This chapter demonstrates how transnational counter-terrorism is used to shape, license, and excuse domestic actions that have direct and intimate impacts on the individual and on the relationship between state power and accountability in the counter-terrorism domain. The chapter considers how transnational counter-terrorism disrupts modes of managing the relationship between international and domestic law. It shows that transnational provenance is often used as a proxy for domestic tests of proportionality, constitutionality, and necessity, thus undermining politicisation and national constitutional arrangements. Finally, the chapter considers the impact of transnational counter-terrorism on the relationship between the state and the individual, showing that states routinely capitalise on the impulses and atmosphere of the transnational counter-terrorism order to securitise dissent and opposition, and that transnational counter-terrorism enables states to recast citizens as terrorists whose rights can be treated as forfeited, even where this leaves such citizens in situations of grave vulnerability, including exposure to torture or inhuman treatment.

This chapter problematises the expansion of transnational counter-terrorism, demonstrating that transnational counter-terrorism was set up with such expansion in its sights, and – most importantly – that the expansion has not ended yet. It uses the examples of borders, preventing/countering violent extremism (P/CVE), and internet regulation to illustrate the reach and effects of expansionism. Finally, it draws attention to growing tendency at transnational level to present counter-terrorism as a mode of human rights protection and fulfilment, with significant consequences for the possible future extension of counter-terrorism into human rights. The chapter shows that transnational counter-terrorism sprawl is partly a self-perpetuating technique; its sprawl at once suggests the severity and scale of the problem of ‘terrorism’ and empowers and expands the transnational counter-terrorism order itself. It tends towards establishing the indispensability of transnational counter-terrorism and, thus, towards securing its future as a powerful mode of transnational governance.