Regimes of Terror: Contesting the war on Terror‪.‬

1. The essays in this issue emerge from a colloquium, Regimes of Terror, that I organized at Macquarie University in Sydney on December 13, 2005. The colloquium brought together activists, artists, academics, and lawyers working on the links between racism, colonialism and terrorism. The idea for this colloquium was inspired by the fight Mamdouh Habib and his wife Maha Habib were and still are waging against the Australian government after his release from detention in Egypt and Guantanamo Bay where he was tortured. Other Australians like David Hicks still remain detained at Guantanamo Bay. Internationally, there is an ongoing struggle to shut down Guantanamo Bay and prisons like it around the world. 2. In Habib's case, I was struck by the manner in which his release from Guantanamo Bay (without any conviction) did not spell the end of his troubles. Rather, since Habib's return to Australia, governmental attempts to silence him as well as the treatment of him as if he were a terrorist provided an embodied instance to me of at least one family terrorized by a number of regimes that were being formulated and in the process of being institutionalized. In this case, the Australian government, the Australian Security Intelligence Office, and the Australian media appeared to demonstrate some remarkable discursive consistencies along with their consequent material effects in their treatment of the Habib family. In this context, I wanted to bring together community activists, lawyers and academics in order to understand the ways in which regimes of terror were being formulated and formalized across a range of institutional spaces. While the Habib family is one instance of where the effects of such regimes were being felt, the colloquium was designed to address how the formation of terror has become an overarching narrative in the areas of law, politics, economy, and the media. Also, it was a space where activists, artists, academics, and lawyers could produce critical responses and points of intervention in these regimes of terror.