changed’. My thesis takes both of these developments into account and provides a critical exploration of contemporary biopolitical US counter-terrorist measures. Emphasis is placed on a contextual juridico-political analysis that sheds more light on the complex interrelations between the relatively novel biopolitical dispositif and the classical legal dispositif of sovereignty. This is accomplished by a two-part empirical genealogical study that traces some of the pivotal judicial changes that have resulted from the counter-terrorist measures introduced in the wake of 9/11. It proposes that the PATRIOT Act, one of the primary legislative tools introduced after 9/11, is a distinctively ‘bio-legal’ document that allows for the integration of the biopolitical discourses of pre-emption, exception and contingency within the existing legal framework. I argue that this is a genuinely novel development that significantly alters the intersection of biopolitics, geopolitics and law. The second part of the empirical analysis presents a detailed interrogation of the legal disputes that involve the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay and, over the course of three key legal cases, shows that, even though the logic of biopolitics has now established a foothold within the US juridical system, the classical apparatus of Sovereignty still plays a decisive role in US governance. My key arguments are preceded and supported by an extensive overview of the notion of biopolitics, both as it was first introduced and developed by Foucault over the course of five publications, and as it is currently being used by key contemporary social theorists, especially insofar as this usage relates to the changes in Western politics after 9/11. Overall, the thesis provides a profound interrogation of the epistemic status of biopolitics, and it supplements this purely theoretical analysis with a detailed overview of how biopolitics and sovereignty interact in practice through the mechanism of the law, in the context of US counter-terrorist policies after 9/11.

This study aims to investigate the Guantanamo Bay detention camp from a state security and human security perspective. This study analyses the Guantanamo Bay detention camp from the USA’s and UN’s perspectives on state security and human security. The study further analyses whether or not the USA is violating human rights in Guantanamo Bay whilst invoking state security to justify it. The method that has been used is text analysis. The method did help to answer both the purpose and research questions of the study. The findings of the study shows that the USA built the Guantanamo Bay to imprison terrorists who posed a threat to the nation’s security, and that the UN has concluded that the USA acted within reasonable self-defense when it built Guantanamo Bay and imprisoned hundreds of inmates. However, the findings further show that human rights were not respected in Guantanamo Bay as the inmates were ill-treated. The UN concluded that the USA puts state security above human security by maintaining Guantanamo Bay.

Aim of this paper is to explain used forced feeding of hunger strikers at the U.S. Prison at Guantanamo, when this technique is prohibited in international law. I used the sociology of Michel Foucault, who devoted himself to the topic of imprisonment. His work is often used in the interpretation of what is happening at Guantanamo. With the help of these interpretations were generated two hypotheses. I tested compiled hypotheses in study of literature including news articles, research papers, reports of human rights organizations, legislation, interviews with former camp detainees or camp staff etc. We conclude that the prisoners at Guantanamo are not fed to be kept alive, but rather to be punished for a hunger strike protest. The conclusions highlight a new form of relationship between state and its citizens, which calls for more comprehensive analysis of current form of government, which we are not able to cover in this work.

This thesis sets out to research the phenomenon that is extraterritoriality within Americancounterterrorism, doing as such by analyzing four policy reports from four differentpresidential administrations. The purpose of this thesis is to research the evolution ofextraterritoriality within counterterrorism policy based on the knowledge that there has been achange regarding the matter, significantly following the events of the 11th of Septemberterrorist attacks in 2001. This thesis, however, researches more than merely before and afternine-eleven. By analyzing policy report from Bill Clintons, George W. Bush’s, BarackObamas and Donald Trumps administrations, the study examines the evolution ofextraterritoriality over a larger time period. The two research questions ask what the view ofextraterritoriality within American counterterrorism has been and, in what sense have changesbeen made within American counterterrorism regarding extraterritoriality.Extraterritoriality has challenged a foundational norm within the modern international worldand that is state sovereignty. Extraterritoriality can be described as one actor asserts theirjurisdiction over another actor within a specific territory of another state. In this thesis, theAmerican military base in Cuba called Guantanamo Bay will be frequently referenced to as anexample of a place where extraterritoriality is present, a so-called extraterritorial domain.In order to analyze the empirical material, a qualitative, descriptive textual analysis has beenused and dimensions have been used as an analytical tool in this thesis.The main conclusions drawn are that there has been an evolution of extraterritoriality withinAmerican counterterrorism during the time these four presidents were in office. The evolutionhas not, however, been simply linear and this study shows that extraterritoriality can bevisible in all the different policy reports. The amount of extraterritoriality noticeable andregarding which matters of extraterritoriality is the primary difference.